On any given day, officers from the Waldo County Sheriff’s Department are on the road, transporting prisoners to York County Jail because there’s no room back home.

That’s a six-hour round trip that often is repeated more than once for a single prisoner, who gets taken to York for a bed, but has to be brought back for his pre-trial hearing in the Waldo County courthouse, only to be taken back to York again.

Once in a while, Jail Administrator Ray Porter gets lucky and there’s room in the Hancock County Jail, but that’s happening less often lately. Hancock is near capacity at its jail – and sometimes over – and it was built less than five years ago.

Hancock County Jail Administrator Terry Robertson said the new jail, with a capacity of 54, usually has enough room to take five or six inmates from a neighboring county, but “our population is still rising.”

Before the new jail was built, Hancock sent its overflow to Penobscot, “but they’re full all the time now.”

County Jail Populations 2004 County Capacity Avg. Pop. Androscoggin 118 117 Aroostook 66 79 Cumberland 570 505 Franklin 23 35 Hancock 54 52 Kennebec 134 167 Knox 55 52 Lincoln 21 35 Oxford 44 42 Penobscot 136 173 Piscataquis 39 29 Sagadahoc 0 34 Somerset 55 71 Waldo 32 50 Washington 42 51 York 286 151 Source: Department of Corrections

And so it goes, with counties spending millions to house their prisoners somewhere else – mainly York and Cumberland counties – at $90 to $104 per day respectively on top of what it costs to run their own jails. Kennebec used to be a popular destination, but it’s now over capacity by more than 30 inmates on an average basis.

Statistics from 2004 – the last full year available – show 10 of Maine’s 16 counties are over capacity on an average day and 14 hit peaks during the year that put them over the limit. Sagadahoc and Lincoln counties will improve those numbers when they complete a shared jail in 2006 and will cash in on the rent money, building nearly twice as many beds as they need. Currently Sagadahoc has no facility and boards out all its prisoners.

“Nobody seems to have a lot of space,” said Porter, who spent $370,000 of his jail budget last year on boarding inmates in other counties and is budgeted to spend $400,000 this year out of a total budget of just over $1.7 million. He would have liked a new jail himself, but Waldo County voters turned down the bond proposal.

The problem, corrections officials say, is the jail population is growing faster than people anticipated, in part due to the number of parole violators from the state prison who are returned to county jails to finish off their time.

Under statute, all prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing – with a few dangerous exceptions – spend their time in county jail. Once sentenced, prisoners with more than nine months to serve go to state prisons, and under nine to county jails, including time left after a probation violation. It used to be a six-month maximum, but the state changed the rules to nine, promising more aid in return for the counties helping to relieve overcrowding at the state prisons.

That worked, county officials say, when the state paid counties on a real per diem cost basis, but the deal fell apart when the state ran short of cash in the 1990s. Now counties are paid a set amount per county that doesn’t fluctuate with the population and doesn’t nearly cover the cost of housing prisoners. The rest is largely made up with local property taxes collected through an assessment paid to the county from municipalities.

“Many of us feel the state hasn’t fulfilled its commitment,” said Cumberland County Manager Peter Crichton. Cumberland County is only getting 6 percent of its jail costs covered by state funding and across the state it’s 10 percent or about $5 million on total jail operating costs of $51 million.

Cumberland gets $2 million to $3 million a year in boarding fees from “revenue inmates” sent from other counties or the U.S. Marshals Service.

“We aren’t making money,” Crichton said, but “it helps to stabilize the financial challenges.” And, it represents an income source unavailable to the smaller counties who turn to Cumberland and York to house their inmates. York just built its spacious jail in 2004.

Making matters worse this fiscal year, the state has cut $250,000 from its general subsidy to county jails to help fill a state budget hole. And, it will charge counties an estimated $100,000 annually in cell rent to house the handful of prisoners awaiting trial, who are deemed too dangerous – to themselves or others – to wait in county facilities.

“That’s a $350,000 cut,” said Robert Howe of the Maine County Commissioners Association. “There’s isn’t a lot of room to be cutting county budgets.”

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