By Bill Dolan
The Times, Munster
CROWN POINT — The Lake County jail staff is working overtime.
Sheriff John Buncich said last week he will be asking the County Council in the near future to reimburse corrections officers for a significant amount of back pay accumulating in recent weeks.
“I don’t know the figure. Our accountant is working on that at the moment,” Buncich said.
County records indicate jail overtime cost the public $600,000 in 2011, $883,000 in 2012 and $1,145,000 last year.
This year’s total will only add to the more than $24 million the jail cost taxpayers annually. It amounts to about a quarter of county government’s entire spending.
State law mandates the county operate a jail. The county signed a 2009 agreement with the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice committing the county to providing guaranteed levels of medical and mental health services to an inmate population often suffering from ill health.
The sheriff said a rising jail population, which was in the mid 700s last month, and extensive training requirements by the justice department account for much of the overtime now facing officials.
He said the justice department requires corrections officers to be trained to protect inmate-on-inmate violence, fire prevention, suicide prevention as well how much force corrections officers can use to make inmates comply.
Lake County Councilman Eldon Strong, R-Crown Point, blames a work schedule that generated more days off for the county’s 197 corrections officers and more overtime for those who work those days off.
Strong said the sheriff is returning the corrections officers next month to a 12-hour shift structure that potentially could reduce overtime.
The council also hopes to reduce overtime by adding 24 more corrections officers to the staff.
However, they found the money to hire more officers by closing the sheriff’s minimum-security work-release center, which housed dozens of minor offenders.
Buncich warned last month closing the work-release center and a new law requiring convicts normally sent to state prisons for short sentences to be kept at county lockups will only boost the jail’s population and its operational costs.