New county mini-jail will bring inmates back to Wichita, save taxpayers money

Sedgwick County will be building a new mini-jail next year to bring inmates back to Wichita and save taxpayers as much as $1 million a year.

The new jail, to be called the “jail annex,” will be developed at the current site of the sheriff’s work-release program, 701 W. Harry.

When completed, it will hold about 180-197 regular jail inmates, said Sheriff Jeff Easter.

The plan will allow the sheriff’s office to bring back inmates who are now being housed in space rented from other counties at great expense, Easter said.

The plan was approved by the County Commission last week after presentations from Easter and Glenda Martens, director of the county’s Department of Corrections.

“We were really talking about the reality of what was happening with the overcrowding in the jail and we came up with this proposal,” Martens said.

The main jail, next to the county courthouse dowtown, is filled to capacity and the sheriff’s office now has to farm out about 260 inmates to neighboring counties that have spare jail space available, Easter said.

That costs the county about $9,100 a day, 365 days a year, he said.

The proposed change won’t completely solve the problem, but will cut it to about 70 inmates housed out of county and reduce the cost to about $2,400 a day, Easter said.

Remodeling the facilities will cost about $1 million up front. That money will come from savings in the sheriff’s office budget this year, Easter said.

He said the changes should save the county about $800,000 to $1 million a year, so the project should pay for itself by the end of 2019.

The plan to free up the Harry Street facility for the new jail is complicated and involves shifting some inmates from sheriff’s custody to Corrections, the county’s probation office.

Corrections will take over the work-release program, which is now run by the sheriff’s office. Offenders in that program spend their nights in custody, but are allowed out during the day to go to jobs in the community.

Following the move, work-release will be housed in the same facility at 623 E. Elm as the Corrections Department’s Residential Facility, a program that provides housing, monitoring and treatment to help offenders transition back into society.

Here’s how the plan will work:

Step 1: The county transfers control of the work-release program from the Sheriff’s Office to the Corrections Department.

Step 2: Corrections remodels its 65-bed residential center on Elm Street to accommodate an additional 100 work-release inmates.

Step 3: Inmates are moved from the sheriff’s work-release center on Harry Street to Corrections’ Elm Street facility.

Step 4: The Sheriff’s office remodels the Harry Street facility to increase security and create the jail annex.

Step 5: Inmates will be brought back from rented jail space in other counties, and confined at the jail annex instead.

Easter said it doesn’t worry him to cede control of work-release, because the inmates aren’t hard-core criminals and almost all of them would eventually come under probation office supervision anyway.

Another benefit is that the work release inmates will have access to job counseling and treatment services at the Corrections facility that they don’t have now, he said.

“Currently, with our setup, we basically monitor if they went to work or not, if they went out and applied,” Easter said. “There’s really no services we provide.”

Access to those services is expected to reduce the number of work-release inmates who commit new crimes after they’re released, he said.

The Elm Street facility has room to accommodate the work-release inmates because the state eliminated funding that used to pay for a youth correctional program at the site.

The changes should all be in place by about August of next year.

The County Commission gave an enthusiastic green light to the plan.

Commission Chairman David Unruh called it “a creative approach to utilizing our resources to our advantage and at the same time providing better, more responsible services to those who are detained.”

“The idea that we’re going to move these folks on work release to a new location and then provide services that will help them become better citizens and reduce recidivism is creative, the right thing to do,” he said.

This story was originally published December 23, 2017 at 3:38 PM with the headline "New county mini-jail will bring inmates back to Wichita, save taxpayers money."