ELKHART — County government officials Friday learned a significant funding boost could be headed to the county related to an expected influx of Marion County inmates to the Elkhart County Correctional Facility.
The announcement came during the annual Elkhart County Leadership Summit in Elkhart. During the meeting, Elkhart County Sheriff Brad Rogers provided attendees with an update on the current overpopulation issues at the Marion County Jail and how that issue could benefit the county financially.
According to Rogers, Marion County’s jail is currently overcrowded and under federal mandate to reduce their inmate population. As such, the county will be transferring as many as 50 of its inmates to Elkhart County as soon as next Tuesday. That number would be on top of the 91 inmates the county currently houses for Marion County.
“And all of those inmates will be Level 6 felony inmates, so your lower level felonies,” Rogers said. Examples of Level 6 felonies include prostitution, theft and resisting law enforcement.
Rogers noted that the county will be charging Marion County $40 a day per inmate, while the cost to the county for housing those inmates comes to about $3 a day per inmate on average.
“So at 141 inmates, with the number of days we have left this year, we’re looking at about an additional $1.3 million in revenue for this year, and then another $2 million annually after that,” Rogers said.
What’s more, Rogers said Marion County plans on continuing to feed inmates to Elkhart County for the foreseeable future as the need arises. He cited Elkhart County’s convenient location relative to Marion County and the plentiful bed availability at the county’s correctional facility as the main reasons for Marion County’s decision to go exclusively with Elkhart County, rather than disperse smaller groups of inmates to multiple facilities around the state.
“No other jail in Indiana has open beds like we do,” Rogers said. “So by next week we should have 141 Marion County inmates, and it appears more could still be coming.”
Looking at the county’s current inmate population, which has settled at around 730 inmates, Rogers said he believes the county could accept a total of 250 Marion County inmates and still retain enough available bed space to handle any Elkhart County inmates.
“So that’s another $3.6 million a year that would be coming in,” Rogers said.
He noted that the jail’s current capacity is around 1,000 inmates, though his goal is to keep the population at or around 850.
"When we get up there around 850 inmates at the jail total, it starts to work on our flexibility of classification,” he said. “So we really don’t want to go over that, because we don’t know how many will be coming in for us locally.”
Elkhart County Councilman Dave Foutz praised the announcement, noting that for all intents and purposes, it does not appear that Marion County has any immediate plans to expand its existing correctional facility.
“The reality of this is, this is a brick and mortar problem that we could be talking about years to turn around, and there isn’t any strong support in Marion County to run out and build something,” Foutz said. “So this could bode well for us.”