Jail plan a bust with counties Gov. Baldacci’s brother leads opposition

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BANGOR – County officials around the state are girding to battle Gov. John Baldacci over his plan to take over the county jails.

Peter Baldacci, the governor’s older brother and a Penobscot County commissioner, will be leading the charge.

“It’s a step in the wrong direction,” Peter Baldacci said Tuesday during the weekly county commissioners’ meeting. “It’s centralization in Augusta, not regionalization. The state is overly centralized when it should be regionalized.”

Penobscot County tentatively set 6:30 p.m., Sept 27, for a meeting to tell legislators how they feel about the plan. Officials and legislators from surrounding counties are expected to be invited.

The governor’s plan would consolidate 15 county jail systems and the state corrections system into a statewide system managed by the Department of Corrections. It envisions closing four jails, in Piscataquis, Waldo, Oxford and Franklin counties, and setting up one or two special programs providing prisoners with mental health treatment.

The plan would free up 300 beds throughout the state and ease overcrowding in the state system, the governor claims.

Penobscot County Sheriff Glenn Ross, who was briefed on the plan last week by DOC officials, told commissioners Tuesday that combining state and county facilities, in a sense, was mixing apples and oranges.

People convicted of felonies and sentenced to serve more than nine months are incarcerated at state facilities. People awaiting trial or sentenced to less than nine months on misdemeanor charges serve their time in county jails along with convicts who have been convicted of violating their probation and may have served their underlying sentences in state facilities.

“Our mission is different than the state’s,” Ross said. “The inmates that come through our doors are nothing like the Department of Corrections has ever had to deal with. They have long-term offenders. They can get into long-term re-entry plans.

“Our mission is to try to prevent recidivism,” he continued, “to get them out working, to get them on community work projects, and to provide what we can for them in the facility so they don’t come back. [This plan] would be mixing those two different missions and a lot is going to be lost in this. It’s going to mean higher recidivism rates I’m sure.”

The home-grown projects in local communities such as the community garden at the Curran Homestead or the alternative sentencing program for first-time drunken drivers that allows them to serve their time working at local schools completing small projects would be lost, Commissioner Tom Davis of Kenduskeag said.

Financing for the consolidation remains unclear, but the administration said last week that the annual savings from such a move could grow from $10 million in the first year to nearly $38 million over time. The administration said last week that the current county assessment for jails would be frozen, implying that the state would be able to use that amount, and the state would take over responsibility for future growth.

Ross disputed the plan’s projected savings. The DOC has not provided enough detailed figures to make that claim, he said.

“This is one of the poorest business plans that I’ve ever seen,” he said, “because all of the things that drive the costs have not been factored into the proposal.”

A major problem, he said, is that the DOC uses a different booking system than the county does. Police officers all over the county can access information from their patrol cars, and stations can access the Penobscot County Jail’s database but can’t access the state’s booking system. That system tracks incidents from the 911 call to the booking and includes more than half a million names in it and every involvement with public safety in this county and some other counties, he said.

“Interfaces will be years out,” the sheriff warned.

The DOC’s plan includes a $7.9 million increase to pay for administrators to run the combined system, but does not outline what the positions would be or how that figure was arrived at, Ross said. Other unanswered questions include whether county corrections officers would become state employees, whose pay scale is typically higher than county employees.

“What it shows is that the Department of Corrections is thinking just about its needs and problems and not about what our needs are,” Peter Baldacci said. “That should bother the people in Penobscot County.”

Although the plan currently continues to allow the jail to house inmates awaiting trial and those serving sentences, there’s nothing that says the DOC could change their mind later on, Baldacci said.

“There’s nothing to prevent them in the future from using it as a maximum security facility,” he said. “They always seem to put their interests ahead of what the community they’re in wants.”

He pointed to the report of the Corrections Alternatives Advisory Committee as a place where the county and the state could find ways to work cooperatively to solve the overcrowding problem in prisons and jails. The result of a “blue ribbon panel” appointed by the governor, the report outlined alternative sentencing programs.

Submitted to the Legislature in December, it included a recommendation that a commission be created to oversee practices in all corrections facilities in the state to ensure that best practices were being implemented. It also called for jails and prisons to go through a certificate of need process, similar to the process that hospitals must go through before building new facilities or acquiring new capabilities.

The legislation to create that commission was to have been submitted in the upcoming legislative session, Peter Baldacci, who served on the panel, said.

“As a commissioner, I thought something was really going to be done,” Davis said of the report. “I thought we’d reached a high point with corrections. We had a brain trust of people who knew what they were doing. We all agreed that we would take that work and improve the situation.”

Penobscot County is not alone in opposing the plan.

Commissioners in Waldo County, where the proposal calls for the jail to be closed, also oppose it.

Commissioner John Hykon Tuesday called the plan unworkable and said it would end up costing taxpayers more money.

“I think it is a bad idea,” he said. “There is no way the state can run the jails cheaper than the counties. They don’t do anything else cheaper than the counties.”

Hancock County Sheriff William Clark said he’s not opposed to jail consolidation as a concept, but he does not support the governor’s plan.

“I’ve done a 180-degree turnaround on this,” Clark said. “There is some benefit in consolidating for efficiency, but this whole deal about the state taking our jails – but we have to continue maintaining and staffing – I’m definitely opposed to that.”

Clark said the plan may help the governor balance the state budget, but it will not result in tax relief for counties.

“To me, it’s so indicative of Baldacci, whether it’s [the recent school consolidation plan] or his Dirigo Health plan. He takes an idea and runs with it without thinking it all the way through,” he said.