The Warren County Jail is more than full, the facility almost always is over its intended capacity, Sheriff Kevin Harrison said.With a recent spike in jail population, the sheriff and Warren County officials are saddled with a facility and a budget that were not designed for their current load.The county jail was built in 1997 to hold 106 inmates, but the average daily population rose to 127 in 2016, Harrison said.The inmates are a mix of local arrests, out-of-county fugitives and prisoners held on federal contracts. Housing so many makes space crowded, requiring the use of portable beds and group housing, Harrison said.The crowding comes from a spike in the number of local inmates, he explained. Between 2010 and 2015, the highest daily average of local inmates in a year was 67. That number was 80 in 2016, he said.So far in 2017, the daily average of locals is 93 inmates.Having more local inmates puts the jail in a double crunch — the space gets more crowded, and the county can’t accept as many federal prisoners.That’s a problem, because the U.S. Marshals service has a contract that pays Warren County to hold inmates while they await federal trial, Harrison said.Those federal dollars have become a major source of income for the jail.“If we said today that we’re going to stop holding federal inmates, we have a $692,400 deficit in our jail budget,” he said. Having fewer inmates to care for wouldn’t make up for the lost federal funding, he said. It wouldn’t reduce the amount of staff in the jail, either — staffing numbers are as efficient as they can safely be, Harrison said.Officials attribute a higher proportion of violent offenses and a lengthy judicial process to the jail’s population increase.Harrison said they have tried to find inmates they can recommend for bond reductions to get more out of the jail, but that the prisoners not posting bond are the ones who pose the most threat. They include people accused of repeated violent crimes, homicide and child sex charges, Harrison said.“There’s a public safety issue,” he said. “Those people are in jail because they need to be in jail.”Without paying bond, those inmates can and do spend more than two years in jail while they await trial. There were three inmates booked in 2014 and 11 inmates booked in 2015 who still reside in the Warren County Jail.

What’s the cost?

Unless you’ve been a victim or otherwise touched by a criminal case, operating the county jail is a mostly invisible service. That doesn’t make it cost any less, with an operational budget of $1.4 million.That included $238,000 just to feed inmates in 2016, and more than $85,000 spent on inmate medical expenses that year.Other than payments for holding federal prisoners, the sheriff’s department is funded in large part by a dedicated sales tax.Those revenue streams are predicted to total $2.9 million in 2017. But the sheriff’s department also has to keep up with patrols and law enforcement, costing about $2 million, leaving a hole in the budget that needs to be filled. That funding gap isn’t unusual, officials said.“There’s no way you can run a jail off the amount of sales tax revenue the sheriff brings in,” said Warren County Commissioner Hubie Kluesner.That’s why the county typically allocates additional money from its general revenue fund to supplement law enforcement.The county will transfer $400,000 into the law enforcement fund this year (down from $450,000 in 2016). Until recent years, that would have been enough to keep the sheriff department’s budget in the black, but the situation at the jail has officials worried.Kluesner said he expects an increasing amount of county revenue will be used to cover that gap.The county commission is reluctant to cut the budgets of other government offices to free funding for the jail. But commissioners also don’t want to reduce the sheriff department’s budget and risk hurting vital law enforcement services.It’s a tricky position to be in, but commissioners said something has to change.The best case scenario is that growth in the county will boost sales tax revenue, offsetting the cost of jail funding. But if push comes to shove, the commission and the sheriff will have to find ways to cut spending, Kluesner said.The process of setting the sheriff department’s budget is a cooperation between the county commission and the sheriff, Presiding Commissioner Robert Mauzy said. They will have to work in conjunction to decide a course of action.Commissioners floated a couple of other long-term solutions to the jail’s budget woes. Another half-cent sales tax would cover the funding gap, but Kluesner said that might not be a popular option.Mauzy said he supports the idea of a multi-jurisdictional jail — a privately run, 600- to 700-bed facility funded by multiple county governments. It would make jailing less expensive based on an economy of scale, but would be extremely expensive to build and require broad cooperation, he said.Sheriff Harrison said he prefers and is examining options that work within the county’s existing budget. First on the list is a planned feasibility study on whether the sheriff’s department can be entirely renovated to put more of the jail on the main floor of the Warren County Courthouse.The jail is split between two floors, with inmate housing requiring a minimum number of staff on each, Harrison said. If most of the inmates could be housed on a single level, that would allow for more efficient staffing, he said. Ideally, that move also would increase capacity and allow the county to keep accepting federal inmates.A renovation would mean relocating the sheriff department’s administrative offices, which share a floor with the jail’s lower level.Harrison said he plans to have architects visit within the next month to examine the space, and that he looks forward to what they have to say.

Warren County Sheriff Kevin Harrison explains the purpose of different cells in the Warren County Jail. A spike in local inmates is straining the jail's budget and space. Record photo/ Adam Rollins.