Ada County wants state of Idaho held in contempt. Here’s why

As we work every day to make sure Ada County is a safe place to live, work and play, we know we can’t do it alone. That’s why our agency works so closely with neighboring law enforcement and government agencies to ensure we are doing the best possible job for our citizens.

That’s also why it’s so difficult for us to take the extraordinary step of taking the Idaho Department of Correction to court to get them to stop warehousing their inmates in the Ada County Jail.

We simply don’t have a choice at this point. The Ada County Jail has 1,116 beds, and we’ve been right up to the edge of our capacity for several years now. Jails should be at 85% capacity or less to ensure staff can manage the population at peak efficiency and safety. So we should have 949 inmates or less to be fully safe.

We’ve had only 22 days since January 2017 where we’ve been under 949 — and one of the main reasons is the vast number of Department of Correction inmates who sit in our jail when they should be in a Department of Correction facility.

For instance, our jail population today is 1,047, with 346 of those inmates belonging to the Department of Correction either as being recently sentenced to Department of Correction custody or on a parole violation. That is 33% of our total population!

We also know many of those inmates have other pending criminal cases in Ada County, and there are some competing arguments on if we should keep those inmates until the cases are resolved or if they should go back to a Department of Correction facility. That discussion is for another day.

What we need to talk about today are the inmates who have received a judgment of conviction and have no other charges. That means they have been through the court process and found guilty of a crime and sentenced to prison. At that point, they are Department of Correction inmates. Yet they remain in our jail for weeks at a time instead of going to a Department of Correction facility.

It’s a classic tax shift, where the residents of Ada County are paying for the housing and care of the Department of Correction’s prisoners.

Former Ada County Sheriff Vaughn Killeen had to deal with the exact same issue in the late 1980s. He sued the Department of Correction in 1990, and 4th District Judge Duff McKee agreed. McKee ordered that the Department of Correction must pick up its inmates in seven days. The department appealed that decision to the Idaho Supreme Court, which upheld McKee’s order in 1991. The problem has never really gone away and has gotten worse over the last few years.

For instance, on Dec. 5, we had 71 judgment-of-conviction inmates who have been in our custody longer than seven days and 11 more who have a judgment of conviction but have been with us fewer than seven days. That means 82 inmates are just waiting for the Department of Correction to get them.

The Department of Correction’s practice of warehousing inmates at the Ada County Jail puts a financial burden on Ada County’s taxpayers. The average cost per inmate in fiscal 2019 was $102.36 a day. The Department of Correction pays us $55 per day for each inmate for the first seven days, then $75 per day for every day in custody after that. Ada County taxpayers are subsidizing the Department of Correction. It’s just not fair.

So we are seeking relief. We are asking the court to find the Department of Correction in contempt of the 1991 order. We are asking the court to fine the Department of Correction $250 per inmate, per day, for every day a judgment-of-conviction prisoner sits in our jail after seven days.

This is not something we wanted to do. We’ve been talking with Department of Correction officials for years about this issue. Promises have been made, but nothing changes, while our jail population reaches critical mass.

We realize the Department of Correction desperately needs more beds for its prisoners and more resources to help it manage its prisoners when they are released back into our communities. We empathize with their plight. However, it is not the financial responsibility of Ada County’s taxpayers. It is the state of Idaho’s responsibility.