County Wants State Inmates, But No Gangs
Center County PA officials have applied to the state to house 25 prisoners at the county correctional facility. The deal to help ease state prison overcrowding over the next two or three years would generate revenue for the county — $55 per day per prisoner, or $500,000 a year, enough to more than make up for a projected line-item shortfall. Report from Center Daily.
But the potential arrangement also has raised concerns from Board of Commissioners Chairman Jon Eich about inmate gang members mixing with county inmates … “I’m concerned about gang presence — we hear that gangs are present in state prisons,” Eich said in a news conference after the commissioners’ regular meeting. “I don’t want to see Centre County inmates recruited into gangs” …
Commissioners Rich Rogers and Steve Dershem downplayed the concerns without dismissing them. They said discussions with state Department of Corrections officials would precede a decision by the Board of Commissioners. “We do have the capacity to isolate these folks if we need to,” Dershem said. “Do we have concerns? Yes. Have we made a decision yet? No. It’s an opportunity that we’re looking at.”
Without the state prisoner revenue, the county is on a pace this year to bring in little more than half of what it budgeted for housing prisoners from other counties in Centre County’s 4-year-old, $20 million prison at the Benner Pike and Rishel Hill Road in Benner Township. The county took in $89,000 though April for housing other counties’ inmates, an annual rate of $266,000 against $510,000 expected in the budget line-item. Rogers said other counties have begun to find “creative ways” to avoid the expense of shipping inmates to other counties.
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