El Paso County Commissioners question costs of federal inmates

Is it worth the money? That’s the big question surrounding the county’s program to house hundreds of federal inmates at the county jail.

Staff with the human resources department told Commissioners Court today the program to house federal inmates brings in about $7.5 million per year, covering about 13 percent of the jail’s budget. That’s in addition to the salaries for the estimated 64 officers to oversee about 550 or so federal inmates.

But County Commissioner Vince Perez said he used the same formulas for shifts and overtime. He found that the real need was for 3 times as many officers to cover the federal inmates. Either that or the jail as a whole had 222 more officers than necessary.

“So I have problems with the formulas in the study,” Perez said. “It tells me either 1 – that number of guards to guard the federal prisoners is grossly underestimated, or number 2 – we have a surplus of detention officers that we need to evaluate.”

Sheriff Richard Wiles said the formula didn’t account for other services like transportation and medical needs, which are separate from the jail budgets in other counties. Wiles insists taking the federal prisoners helps the county, and other private jails would be eager to take them in should the county let them go.

“But to do that, would mean that those prisoners would go to those other two private facilities,” Wiles said. “And they want them, because they’re money makers. So they want those prisoners. But then the county would have to come up with an additional $8 million dollars in taxpayer funds, according to this study, to continue operating the jail.”

Perez said that the real estimate for salaries of those extra officers would be closer to $12 million, more than the $11 million the federal government currently pays the county. He said the other possibility is that the jail system has a couple hundred of unnecessary officers that could bring savings of $14 and a half million if eliminated.

Commissioners didn’t take any action on this Monday, but Commissioners agreed it was an important topic that should be re-visited in the future. This could play a part of budget hearings for the county, which start next week.