2011 was a very busy year at the Hubbard County Detention Center and I’d like to give our readers a sense of what happened last year.
- The Jail booked 989 individuals.
- Of that number 736 were Male and 253 were female.
- These numbers translate into an average daily head count of 36.3 inmates.
- Total Jail days spent in the HCDC for all inmates was 13254.
- Jail days spent in the HCDC for females was 2643.
- Jail days spent in the HCDC for males was 10609.
Now lets give those numbers some context:
One often heard suggestion of lowering the operating budget of the Sheriff’s Office is to close down the female housing unit and house them in another county. If Hubbard County had done that last year, the cost to the taxpayers would’ve been approximately $132,150. The important thing to note here is that there could be no reduction in staffing because of the physical layout of the jail and Minnesota Department of Corrections requirements. Therefore, housing our female population in another county would’ve raised the operating budget of the jail by a significant dollar amount. Note also that the $132,150 amount only includes the actual per inmate daily housing fee cost which for simplicity sake I used $50 per day to calculate (this is the low end of the scale and most agencies charge more per day). The $132,150 figure also does not include transport costs associated with transporting female inmates back and forth for court appearances as well as the time of arrest and release. These costs would be significant.
The old jail had 23 beds but the Department of Corrections mandates that a facility only houses inmates up to the operating capacity which I believe was nineteen or twenty. One reason for this is that you always have to have room to take in new arrests. For simplicity sake lets use twenty as the operating capacity. With an ADP (average daily population which is the same as the average daily head count) of 36.3 [1] inmates For 2011, we would’ve been spending $800 per day (16.3 x $50) which if multiplied by 365 days in year equals $292,023 [2]. Think about that for a minute. Had the county commissioners not made the smart decision to build a new facility we would’ve been spending over a quarter million dollars per year to house inmates in another county.
Of course there would be a corresponding reduction in the Sheriff’s Office operating budget because if we were still in the old facility we wouldn’t need the same number of Corrections Officers. Realistically, though, there is no way we could go back to pre 2005 staffing levels. As a CO that worked in the old jail I can remember weeks when only one, two or three people were arrested. In 2011 we averaged close to three bookings per day. That kind of volume would necessitate at least a doubling of jail staffing levels from what they were prior to 2005.
Lost in this whole, somewhat esoteric discussion, is the fact that housing inmates in another county means Hubbard County loses good, taxpaying jobs. I’m not implying or suggesting that as a community we should create and pay for these kind of positions just for the sake of creating jobs. I just think that the real, concrete need for a jail facility and the jobs that come with it is a factor that warrants consideration in these kinds of discussions. Do we really want to be farming these jobs out to neighboring counties?
Make no mistake, crime rates are not going down and likely won’t. There will always be a need for law enforcement and jails facilities. 2012, in fact is starting out to be a significantly busier year than 2011. At the end of February our ADP was 41. Once again we’re housing for a neighboring county (Becker) and generating revenue.
Corrections and jail facilities are infrastructure and are no different then the highway department or a municipal public works department. You can’t have law enforcement with out jails and you can’t have a civil society where citizens are free to engage, without fear, in the daily activities of a free and open free-market democracy without law enforcement and jails.
Back 1 Full disclosure: these numbers include inmates the HCDC housed for neighboring counties. The numbers of inmates we housed from other counties, mostly Wadena county, were not large but weren’t insignificant either. If I had to guess I would estimate our ADP would drop by 1 or so if the inmates we housed for Wadena were not included. I’m going to see if I can crunch the numbers using only Hubbard County inmates and will post back with an update.
[UPDATE] Last year the HCDC housed 54 different inmates for a number of other jurisdictions. The total number of jail days we housed these inmates for was 400. If we subtract that number from the 13254 jails days for all last year we come up with 12854 jail days for just Hubbard County inmates. That results in a 35.2 ADP.
[UPDATE 2] Back 2 reworking the numbers to reflect the 35.2 ADP, the amount of money we would be spending to house our excess inmates (over the 20 I used previously) in another county would be $277,400. 15.2 multiplied by $50 per day = $760 per day. $760 multiplied by 365 days per year is $277,400.
[UPDATE 3] My itchy ‘publish blog post’ finger got the better of me. Our capacity in the old jail, excluding our single holding cell was 24 not 23. This would make our operating capacity 21 so instead of using 15.2, I should’ve used 14.2. Multiplying this number by $50 per day for 365 days gives us $259,150 we would be paying to house our excess inmates out if county. Keep in mind, however, that this dollar amount does not include any transport costs associated with getting inmates back and forth for court appearances and release. I’m going to try to flesh this out more in a future post.
From → Corrections
