Reforming our jails ‘The state has to bite the bullet first and take some of its sacred cows to the altar of sacrifice’

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If the current county and state jail system is left in place, taxpayers will face funding $60 million to $100 million to build new facilities that aren’t really needed, according to a state corrections official.

“The incentive in the existing system is to build more jail capacity than we need and that is at considerable cost,” Deputy Commissioner Denise Lord said this week. “We estimated $60 [million] to $100 million in new construction that if you took a systems approach you wouldn’t need to do, at least not in the near term – the next three to five years.”

Lord was defending Gov. John Baldacci’s proposal for property tax relief through combining the state and county jails into one state system by July 1. The latest plan would not close the Piscataquis, Oxford, Franklin and Waldo county jails as proposed earlier this year, but would convert them into 72-hour holding facilities under contract with the state. In addition, Kennebec County Jail would be converted into a pretrial detention center, and the Two Bridges Regional Jail in Wiscasset would become a specialty unit for inmates who need mental health treatment.

Baldacci claims his unification proposal would save taxpayers $7 million the first year, $23 million by 2013 and $38 million by 2015. The savings would come from eliminating state funding to county jails, cutting 116 county jobs and reducing boarding fees by more evenly distributing prisoners in the new system.

But people at the county level of government are skeptical. Piscataquis County Sheriff John Goggin said this week that before the state starts fudging around with county operations under the guise of property tax relief, Baldacci should first do some sweeping inside his own house.

“The state has to bite the bullet first and take some of its sacred cows to the altar of sacrifice,” Goggin said. If the governor were serious about cutting costs he would combine the state police, game wardens and sheriff’s departments, since they basically cover the same beats and pass one another daily on patrols; plus they all attend the same school, he said.

“I think the sheriff makes an excellent point and we are absolutely doing these things across state government,” David Farmer, a spokesman in the governor’s office, said Thursday. He noted the governor’s supplemental budget included the consolidation of the state departments of Conservation, Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, Agriculture and Marine Resources. That proposal does not include the state police, he said.

Goggin wasn’t alone in voicing concern about the governor’s plan. The Maine County Commissioners Association and the Maine Sheriff’s Association, which claim the plan would bring no savings, jointly funded a study and have released their own cost-saving proposal, which received a lukewarm reception in Augusta on Wednesday.

Building for efficiency

Corrections Deputy Commissioner Lord said there’s plenty of tax relief, improved services and more jail efficiency in the governor’s proposal. She said state officials basically built a jail system from the bottom up on paper. The 15 county jails were visited and their operational costs collected, and from that information, a unified system was designed that would turn five jails into holding facilities and two into pretrial centers. The other eight would remain full-service jails.

One reason the state embarked on this proposal, aside from property tax relief, is the uneven distribution of beds, Lord said. Five jails have more beds than they currently need, and 10 jails are at or over capacity. As such, the five counties with excess capacity are charging a higher inmate boarding fee than some counties can afford, she said.

Another goal is to improve services, so specialty jails were proposed to handle substance abuse treatment and mental health issues, and some pre-trial diversion services were included, according to Lord.

Each of the jails was visited to determine which locations would be best for certain programs, Lord said. A unit at the new Two Bridges Jail actually was designed as a mental health unit, so it made sense to use it for that purpose, she said. In addition, a staffing and service analysis was conducted. Some of the psychiatric and medical services would be contracted, while the security staff would be state employees.

While some jails do a really good job of addressing mental health and medical issues, others do not and there is no mechanism for unifying efforts, according to Lord. Under the new system, the state can screen and assess inmates to ensure those who need a higher level of intervention receive it, and others have alternative treatment available.

The combined costs for the new system the first year would be $7 million less than what is being spent on the county jails and the state’s prisons, which translates into the first year’s savings, according to Lord. The state’s average the past four years of 6 percent budget growth was applied to that cost each ensuing year to determine the long-term savings.

