BELFAST – Faced with rising costs due to overcrowding at the county jail, Waldo County commissioners have decided to try to reduce the number of short-term inmates being held at the facility.

The commissioners Tuesday agreed to pursue a $55,500 contract with an outside agency to develop and manage a community corrections program at the jail.

The program is designed to eliminate the need to hold nonviolent inmates in custody while they await trial and to recommend noncustodial alternative sentences should they be convicted. It will run for one year, but the county has the option to continue for additional years if the program reaches its goals.

“I think that this time next year we’re going to have a really good grip on where we are going,” Sheriff Scott Story advised commissioners during the meeting.

The appropriation will need to be approved by the county budget committee before a contract with Volunteers of America is adopted. The budget committee is scheduled to review the county budget next month.

VOA is a national faith-based organization that has worked on social issues for more than a century. The agency provides similar services in several other Maine counties for people in the criminal justice system. The program entails monitoring the activities of individuals charged with crimes from their arrest until trial. The group ensures that the accused receive access to programs designed to keep them from returning to a life of crime or substance abuse.

“It’s a way to reduce the number of people in the jail, but it’s a lot more than that,” Story said after the meeting. “The whole theory is not just to try and keep people out of jail, but to get them the kind of services to keep them from coming back.”

Story said VOA caseworkers will operate from offices at the Ed Reynolds Home in Belfast.

VOA president Joan Koegel said the group has run a similar program in Sagadahoc County for the past 10 years.

Koegel said caseworkers would handle pre-arraignment screenings for all offenders processed through Waldo County, supervise all conditional releases within the community, develop and coordinate community referrals and placements for offenders, search for alternative sources of funding for community corrections programs and assist the Sheriff’s Department in coordinating alternate programs.

“We’ve had a lot of success,” Koegel said. “What ends up happening is you’ve got an awful lot of people sitting in the jail for a variety of reasons, say substance abuse, that under supervision could be in the community. We have a lot of treatment options available for them. The whole point is to address the issues that got them there to begin with.”

The county jail has been restricted by the state to holding 23 inmates. The county had been averaging 40 inmates a day, but cut back when an investigation determined that crowding was the cause of a suicide at the jail in 2002.

Story and the jail administration have developed a plan to increase inmate levels, but it is predicated upon the hiring of six additional corrections officers. The budget committee will also act on that request when it meets next month.

Even if the VOA program helps reduce the number of inmates at the jail, the state-mandated inmate levels will result in the county having to board prisoners at other county jails on those occasions when the jail is full.

Story has submitted a $350,000 budget for boarding prisoners during 2004, an increase of $250,000 over this year.

“We have not hidden the fact that this is going to cost us a lot of money to house inmates somewhere else,” said Commission Chairman Jethro Pease.

Pease also noted the lack of space for inmates had forced the county to balance the safety needs of the community with those of the taxpayer.

“The fact is, the average Joe out there, when someone gets in trouble, says ‘Throw their butt in jail and lock the door’ and the judges hear that,” Pease said. “We can’t just warehouse. Warehouse isn’t working. They just keep coming back. Pick up the newspaper and you read the same names.”