Inmates who have been sentenced to serve time in the Marshall County Jail may be moved to the Elkhart County Jail in the near future to alleviate the overcrowding issue.
During Monday’s County Commissioner meeting, Sheriff Matt Hassel said they reached an all-time-record-high on Friday with 282 inmates. Monday morning that number was down to 278. The sheriff said they only had two mattresses left on Friday so they had to purchased ten more to make sure the weekend arrests had someplace to lie down.
He then asked the commissioners if they had signed the intergovernmental agreement with Elkhart County to house overflow inmates from our county jail into theirs. The agreement calls for Marshall County to pay them $40 per day per inmate for the services provided.
Sheriff Hassel said, “There’s no guarantee but Elkhart County Sheriff Jeff Siegel said he would entertain the thought of doing this for us and I did transfer money into another account to pay the fees.” He also told the commissioners St. Joe County has room but no staff to take on inmates, Starke County is full, Kosciusko County is full and Fulton County is currently transporting some of their inmates to another facility.
Hassel noted that state pay just went up to $37.50 a day on July 1st. He said his average daily cost to house an inmate in our county jail is $64 a day which also includes about $10 a day for the cost of the bond issue to build the jail.
While Sheriff Hassel hopes he doesn’t have to use the services of the Elkhart County Jail, he said if local police server a bunch of search warrants or do a raid he won’t have a place to house them. This agreement would allow him to move some inmates that have already been sentenced if Elkhart has the space for them.
Commissioner Kevin Overmyer asked if there was a reason why the agreement was signed and County Attorney Jim Clevenger said, “At the time we had other ideas that maybe that population was going to fall off and we weren’t going to need it.”
The commissioners unanimously approved the intergovernmental agreement with Elkhart County for the housing of inmates.
