Real Change News | Cost of incarceration goes up

March 10, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 11

News

Cost of incarceration goes up

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

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It costs a lot to jail the mentally ill. Just ask the folks at the King County Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention. They’ve come up with a new list of daily jail rates, as it were, that shows just how much – an increase that’s going to cost Seattle an extra $663,000 a year under a new contract that the City Council is close to approving.

Seattle and other cities contract with the county for jail beds that the county had said would no longer be available to them after 2012. That started the ball rolling a few years ago on controversial plans to build two new municipal jails, with Seattle and the northeast cities planning one and a group of cities in south King county already building another that’s set to open in 2012.

After civil rights activists questioned the need for more jails, pointing out that the county’s jail population has actually declined in recent years thanks to jail diversion services, King County agreed last year to extend the jail-bed contract for Seattle and the northeast cities past its 2012 expiration. A bill that the City Council’s Public Safety Committee plans to vote on next week would take the contract through 2016, a year more than first planned, and guarantee 330 beds a year to Seattle and the northeast cities through 2013 and 250 beds through 2016.

The numbers drop, says the Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention’s Maj. William Hayes, because the jail projections show the county itself will need more beds as the area’s population rises. But in the new contract, the county is doing something it hasn’t before: passing on the actual cost of incarcerating the sick or mentally ill to the cities, rather than eating the cost as it did in the past.

The cities tend to bring the special-needs inmates to the county jail, says Catherine Cornwall, a policy analyst with the city’s Budget Office, because it has the facilities to handle them. That includes a psychiatric unit often called out by activists and elected officials as one of the largest de facto mental hospitals in the state. But where the county once charged the cities a flat rate of $122 a day for any inmate regardless of his or her condition, the new rate schedule in Seattle Council Bill 116769 shows that an inmate in need of psychiatric care will cost the city $172 a day in the future – or $326 a day for more acute cases. Someone in need of medical care, by contrast, will cost the city $267 a day or as much as $1,319 if round-the-clock observation is needed.

Some of the rates go down as well – for instance, the regular daily rate would be $106 or just $79 for a work-release inmate. But the county is also upping its booking fee, from $234 an inmate to $289, which adds another $603,000 a year to city’s tab. Altogether, the new total for Seattle under the contract is $13.8 million a year – $1.3 million more than the city is paying the county for jail beds now.

The Public Safety Committee is scheduled to vote on the jail contract extension at a March 17 meeting scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m. in Council Chambers at City Hall, 600 Fourth Ave., Seattle.

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