“It’s just no fun anymore,” Mark Westrum, administrator of the Two Bridges Regional Jail, said last week.

He was returning after being ill for some days, and found himself overwhelmed. No one was there to greet people coming to the jail, no one was answering telephones, no one was helping transition inmates from jail to productive lives on the outside. All those positions and more had been cut, and problems with the airflow system to the jail had just been identified that will cost thousands to replace.

“We found out the contractor that installed it used a product that was obsolete the year after it was installed, and the contractor went out of business, and it was years ago, and our attorney tells us not to waste our time trying to sue anybody,” he said. “And there’s no money in the budget for capital improvements, we’re cut to the bone as it is.”

The jail is still outwardly a beautiful facility, but inmates have fewer programs, some of which are geared to help them make better choices and have better options when they emerge from jail. And all of them, except a handful who are being held prior to trial and might be found guilty and sentenced to prison, will be leaving the jail, sooner or later, nearly all of them to the community that sent them — somewhere in Lincoln or Sagadahoc County.

“We’ve cut parenting classes, literacy classes, classes that help inmates earn a GED (general equivalency degree for a high school diploma), most job training, and I even had to let our chaplain go,” Westrum said. Luckily, there are volunteers who are meeting some of the need, but Westrum says that while they are invaluable, volunteers are no substitute for paid staff who could spend the hours necessary working to get inmates ready to enter the outside world.

The staffers who did that work have been cut. Of the two Department of Health and Human Services personnel who once helped inmates find a place to live, preferably away from the triggers that put them in jail in the first place, both have been cut because of DHHS cuts, and the one jail employee trying to do some of that work is half-time. Westrum is trying to pick up the slack, but he is also answering phones and doorbells, and trying to administer a jail that has had its budget slashed to the bone.

“I never wanted to be in charge of a warehouse for human beings,” he said. “But that’s what’s going on here. And now I spend every day just trying to get through the day.”

How did it get to this point?

The early days of a regional jail

Before Two Bridges was built, Sagadahoc didn’t have a county jail, and Lincoln County had a small jail in the basement of the Sheriff’s Office. It became imperative that the counties construct new jails or be faced with no place to put their inmates, and the two counties decided, in late 2003, to take the first tentative steps to create a regional jail. The next year, the commissioners of the two counties agreed, creating a board of directors. The two counties bonded for the jail's construction, and Two Bridges Regional Jail was built over the next couple of years, opening in November 2006.

For the first couple of years, the two counties paid for the jail's operation through property taxes, based on the percentage of inmates each county contributed, which, according to Todd Brackett, sheriff of Lincoln County, was something like 52 percent from Lincoln County to 48 percent from Sagadahoc, with the amount fluctuating every year based on average population, although not without dispute. Lincoln and Sagadahoc argued about the formula, and in 2010, came close to a lawsuit. The jail also accepted some inmates from counties with overcrowded jails, based on a per-night boarding fee, and soon, longer-term state inmates.

The state inmates were allowed to serve their sentences in the county jails if they had no more than six months to their sentences. As the state prisons filled up with many minor offenses, the county jails were asked to take on sentences of up to nine months, in consideration of a fee, which became codified as the Community Corrections Act, or CCA. The state pumped in the difference for inmates held beyond six months at the county jails, but often, an inmate was sentenced to consecutive sentences. Instead of one 18-month sentence, for instance, the inmate had two nine month sentences, and the two counties had to pay for the first six months of each sentence. This placed a hardship on the facility, and was never fully appreciated by the state, or paid for by the CCA.

Until 2008, this was how the funding for Two Bridges and other county jails was pieced together.

Room ... and board

When TBRJ was first built, the state of Maine was considering sending prisoners to other states at the rate of $60 to $70 per day.  Those prisoners would have been housed elsewhere in the Northeast or the Midwest, but the Maine Legislature put a stop to the idea very quickly, objecting to both the cost and the distance of keeping prisoners in out-of-state facilities.

The idea of a boarding fee, however, survived for a time, even though the actual cost of housing a prisoner at Two Bridges is somewhat higher than that. Still, it was a price TBRJ could have lived with, and the Authority was actively considering taking on some of the 200 or so long-term state prisoners that were considered part of the overcrowding problem at Warren in 2007. 

In 2008, the Board of Corrections was formed to try to consolidate jails under a state authority, give the counties control over a portion of their budget, and cap property taxes that could be raised for jail operations. Recognizing that this would create a hardship, the Legislature granted the counties $2.4 million to make up what they expected to be the difference, but that fund really never kept pace with costs, Westrum said.

The jails were also given control over 30 percent of their budgets under the BOC model, and according to Scott Ferguson, service center director at the Department of Corrections, the 30 percent they had control over were things they really couldn’t control. “They had control over commodities, essentially,” he said. “It is not helpful to be able to control the part of the budget that pays for food and fuel if you can’t control how much those costs rise.”

