Maine’s county jails are asking the Legislature for additional funding to combat skyrocketing prisoner populations and the added costs of housing inmates with mental health and drug problems.
The struggle to balance the budget at some of Maine’s county jails continues. Part of the problem, according to Republican state Rep. Ricky Long, stems from the Legislature’s failure to fully fund county jail needs at a cost of nearly $15 million a year. Instead, the jails were given just over $12 million.
Now, Long and others are supporting a bill before the Legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee to make up the difference.
“What this bill will entail is coming up with the funding to reimburse the counties that $2.4 [million], and the question will be, is it for one year or two?” Long says. “That’s something the committee will have to decide.”
Two years ago, at the request of the Maine Sheriffs Association and others, the Legislature agreed to disband the Maine Board of Corrections, which oversaw the operations of the state’s unified county jail system. The sheriffs complained that the structure had taken away some of their control And had failed to provide enough funding.
Gov. Paul LePage pushed for doing away with the Board of Corrections and said the county jails should either be returned to the control of the sheriffs or be absorbed by the state Department of Corrections. The Maine Sheriffs Association preferred the former option and signed off on the plan, which also raised the caps on county taxes in order to provide a little more money.
But Joel Merry, the sheriff of Sagadahoc County and president of the Maine Sheriffs Association, says part of that agreement was dependent on a higher level of state funding. Not surprisingly, his organization supports the increase.
“The Maine Sheriffs support this legislation because it will allow us to sustain impactful programming, which has had the potential to reduce recidivism and save taxpayers’ dollars,” Merry says.
He says the current agreement for state funding does not address the financial situations of all of the state’s county jails.
“They’re all different, the facilities — the infrastructure’s different, the make-up is different, the types of jails are different, the programming within each jail — and a lot of that is driven by the demographics that that facility has to hold,” Merry says. “The inmate in York County is not the same as the inmate in Washington County.”
In fact, he says some county jails may not need additional funds from the state, which distributes the money on a strict formula.
That prompted the committee’s House Chair, Rep. Lori Fowle, a Vassalboro Democrat, to question whether additional changes should be made in the law.
“I’m thinking you need to be more along the lines of what is the need, who gets it, and we need Appropriations to distribute that money the same way it was distributed last time, in a supplemental budget versus it trickling down to everyone — some who don’t need the money,” she says.
“They like the state funding the jail but I believe that they killed the goose that laid the golden eggs,” says state Sen. Stan Gerzofsky, a Brunswick Democrat.
He says the sheriffs can’t insist on maintaining complete control over the county jails while expecting the state to bail them out every time they face a financial crisis.
“So it’s going to be up to them to manage what they wanted to manage,” Gerzofsky says.
The panel will be continue its work on the jail funding bill next month.