The Daviess County Detention Center’s per diem rate for housing federal prisoners was recently increased in a new agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice.
The new rate of $70 per prisoner per day — up from $55 — is estimated to bring in an additional $300,000 to $400,000 in revenue for DCDC, according to County Treasurer Jordan Johnson. The new per diem rate is retroactive to July 1, 2023.
“So that’s exciting news for the county,” Jailer Art Maglinger said. “It definitely was higher than it was at the end of the last fiscal year.”
In addition to reimbursements for federal inmates, Maglinger said the jail receives $35.34 per day per state inmate.
While bringing in more state and federal inmates may sound like a better financial move as they accrue more reimbursements, Maglinger said that is not possible due to the overcrowding and rapid growth in county inmates.
Maglinger recently said there were 64 federal and 200 state inmates at DCDC, compared to 370 county inmates.
“The county inmates are the ones that we do collect fees for, but we don’t really get reimbursed, so to speak,” Maglinger said. “So because a lot of those guys go to prison or they never pay their debt, sometimes there are about $400,000 a year in our budget that is collected from inmate fees from county inmates, and that’s the majority of our inmates.”
Maglinger said DCDC is one of the state’s most populated county inmate detention centers. The overcrowding is predominantly due to the backlog in completing cases due to the pandemic, Maglinger said.
“Just one example, we have one here who has been here 900-and-something days awaiting trial, and his trial was just reset to spring. So he will have been here over 1,000 days — which is close to 3 years — before he even goes to trial,” he said.
Maglinger said he is trying to work with the judicial system to speed up some cases.
“It’s an expensive operation that’s even become more expensive in the last couple of years with inflation and the price of things going up. That’s what the challenges of a jail are if you look at it just from a fiscal perspective because the expenses are always going up every year, and there are stagnant revenues,” he said.
With all this in mind, Maglinger said that an expansion needs to be on the table. He said that Building 1 at DCDC was built in 2000 and, over the 23 years, has seen some wear and tear. He doesn’t think it can last another 20.
“I think that, definitely, an expansion could be a consideration of the county,” he said. “It’s just our county inmate numbers are growing so rapidly that we can’t really keep up in our facilities.”
