HOULTON, Maine — Exactly who controls the state’s county jails remains up in the air, despite the fact that the facilities are now in a new fiscal year.
LD 186 — an act to reverse jail consolidation — is one of numerous bills that is currently in limbo. The bill would turn control of the jails back to their respective counties to govern instead of the Board of Corrections.
The Maine Legislature approved the bill in July, but Gov. Paul LePage refused to sign it, along with 70 other bills. Instead, LePage attempted to veto the bill, but did not do so in the necessary timeframe. The matter has since been sent to the Maine Law Court to decide.
“Full operational control of the county jails would return to the county sheriffs in all but Lincoln and Sagadahoc counties” Aroostook County Sheriff Darrell Crandall said. “Budgets would be approved by the County Commissioners, which is a good thing.”
The Maine Legislature created the state Board of Corrections in 2008 to be the governing body of all the county jails in the state.
The Aroostook County Jail has been flat-funded at $3,165,599 for the past two years, even though that amount does not fully cover the costs of operations. Actual expenses for the year are closer to $4.2 million.
Further complicating things is the fact that Aroostook County operates on a calendar year budget, while the state goes on a fiscal cycle of July 1 to June 30.
“If the law courts say that LD 186 is law, it will allow the counties some latitude to increase their local (tax) revenue, which has not been the case since 2008,” Crandall said. “I can’t change what it costs to run that jail. I can’t just say I am going balance the budget by laying off guards. It doesn’t work like that.”
Crandall said the only way the County Jail’s budget could be reduced would be to close off sections of the facility, thus reducing the amount of inmates held there. He added all of the state’s sheriffs were in support of seeing control turned back to the respective counties.
Historically, the number of inmates incarcerated has gone up. Since its construction in 1889, the Aroostook County Jail has housed inmates who are either awaiting trials or sentencing or were involved in minor incidents. In February 2014, renovations to the jail expanded the number of inmates that could be held in Houlton.
Back in 1991, the Aroostook County Jail was rated for 66 prisoners. A year ago, it was rated for 86 inmates (up from 72 in 2013), and currently the jail’s capacity is 123 inmates. For the most part, inmates are either awaiting trial or to be sentenced.
For 2014, the average daily population of inmates at the ACJ was 88, with a low of 70 in January and a high of 100 in November.
In years past, about 75-80 percent of the inmates were sentenced and doing their time, while 25 percent were waiting to go to court. Today, those numbers have flipped as about 20-25 percent of the total population is serving their time after being sentenced, while the rest are waiting a court appearance. Compounding the problem, the length of stay for those pre-trial inmates is unusually long for inmates of the Aroostook County Jail.