Brackett and Westrum, who was sheriff of Sagadahoc County at the time, disagreed on whether consolidation was a good idea back in 2007. Westrum was opposed to jail consolidation, fearing that the work he had pioneered in jail diversion and support for offenders trying to readjust to the community would be a casualty of the process. Brackett, on the other hand, thought the idea had merit and could provide the jail with much needed revenue.

“We couldn’t afford local control then, and we can’t now,” says Brackett. “Consolidation made sense in theory. But the costs are just too high for every little town and every county to go it alone. We can see the result at the jail. We have empty beds, but we have to keep staff levels up in all the pods. Our problem is that the state has never really paid its fair share of the costs of consolidation.”

Westrum’s view of consolidation is different. “We gave away control of the jails — not just the money, but the type of prisoners we have to accept (from the state) and the level of need those prisoners have,” he said. “We can’t do diversion programs anymore, we don’t have the staff for it, and the organization that has the state’s contract for diversion doesn’t have the same kind of expertise that our previous partner had. It’s hard to find places for inmates to go when they get out without the state’s help, and we aren’t allowed to raise the funds to do it ourselves.”

At the height of the financial collapse, property tax revenues in both counties declined generally. But the cost to keep the jail open increased, and population also increased in the jails. The cost of fuel rose significantly during the same period.

Westrum said that the property tax cap has decreased the county jails’ operating budget dramatically, and the promised state makeup — when it arrives — has been nowhere near what is necessary to replace the funding. “Property taxes are capped at about $61.5 million, and the real cost to operate jail facilities in 2016 is about $83 million,” he said.

The state simply failed to pay the funds in the second year of the deal, and cut Two Bridges out of the fund afterward, Westrum said. It also paid late, into the next fiscal year, and when Westrum tried to plan for those late payments by not spending every dime, he said he found his budget cut for the next fiscal year.

Two Bridges was preparing to accept prison inmates under the consolidation plan, but in 2008, the jail authorities were summoned to the Department of Corrections and were told that they would be paid the marginal rate, that is, the cost between what it cost to keep the jail open — heating, lighting, staffing, and so on — and the cost to have a particular inmate there. According to Ferguson, the marginal cost to house an inmate or state prisoner, assuming they were well and in no need of medical care, was $22.96 per day, mostly food, clothing, and medicine.

Brackett said that TBRJ cannot do the job for that. In the first place, the prisoners they were housing were far from well. Many had substance abuse and mental health issues that had to be actively managed, and the Jail did not have the staff for it. “We’re getting difficult prisoners,” he said. “They’re not quiet, obedient people. The prisons haven’t been sending us model prisoners who can fit well within a county jail. They need more supervision, more services, and are used to different levels of programming than we can offer them here.”

Westrum pointed out that the funding model for the jail always included inmates from other facilities, and that the baseline costs took into account the use of TBRJ to do that work. “We planned to be a flagship jail, and our budgets reflected that,” he said.  By this he meant that the costs for electricity, heating, staffing, and programming assumed a certain number of overflow inmates from either the state prison or county jails. “Overcrowding in those facilities wasn’t going to go away,” he said. “We knew there would be a market for what we could provide, and we budgeted accordingly.”

That was thrown to the winds by the decree that only the marginal costs would be covered, and TBRJ began to decline to accept inmates from other facilities if they weren’t going to be paid for at a reasonable rate.

“It would have been unfair for our taxpayers to pick up the costs for these other inmates,” Westrum said.

Through this period, the jail was functioning by the nearly flat property taxes, now 50-50 between the two counties, and a new contract for about $900,000 with Waldo County that boards its inmates in the jail, as well as the occasional federal prisoner. Waldo County takes the state match it receives and sends it to Two Bridges.

According to Ferguson and Brackett, Waldo has no true jail of its own. It has a facility that operates like a halfway house to step down prison inmates who are preparing to be released. No jail inmates are served there because no jails are sending their inmates to Waldo County. Instead, each jail is trying to provide services to its own inmates with varying levels of success.

Ferguson said that the Waldo contract is technically illegal under Public Law 335, which ended jail consolidation, although the state has no plans to shut it down.

The law’s section on reimbursement states: “During a state fiscal year in which at least $12,202,104 has been appropriated to the County Jail Operations Fund and disbursements have been made equal to that amount to the counties as required by Title 34-A, section 1210-D, the receiving jail or the department may not charge the sending jail a per diem rate for the transferred prisoner.”

Because the jails are appropriated at that level, it is beyond the technical letter of the law to transfer funds from one jail to another. But that is not how two of the members of the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, which crafted and passed the law, see it.