By comparison, the budget growth rate in county jails in 2007 was 3 percent, but the average over the last four years was 9 percent, Lord said. She said the county jail average varies from year to year and will increase when the new Somerset County jail is in operation next year.

Balancing the books

Robert Howe, executive director of the Maine County Commissioners Association, said this week the county average, in part, is driven by the debt service counties pay. Given the state’s current budget woes, he doubts that it will cover, as proposed, all future increased costs for operating the new jail system.

But state officials don’t believe there will be an issue covering those expenses.

To offset operational costs the first year of the unified system, Lord said revenues of $8 million are anticipated. This figure includes fees from boarding federal prisoners as well as inmate benefit funds currently collected at the county level. The inmate benefit funds also are known as the telephone prisoner accounts, which are the commissions jails receive each time inmates make collect calls.

The state currently contributes a percentage to each of the county jails each year to help offset operational costs through the Community Corrections Act, which no longer would be required, according to Lord. The state appropriated $5.6 million in 2007 for those funds, which come from the state’s General Fund.

It was only after counties had adopted their new budgets anticipating the corrections funding for 2008 that they learned the funds were not included, according to Howe. That will leave many counties scrambling to cover the shortfall.

The state’s plan creates a historical precedent for using the county’s property tax revenue to subsidize the operation of a state agency; it is, in effect, reverse revenue sharing, according to Howe and Waldo County Sheriff Scott Story of the Maine Sheriff’s Association.

Under the new arrangement, each year the affected counties would pay the state the amount it costs to operate their jails, and that amount would be frozen at the 2008 budget level. Those funds, raised through property taxes, would cover the counties’ shares of the unified system, Lord said.

Lord admitted, however, that if the operational costs were more than anticipated in future years, the Legislature could lift the cap. “The Legislature could hypothetically increase the property tax contribution, but I think the experience, if you look at schools in particular, has been quite the opposite,” she said.

A different experience

Howe has a differing experience. In the mid-1980s when the state’s prisons were overcrowded, the state decided to increase the maximum time an inmate could spend in a county jail so that fewer would be sent to state prisons. The state also changed its requirements so more inmates who typically would have been housed at state prisons could be sent to county jails. The Community Corrections Act was established at that time to cover the counties’ actual costs of boarding them.

The state faithfully paid that for about six years based on quarterly reports filed by the counties. Then when the 1991 budget crisis arose, the Corrections Department added a sentence that noted the CCA would be a reimbursement to the counties or whatever amount is appropriated by the Legislature, Howe said. The amount appropriated by the Legislature for the succeeding six fiscal years was hundreds of thousands of dollars less than the actual reimbursement should have been, he said. Then in 1997, the law changed to convert the CCA funds from a reimbursement to a subsidy and that subsidy has not kept pace with the growth and cost of corrections, he explained.

“So there’s a rich history here of the state changing the deal unilaterally,” Howe said.

That aside, Lord said the goal is property tax relief, and under the governor’s proposal 116 jobs will be eliminated in county jails. The jails that become 72-hour holding facilities would operate as county jails with county employees under a state contract. Lord said the workers laid off from the jails could apply for available job openings at the holding facilities. It is unclear how many jobs there will be.

Lord said the governor’s proposal includes $1.3 million to operate the five holding facilities, a figure generated after a survey of the number of bookings each of the facilities had. For example, Kennebec County Jail would need an estimated 10 cells or beds to meet the county’s needs as a 72-hour holding facility, she said. While a contract will be negotiated, Lord said it could be revisited if there are cost overruns because the demand exceeded expectations.

Just as it is now, the transportation costs of inmates would be funded through county government, according to Lord. “By providing those holding facilities, we’re basically giving local law enforcement the exact same service they currently have,” she said. Local officers would bring detainees to the holding facility, and then it would be the county’s responsibility to transport the prisoner elsewhere after the 72-hour hold.

Lord said the only added expense to the county would be the transportation costs of taking inmates to and from the nearest detention facility and court. At the same time, there are costs the county currently incurs for the sentenced population that would become the state’s responsibility. For example, other than during transportation to and from court proceedings, the detainee will be considered the state’s responsibility.

