By Jacob Fischler
The Monitor
HIDALGO COUNTY, Texas — When the Hidalgo County Jail reaches its capacity, a private jail company picks up the inmates who won’t fit in the public facility and brings them to one of two privately run jails, at a cost to Hidalgo County of $45 per inmate per day.
Between April 2011 — the first month LCS Corrections Services, the private prison company, began charging the county at the $45 rate — and January 2014, the county spent an average of about $212,000 per month to outsource its inmates, according to a Monitor analysis of jail documents. Next month, that rate could go up by more than 20 percent, as LCS and Hidalgo County renegotiate the contract that expires March 31.
LCS’s opening bid in negotiations came in at $55 per inmate per day, a reflection of increasing costs in the industry, said Richard Harbison, the company’s executive vice president.
“It’s basically, the cost of housing inmates is going up dramatically,” he said, citing rising costs of utilities, food and labor.
Rather than paying a company to house inmates for the county, though, Sheriff Lupe Treviño has another idea: Expand the public jail.
“We need something that we can move on right now, because it’s costing the people of this county a bunch of money every year,” he said. “There’s a solution to it. The question is: Do we really want to bite the bullet and do what we want to do?”
Full story: Sheriff: Expand jail instead of paying to outsource prisoners