HARRISBURG Counties say state must get inmates

Local taxpayers bear the expense.
HARRISBURG (AP) -- Three years ago, Lehigh County officials began trying to reduce the size of a costly category of inmate -- those serving maximum sentences of between two and five years at the downtown Allentown jail, rather than in state prisons.
Pennsylvania law grants to county judges discretion as to where that class of inmates will serve time. By 2001, the Lehigh County Prison confined more than 200 of them, a significant cost for a facility that spends about $28,000 a year per inmate.
"The realization wasn't hitting home that all that expense has to be shouldered by the local taxpayers," said Ed Sweeney, the county's corrections director.
Judges help cut numbers
With cooperation from the local judges, Lehigh County has cut those numbers to less than 100. Judges are sending more inmates with the qualifying sentences to state prisons, adding only 13 of those inmates to the county jail in the last nine months of 2003.
"We still have the normal increase of our local arrests and populations, but having 100 less inmates right now than we did three years ago, that has allowed [the overall jail population] to remain flat," Sweeney said.
County commissioners and prison wardens are now trying to get help for all counties that house state prisoners.
They are seeking either reimbursement for their estimated $40 million in additional annual costs or passage of a bill now before the Senate Judiciary Committee that would prevent state-time inmates from going to overcrowded county facilities.
Roughly 2,000 state-time inmates are housed in county prisons across Pennsylvania. The Department of Corrections estimates that taking in all of them would require construction of a $110 million prison, followed by $45 million a year in operating costs.
Governor opposes bill
A spokesman for Gov. Ed Rendell said he opposes the Senate bill on grounds it does not address the rising costs of incarceration and would not reduce overall prison population. Instead, Rendell is backing a House bill designed to reduce county jail populations by mandating treatment for drug and nonviolent offenders.
Because judges have discretion as to where to confine the two-to-five-year inmates, counties report widely varying practices.
In Allegheny and Philadelphia counties -- which contribute nearly half of the 40,000 state prison inmates -- judges allow virtually no state-time convicts to remain in their county jails. One study found that in August 2001, at least 38 of the state's 63 county jails contained fewer than 10 state-time inmates.
Conversely, just eight counties housed more than 70 percent of all state-time inmates in county jails, according to a 2003 legislative analysis. The threat of going into the state system, which can be intimidating to a criminal defendant, is often used as a plea-bargain tactic.
"It's been kind of regionalized practices, how local judges make those decisions," said Doug Hoffman, a research director with the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.
County prison wardens argue that, budgetary considerations aside, it is bad policy to let the longer-term inmates remain in county jails that generally do not offer as many employment, training and rehabilitation services as the Department of Corrections. They also tend to be paroled later than inmates in state prisons and are granted greater freedom of movement within the institution.
"Oftentimes you'll find guys that want to go" to a state prison, said York County Prison Warden Thomas H. Hogan, president of the Pennsylvania County Prison Wardens Association.
Their medical expenses
The state-time inmates tend to be older and stay longer than the typical county inmate, so they generate a disproportionate share of the jails' medical expenses. They are also considered the county prisons' biggest security risks.
Lancaster County Prison Warden Vincent A. Guarini said that place-of-confinement reform proposals have been kicking around the General Assembly since the late 1980s.
"I think there probably will be something happening with it, hopefully in the not-too-distant future," Guarini said. "It's not going away."