Federal prisoners to fund jail
BY PAM BRANNON Gulf Breeze News news@gulfbreezenews.com

It looks like federal prisoners will be the ones to fund the new Santa Rosa County jail expansion project. Sheriff Wendall Hall gave a detailed breakdown of the numbers that he and his staff came up with to county commissioners last week showing cost of the new jail addition, expenses of housing the federal prisoners, and how much profit can honestly be gleaned from the federal prisoner housing program over the next five years. It is more than enough to pay for the building, even with the most conservative estimates, Hall said.

Hall has told the commissioner many times that his jail is experiencing continued overcrowding, causing the need for a jail addition. Last week he showed them some figures on paper of how the inmate population has kept increasing over the past several years. "In 2006 the aver- age daily inmate population for the year was right at 417, and for 2007 it went up to 519. We are supposed to stay right at 500. For the entire year of 2007 we had 8,800 inmates booked into the Santa Rosa County jail. For this year, if the pace keeps up as it is so far, we are projecting we will hit just over 9,150 inmates for the year," Hall said.

"From 2004 to 2007 we had a 46 percent increase in bookings into the county jail," Hall explained.

Right now the county jail is housing 50 federal inmates a day. The county currently receives $49 a day for each federal inmate it houses, Hall said. "When we get the jail addition, we would go up to 100 federal inmates the first year. Then we looked a the numbers considering a decrease each year for five years of 10 federal inmates a year, so at the end of five years we would be back to only 50 federal prisoners being housed here. That is because if the local population continues to grow as it has in the past, we would not have room for 100 federal inmates. However, if we can do some other things about local overcrowding, like more use of GPS monitors, we might be able to still house more federal inmates. That would of course help with the cost of the jail addition."

With the concept of cutting back 10 federal prisoners a year, Hall still projects raising just over $7.15 million over that five year period from federal inmate housing. "Then, after taking into consideration the start up costs of the building, and the expenses such as food and maintenance, etc as well as interest, we have come up with a profit over that five year period of a little more than $3.6 million," Hall said.

County Commissioner John Broxson of Gulf Breeze asked county administrator Hunter Walker if the staff had looked at these numbers and were the architectural firms that the county staff had met with about ready to sign any contracts. Walker said, "The sheriff and his staff have worked the numbers very conservatively and very well. We agree with their numbers. But I do not believe any of the construction management companies or architectural firms that we have talked with are to the point of presenting possible contracts yet for a jail pod.

Broxson asked the sheriff if his office had considered having some inmates pay for their inmate costs, as other counties across the country are doing these days. Hall said, "We have started doing some of that. When an inmate puts money into their account at the jail, we take whatever they owe us right off the top. We charge them for booking fees, and for meals. But there are always those indigent inmates who have no money and we have to provide the same services for them as anyone else."

Hall said he expects the fee for inmate housing to go up, also, over the next few years. He pointed out that the fee used to be $37.50 a day for housing federal inmates, and it has gone up to $49 a day.