The Berks County PA commissioners Thursday approved housing as many as 30 inmates from Bucks County in the Berks prison to help Bucks cope with overcrowding, according to the Reading Eagle.
Berks will receive $55 a day per inmate, officials said. Berks Warden George A. Wagner said the prison population has dropped to 1,070 this year from 1,300 last year. Wagner said the prison ideally should house about 900 inmates. However, he said, the prison can accommodate the additional inmates from Bucks.
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After being arrested in Bucks County PA, suspects place their hands on an imaging screen that scans their fingerprints into a computer linked to a federal database. This report from Morning Call.
Within minutes, prison officials can learn the person’s criminal record — whether he is wanted for other crimes and whether he is in the country illegally. That’s the latest weapon the federal government uses to track people who are illegal immigrants. The system has been in use in Bucks and Montgomery counties — the only two in Pennsylvania so far — for a couple of months. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to extend that to more than 6,000 local police booking centers and jails nationwide … in about 3 1/2 years, Thomas Decker, director of the ICE Field Office in Philadelphia, said Monday …
Criminals who are in the country illegally will be turned over to ICE for deportation proceedings only after completing their sentence in a county jail. Bucks District Attorney Michelle Henry said people simply can’t be turned over to ICE before completing prison terms. ”It’s important to serve whatever sentence that is,” she said …
Township police have arrested about a dozen people who, with the help of ICE, have been identified as being in the country illegally. Bucks was able to tap into the ICE system because its computer fingerprinting system was in place and needed only upgrades — $30,000-$40,000 worth — to complete the connection, said county Corrections Director Harris Gubernick.
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Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is gravely overcrowded, even after a 50-bed extension was added. County Commissioners blame the State and its prisoners for the problems.
The Bucks County commissioners instructed their attorneys Thursday to explore suing the state over the cost of housing so-called state-sentenced inmates they say are clogging the county lockup. Under state law, prisoners sentenced to terms of less than two years must serve their time in county jail. Those sentenced to five or more years must be sent to state prison. But county judges have discretion to allow inmates whose sentences are between two and five years — enough to land them in state prison — to do their time in county prison. About 265 of the 760 inmates at Bucks County Prison on Thursday were in that category, according to Corrections Director Harris Gubernick.
The Commissioners are faced with the possibility of building a new jail at a cost of about $50 million. In the meantime,
Commissioner Diane Marseglia … said she thinks the state should be forced to pay the costs of housing the inmates before county taxpayers foot the bill for a larger prison. ”I think we need to sue the state and get them to start reimbursing us,” she said.
The State, of course, says they have no obligation to pay. For more details see The Morning Call.
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