County jails across the state are picking up a $2 million annual tab to lock up prisoners who are serving sentences of longer than 18 months, members of the House of Delegates Appropriations Committee were told yesterday.
Because those prisoners are supposed to be housed in local detention centers, the state should share those costs, said Del. pTC Nancy R. Stocksdale.
"That's a lot of money that could be put in other places," said Ms. Stocksdale, a Republican from Westminster. "In all fairness to the counties, I ask you to support this bill."
The bill, requested by Carroll County Sheriff John H. Brown, would require the state to pay county detention centers a per-day rate equal to the cost of keeping a prisoner in a minimum security facility for each inmate housed longer than 18 months.
State law requires that prisoners serving 90 days or less should be sentenced to the local detention centers. Those serving more than 18 months are to go to state facilities. For any sentence in between, the state shares the cost.
But for a variety of reasons, judges frequently are sentencing inmates to local facilities for longer than 18 months, Ms. Stocksdale said.
"Due to compassion or wanting to keep an inmate close to home, judges are giving sentences [in] local detention centers for up to three years," she said. "There is no reimbursement at all and counties are being asked to bear the entire cost."
In November, for instance, Carroll County had 10 inmates serving sentences of more than 18 months. Frederick County had one and Baltimore County two.
Counties with the most inmates serving the longer sentences in November were Wicomico with 41 prisoners, Cecil with 22, Harford with 19 and Washington with 13, according to statistics provided by the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.
"If the county was to be reimbursed at $40 a day per inmate, the payment for one year would total $146,000," Ms. Stocksdale said. "For the entire three years, the total would be $438,000."
Mason Waters, warden for the Carroll County Detention Center, said current costs are about $50 a day for each inmate. Although most of those inmates are on work release, they pay the center only $70 a week.
"The judges do a good job analyzing case by case," Mr. Waters said. "Sometimes it's to put them on work release so they can support their families."
In other cases, the inmate needs to earn money so he or she can begin to make restitution, said Carroll County Circuit Judge Luke K. Burns.
"I have had a couple of embezzlement cases where I was very anxious for the defendant to start making restitution," he said. "If I send them to the Department of Corrections, that's not going to happen because there is no work release there.
"It's sort of an exception, but there is a very good reason for it to be done."
In an unusual twist, the Maryland Association of Counties (MACo) testified against the bill, saying it may actually make the current situation worse.
"I'm in a peculiar position, since we're here to oppose a bill that would give money to the counties," said Michael Sanderson of MACo. Mr. Sanderson testified that MACo supported the intent of Ms. Stocksdale's bill, but felt it was the wrong approach to solving the problem.
"There are some complications to the bill that are awfully important to understand," he said. "The reason we have this problem is that the current law is not being followed.
"This could open the door even further so that the state could be alleviating its [prison overcrowding] problem one case at a time."