Being “tough on crime” may sometimes mean more arrests, but housing inmates becomes a new challenge altogether. It’s a challenge Pennington County is dealing with firsthand.
Both the Pennington County Jail and juvenile facility, or JSC, are operating close to 100% capacity, with JSC having to temporarily reopen a formerly closed wing to house young offenders.
However, Pennington County Sheriff Brian Mueller stopped short of describing it as “overcrowded.”
“So, our jail has 601 beds, and operationally you want to run at that 85-90% range," Mueller said. "So, at 87% range which would be optimal for us, our full capacity would be 525 inmates. We’ve been at or above that since 2014. We’ve been at 600 or over pretty consistently since 2017, so we’ve been running pretty close to 100% full.”
At JSC, roughly 40 beds are filling up quickly and when the unit pushes 50, the secondary unit is utilized. Mueller said this situation is directly causing revenue losses to the local government.
“Because our local (inmate) population has been on the rise, we’ve reduced our federal (inmate) population by almost 100, which is almost $4,000,000 of lost revenue to Pennington County," Mueller said. "So, by adding some capacity back at the jail we’d be able to increase those numbers and offset some of the costs of building the jail and operating the jail moving forward.”
Mueller said adding capacity to the jail remains a priority of his.
“You can’t arrest your way out of a lot of these issues," Mueller said. "You know, a lot of the social issues that end up landing people in jail. When I ran for Sheriff, I said one of the first things I was going to have to do was sort out adding capacity to the jail. We are in the process of that, and we’re doing an informational meeting to the county commission on Oct. 15.”
That meeting will be open and will include a public comment period. Scheduled for 9 am, it will be held at the Pennington County Administration Building on Kansas City Street.