If the county jail chooses not to become a 72-hour facility, it will have to close, Lord said.

Counting the costs

That irks Sheriff Goggin, who said he will recommend the county-owned jail not become a 72-hour holding facility because of the added costs. “Can you imagine how many trips it will take to shuffle inmates back and forth from Bangor to court appearances in Dover-Foxcroft, including their initial court appearances, motions and hearings, let alone the added fleet, insurance and staff that would be needed for the transport?” he asked. In order to operate a 72-hour holding facility, Goggin said, the county still would need to cover the same costs it has today, including heat, water, food and personnel.

Goggin said each Piscataquis County town pays a share of the estimated $1 million jail costs through the county budget each year. With the exception of the Community Corrections Act funds, which amounted to about $73,340 last year, the county operates the jail, the communication center and the Sheriff’s Department all within the same building.

When state inmates were removed from its jail in the late 1980s, the county contracted with the federal government and began boarding federal prisoners. In recent years, the federal government also added a contract for the county to transport the federal inmates. Last year, those federal contracts resulted in $440,000 in revenue to the county which helped offset the county costs, Goggin said.

John Clark, chief deputy of the U.S. Marshal’s Office in Portland, is closely watching the state’s proceedings on the jail plan. “We really don’t know how this will wash out,” he said recently. Clark said his agency has a great working relationship with the county jails, including Piscataquis County. On average, there are 130 federal inmates in custody in Maine, he said. “Obviously we need to board our prisoners somewhere.” He said if the governor’s plan is adopted, the best-case scenario would be to transfer the relationship from the county to the state.

That relationship is included in the governor’s plan, Lord said. She also said the families of inmates are considered under the proposal. If the state were running a unified system, it could keep people with shorter sentences closer to their hometowns, she said.

“Our pretrial defendants are [now] spending two to three times longer than the national average awaiting their final disposition, whether it’s their plea agreement, their trial or even awaiting bail,” Lord said. “Everything is a trade-off, there’s never a perfect solution, but I think the existing system has some liabilities that people aren’t willing to admit.”

Such a trade-off on the back of county government is not acceptable, according to Goggin and Howe.

Howe said the MCCA and MSA’s study found that Piscataquis, Waldo, Oxford and Franklin counties would have the additional tax burden of 86,516 miles and 2,335 additional hours for 6,490 detainees. Those figures were derived from contacting each of the police departments in the affected counties to find out how many people were arrested last year, he said. In Piscataquis County’s case that’s 8,366 additional miles and the associated time officers would be unavailable for emergency calls or patrol.

“Instead of one dead horse, we’ll be paying for two dead horses,” Goggin said. “Tell me where the tax relief is.”

The Legislature is expected to hold a public hearing on the governor’s plan the week of Jan. 28, with work sessions to be held the second week in February, Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, co-chairman of the Legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, said this week. The committee will do a full analysis of the governor’s proposal, more so than any other proposal, he said.

Diamond, who visited the state’s 15 county jails to look at the operations and to discuss the governor’s proposal with county officials, said it was important people not draw lines in the sand on the issue.

“I know the system can be improved; we have to do the package that’s best for Maine,” he said.

The governor’s proposal would:

. Lay off 116 county employees.

. Save $7 million in the first year as a result of avoided costs, according to administration officials. But the annual savings would grow to at least $23 million by fiscal year 2013 and $38 million by 2015.

. Allow Piscataquis, Kennebec, Waldo, Oxford and Franklin county jails, which are targeted to be closed, to contract with the state and operate as 72-hour holding facilities.

. Create a specialty unit for mental health treatment at the Two Bridges Regional Jail in Wiscasset, which serves Sagadahoc and Lincoln counties.

. Open a new jail in Washington County in 2011 to replace the state’s aging Downeast Correctional Center in Machiasport and county jail in Machias.

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