The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

"I lie down and watch TV," said the 31-year-old from Middlesboro, who has spent 20 months of a five-year sentence for possession of a controlled substance in the Pulaski County Detention Center. "It is the only thing I can do."

Lumpkin is one of more than 6,000 Kentucky state prisoners housed in county jails -- local lockups originally designed to hold inmates for a few weeks or months as they await trial or serve misdemeanor sentences of less than a year.

Now, 30 percent of Kentucky's 20,585 state felons -- those sentenced to a year or more -- are being held in county jails. That is four times the rate in Indiana, five times the national average and a higher percentage than any other state except Louisiana.

And the consequences are grave, both for the inmates and the communities to which they will eventually be returned, according to a blistering new report by University of Kentucky law professor Robert Lawson, the author of Kentucky's penal code.

Jails generally are not designed, equipped, staffed or funded to provide the kind of rehabilitation programs that offer "anything more than a faint hope of helping inmates after incarceration," Lawson writes.

Offering little more space than an animal shelter gives a large dog, he says, jails "are more of a storage bin or human warehouse than a penal institution in pursuit of corrections."

The report also asserts that many counties intentionally overcrowd their jails to get additional money from the state -- enabling some of them to make a profit.

Prison and jail officials dispute Lawson's conclusions, saying he underestimates the value of keeping felons in jails closer to home -- and the millions of hours of community service they perform for local governments, schools and parks.

But Lawson's 71-page report, "Turning Jails into Prison -- Collateral Damage from Kentucky's War on Crime," describes the incarceration of long-term prisoners in county jails as the worst consequence of a prison boom in Kentucky, where the prison population has multiplied sevenfold since 1970.

Lawson and other experts who have read the report, including Public Advocate Ernie Lewis, who heads the state public defender system, say the situation should prompt public concern because without rehabilitation and education, inmates held in jails are more likely to commit new crimes when released.

Lawson based his findings on visits to jails in nine counties, which he compared with three prisons.

His conclusions mirror, in part, two other recent reports on county jails:

The state auditor's office in February reported that housing felons in jails "exacerbates or causes overcrowding in 53 of the state's 73 full-service and regional jails" and may lead to lawsuits and liability issues.

A consultant's report in December for the state Corrections Department found that 25 percent of inmates in a sample of 25 jails had to sleep on the floor because of overcrowding and that there are "troubling variations" in programs for them.
Jails defended

Kentucky Jailers Association president Joey Stanton and state Corrections Commissioner John Rees concede that some jails are too small to house inmates long term.

But "the advantage is that you are keeping them closer to their community and that they are not going deeper into the system," Rees said in an interview.

Stanton, who is the Grayson County jailer, angrily disputed Lawson's assertion that jails can't provide programs offered in prison. Stanton said his jail offers classes in nutrition, parenting, smoking cessation, anger management and English as a second language, as well as a working law library.

"We are second to none on programming," he said.

Rees also noted that about 60 percent of felons doing time in county jails are eligible to work outside them, picking up litter and sprucing up public areas. Last year, they performed about 6.4 million hours of community service for local governments, schools and other organizations, work that would have cost about $33 million if paid for at minimum wage. (Inmates get 63 cents a day and one day off their sentences for every week they work.)

But Stanton's own program director, Gail Basham, acknowledged that the number of programs at the Grayson County Detention Center is unusual. And even that jail doesn't have space for vocational training or a prison yard.

"It is pretty much of a lockdown facility," she said.
Economic incentive

Jails have always housed a few felons waiting to be transported to state prisons. But in 1992, the General Assembly enacted a law requiring that offenders convicted of Class D felonies punishable by one to five years serve their time in jails. The law was amended in 2000 to allow some Class C felons to be housed in jails.

In his report -- which has been circulated to state lawmakers and prison officials, and will be published in UK's law review -- Lawson says counties have became "addicted" to the money the state provides for housing state inmates.

The state pays counties $31.50 per inmate per day -- more than it generally costs to house them. At the Pulaski County Detention Center, for example, it costs about $24 a day -- a difference that allowed that jail, which once ran in the red, to run up a $422,000 surplus last year, according to Jailer Mike Harris.

The potential for profit is an incentive to squeeze in as many state prisoners as possible, Harris conceded. "It does pay to overcrowd your jail."

The average number of inmates housed in Pulaski County has jumped from 126 when Harris took over in 2002 to more than 270 now, he said. During a reporter's recent visit, 67 inmates were sleeping on the floor.

Although some counties, including Jefferson, refuse to take state prisoners because their jails already are crowded, Lawson found that "many local governments spare no political effort to maintain the right to overcrowd state prisoners in local facilities that are callously and chronically overcrowded without them."

Despite the overcrowding, some inmates from the Somerset area said they would rather be jailed there than in a prison hundreds of miles from home.

James Townsend, 37, of Pulaski County, has served 27 months of a seven-year sentence for wanton endangerment at the Pulaski jail and said his elderly parents would be unable to visit if they had to travel to a prison farther away. Townsend is allowed outside the cell eight hours a day to do maintenance work.

But Lumpkin, the inmate from Middlesboro, gets no visits and is barred from working outside the cell because he had an emergency protective order against him outside the jail and was cited for fighting inside it. He said he would rather be doing his time in a state prison.

So would Daphne Corder, 26, from adjoining McCreary County, who is serving five years for trafficking in a controlled substance

"This is very stressful," she said of life in the Pulaski jail, where she is one of 11 inmates in a 10-woman pod. "You look at the same walls all day. There is nothing new. This is hard time."

The same view was expressed by a half-dozen state inmates serving time at other jails in Breckinridge, Pike and Grayson counties.

Beyond the bottom line

Lawson acknowledged in an interview that Kentucky is unlikely to abandon jails as a place for housing felons, for the simple reason that jail space is cheaper than prison space.

In 2004-05 in Kentucky, the annual cost per inmate was $9,958 in jails vs. $17,198 a year in prisons.

Reversing the policy also would require building more prisons.

Rees said he is pushing instead for changes that would pay more money to jails that offer extra programs rather than just the required "three hots and cot."

He also announced recently that a review could be completed by the end of next year that will look at the feasibility of the state taking over county jails.

State Rep. Rob Wilkey, D-Scottsville, who sponsored the 2000 law expanding the incarceration of felons in jails, said they may need more educational and vocational services. But he said the public likes seeing state inmates at work in the community and "not sitting on their butt."

Lawson concedes that it may be difficult to convince people of the intangible costs of locking people in jails for years. But he says in his report that conditions there may only enhance the "deficiencies" that made them criminals in the first place.

"Against the only yardstick that ought to matter -- whether a corrections expenditure has the desired effect of reducing crime -- it is not at all clear that jail space is as cheap as it appears to be," he says.

Reporter Andrew Wolfson can be reached at (502) 582-7189.
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