“As I understand it, county jails are making arrangements all the time,” Rep. Lori Fowle  (D-Vassalboro), chairman of the committee, said in a phone interview on Feb. 22. “I believe there is something in the law that clarifies how much each county can charge.”

In fact, the law does not permit any per diem rate unless the appropriation drops below the approximately $12.2 million level.  “I know I’ve got to go down and talk to Mark Westrum,” she said. “We had a meeting scheduled for right after the first of the year, but one of us was ill and we didn’t keep the appointment.”

Fowle believes the law allows for per diem funding for receiving jails. “I think the real issue is that most of the jails can’t afford to send inmates, but the dollars are supposed to follow the inmates, not stay with the sending jail.”

Sen. Stan Gerzofsky (D-Brunswick) was even more blunt.

“The counties wanted the right to do whatever they wanted,” he said on Feb. 22. “This law reverses consolidation and gives them the right to do whatever they want.  They can charge whatever they want. They can raise property taxes, They can do whatever they want. Personally, I don’t think the state should be paying for the jails at all. They wanted independence, this law gives them independence.  I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the counties.  They killed the goose, and now there are no golden eggs left.”

In fact, there is also a limit to what counties are permitted to raise from taxpayers for the jails. In Lincoln and Sagadahoc counties, this sum is $2,657,105 per county, per Section 2-C in PL 335.

While jails were permitted to send their overflow inmates to other jails and pay to house them, most needed their portion of the $2.4 million to keep their own lights on, and instead, lived with severe overcrowding rather than pay to house their prisoners at jails with space. For the most part, Two Bridges was underutilized, while other jails — notably Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot — were beyond overcrowded. The overcrowding is contributing to dangerous conditions that may result in the loss of the jails’ accreditation, Brackett warned. For instance, there have been several suicides and suicide attempts at Kennebec County Jail and other overcrowded facilities, including a female suicide victim in January and a male suicide victim in December. 

Cost sharing?

In the winter of 2015, Gov. Paul LePage did not appoint anyone to the Board of Corrections. It lost its quorum, and stopped meeting. That summer, the Legislature did away with jail consolidation, effectively ending the need for the Board of Corrections, although it was still technically an organization until this month. The legislation, Public Law 335, forbade counties from charging one another for boarding inmates, effectively ending the practice, which had been limping along with the state’s $2.4 million stipend. It also did away with the Community Corrections Act funds, rolling them into one state payment of $14.6 million, which was knocked down to $12.2 million for lack of funds.

Looking at the taxpayer funds, and the total cost to run the jails, there is a difference of $21 million, which the state had been going to pick up.  It’s picking up only about $12.2 million, leaving a funding gap of $9.3 million.

According to Brackett, local taxpayers are supposed to pick up about 74 percent of the cost of local county jails, with the state paying about 26 percent. In reality, however, local taxpayers are picking up about 85 percent of the costs of the jails, with the state paying only about 15 percent. That’s a much wider ratio than in other states, according to the Institute of Corrections. Virginia, for instance, pays about 40 percent of the costs of county jails, with 60 percent being picked up by local taxpayers. Scott Ferguson said that the cost increases the counties incurred during the consolidation experiment led to the decrease in state funding.

“The cost of the county jails was increasing about nine percent per year,” he said. “The state was picking up what the counties couldn’t raise because of the property tax cap, so it became a serious issue.” The property tax cap limited the counties to raising property taxes no more than two percent for jail operations, in exchange for the state picking up the balance. “But some of the jails — not all — saw that as free money from the state. People were getting three-percent raises, when no one else in the state had had a raise in five years.”

While Ferguson believed the Board of Corrections was in general a good idea, he said the counties spent too much time arguing about money and not enough dealing with the issues that the jails had in common.

He also said that Two Bridges needs to spend more time at public hearings when jail issues come up. “The Legislature needs to see them at the hearings, and listen to Two Bridges’ needs and concerns,” he said. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

All the parties agree that the sending jails — those jails with overcrowding issues — got the attention of the Legislature, while the receiving jails, mostly TBRJ and Cumberland County, weren’t getting their message across.  No one is “sending” inmates now, since PL 335 prohibits the jails charging one another for boarding costs.

Ferguson thinks the counties would be better off lifting the property tax cap and setting a single, flat contribution from the state. “I think what happened was that the costs were escalating and the Legislature took them all to rock-bottom funding,” he said. “It needs to rise for all the jails because what’s happening right now isn’t in anybody’s best interest.”

The sense that the state should be paying more for local jail costs is something that all three men can agree on, even if they do not agree how to solve the problem.

“I am not convinced that the state is paying its fair share of the costs,” Brackett said. “But the counties had a hand in this, too.”

“Two Bridges is a disaster in the making,” Westrum said. “The state needs to pay more than it’s paying right now, and it needs to pay on time.”