By Kyle Wind
The Times-Tribune
SCRANTON, Pa. — Among Lackawanna County Prison’s surging inmate population, many of the same faces reappear.
The criminal justice community has been working on ways to reverse the costly trend. Discussions so far have focused on topics like access to mental health and drug treatment services, easing the transition from jail to home and imprisoning fewer people awaiting hearings.
Now, the county prison is preparing an application to the MacArthur Foundation to fund a $150,000, six-month study on ways to jail fewer nonviolent offenders and draw on national experts to examine potential reforms.
“It would bring it all under one umbrella and coordinate a study of all of those things we’ve been talking about,” Judge Vito Geroulo said Tuesday.
Including state and federal inmates, Lackawanna County Prison typically houses around 1,000 inmates at a time. The number of inmates from Lackawanna County increased from about 500 in 2011 to more than 700 now, Warden Robert McMillan said.
Meanwhile, prisoners who left the jail over the past three years have a 54 percent return rate, said Len Bogart, president of the re-entry task force, who is preparing the grant application with Joseph Rogan, Ed.D., a Misericordia University professor.
Housing inmates normally costs $58 to $62 per day. Mentally ill prisoners or inmates with medical problems can be more expensive. Meanwhile, the county struggles with jail overtime costs, budgeting $1.89 million for the expense this year.
The MacArthur Foundation is interested in a variety of strategies, including booking procedures, shortened jail stays, and policing practices to limit unnecessary custodial arrests.
“While the primary purpose of local jails is to detain those awaiting court proceedings who are a danger to public safety or a flight risk, they have come to hold many who are neither,” the nonprofit’s grant description states. “Jails too often serve as warehouses for low-risk individuals too poor to post bail or too sick for existing community resources to manage.”
Mr. Bogart expected the competition for the grant to be intense, with 20 available for the entire country. Another 10 grants between $1 million and $4 million over two years will be available to put plans developed from the first grant into practice. If Lackawanna County qualifies, prison officials will keep an open mind.
“If you don’t look to improve, everything will pass you by,” Mr. Bogart said. “You can’t be afraid to change. You have to try new things once in a while.”