For the third year in a row, the county council is supporting legislation that would prohibit judges from sentencing criminals to the Montgomery County Correctional Facility for more than 12 months, said Councilman Phil Andrews (D-Dist. 3). Report by Gazette.net.

Before fiscal 2010, the state reimbursed counties for all inmates held longer than 90 days. That year, the state cut its reimbursement rate to the county by roughly two-thirds, to $45 per day for each inmate held between 12 and 18 months. The state cut all reimbursement payments for those held less than a year.

Statewide, county jail systems have lost more than $25 million since the new reimbursement formula was implemented. Montgomery County lost $3.4 million in fiscal 2010 alone, said Arthur M. Wallenstein, director of the Montgomery County Department of Correction and Rehabilitation.

“The bottom line is, the state’s decision not to reimburse the county for holding prisoners who stay longer than 12 months in our jails, costs the county a little over $3 million a year and this is the third year of that,” Andrews said.

The state’s old reimbursement formula paid county facilities based on the actual operating costs of each jail. In Montgomery County, the daily rate had been $141.18 for every inmate, according to Wallenstein. Because the reduced reimbursement rate also applied to fewer individuals, the cut was more painful, Wallenstein said.

The Montgomery County Correctional Facility in Boyds can hold as many as 1,208 inmates. Last week, there were 963 inmates, and at least 25 of them were expected to serve between 12 and 18 months, Wallenstein said.

State law gives Maryland judges the option of sending criminals with sentences between 12 and 18 months to either local or state facilities.

The county’s fiscal 2012 budget for corrections and rehabilitation is $64.26 million, with less than $500,000 projected to come from the state, said Craig Dowd, budget and procurement manager for the department.

Andrews said the cuts endanger the county’s jail rehabilitation programs, which include treatment for substance abuse and mental health issues, cognitive behavioral modification, basic education, life skills and workforce preparation.

“Without state funding, it creates considerable pressures on the system,” Andrews said. “It makes it harder for the jail to run any of their programs.”

A state law states that starting July 1, 2012, a defendant sentenced to one year or less in the Arizona Department of Corrections will serve that time in the county jail. The exception is if the county has an agreement with the state prison system to reimburse the state for incarcerating a prisoner in the state prison. That could be at least $55 a day per inmate, Deputy County Manager Dana Hlavac said. Report by Tri-State Online.

The second part of the law states that the county will pay the state for any prisoner serving in the state prison after July 1, 2012, who has one year or less left on the sentence.

Mohave County sends about 70 inmates a year to the state prison for sentences of one year or less. The average sentence is about nine months or 270 days. That is equal to about 18,900 inmate days or the county paying the state an additional $1,039,500 a year.

Conservative estimates that the cost to Mohave County would be about $500,000 for inmates serving one year or less projected to still be in prison by July 1, 2012, and $1 million to send future inmates to prison after that date. The first year cost could be at least $1.5 million for those short term DOC inmates and $1 million for each succeeding year, Hlavac said.

If those inmates are kept in county jail, that would require additional jail staffing, which would drive up overall costs to the county. That does not take into account inmates with special needs such as mental health issues, chronic diseases or pregnancy needs. That also does not take into account inmates who pose a security threat such as criminal street gang members, Hlavac said.

Other overall costs would include medical costs, food, religious or prisoner rights or federal lawsuits filed by inmates. Mandatory costs could include sex offender treatment or drug or alcohol abuse treatment.

The county jail does not have to provide sex offender or substance abuse treatment because jail inmates are presumed innocent until they are found guilty. The jail is a short-term facility until an inmate is sentenced. The county’s costs to provide programs to DOC inmates at the jail are unknown depending on the inmate and the programs but could be an additional $100,000 to $250,000 a year, Hlavac said.

The county opened the 242,000-square-foot jail in October 2010 located next to the county administration building in Kingman. The three-story jail has space for 688 beds housing more than 700 inmates with room to expand to more than 1,100 beds. The new $72 million county jail is triple the size of the former county jail. The jail’s operating budget was $10.5 million.

The daily jail cost to house a jail inmate for the 2011-12 fiscal year was recently raised to $88.82 a day per prisoner. The previous rate was $79.46 a day per prisoner. There is also a one-time $65 booking fee. There are currently about 485 inmates in custody at the county jail.

From 1984 to 2008, the number of offenders serving life terms quadrupled, from 34,000 to roughly 140,000, according to the most recent count by The Sentencing Project, which advocates alternatives to incarceration. Report by Tucson Citizen.

One of the fastest-growing subgroups are inmates serving life without the possibility of parole. Those numbers have jumped from 12,453 in 1992 to 41,095 in 2008 and represent the most costly inmates to house as the aging inmates require increased medical care.

“The challenge for us is to distinguish between the offenders we are afraid of — those who deserve to be locked up for life — and those who we are just mad at and who can be handled outside of prison,” Texas state Sen. John Whitmire said.

Whitmire, a Houston Democrat, helped lead an effort to divert hundreds of offenders to less expensive treatment programs outside of prison. He said the cost of basic housing for an inmate serving life — calculated at $30,000 per year — can easily top $1 million over the inmate’s lifetime.

In Texas, the second-largest state prison system in the country, with 156,000 inmates, the number of offenders serving life without parole has been increasing since the sentence was adopted by the state Legislature in 2005, from 47 in 2007 to 391 this year. The number of Texas prisoners serving life with the possibility of parole — 8,665 — has increased in four of the past five years.

“If we’re committed to spending a lot of money on lifers without parole, it’s going to have an impact on who comes in the front end of the system,” Whitmire said, adding that prison should “not be the first option” for parole and probation violators.

In California, the country’s largest prison system with 164,000 inmates, the number of prisoners serving life terms has been steadily increasing, even as the state faces a federal court mandate to reduce the prison population by 30,000 by 2013. More than 20% of the state’s inmates are serving life terms or equivalent sentences.

Joseph Cassilly, a past president of the National District Attorneys Association, said there is concern that increasing budget pressures on state governments could drive officials to consider paroles for lifers in an attempt to reduce costs.

“How do you explain that to a victim of a crime or a surviving family member who thought life in prison really meant life in prison?” Cassilly said.