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| Prison Anger Management Class Cost Irks Penn. County Official |
| By Allentown Morning Call |
| Published: 01/03/2003 |
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A $9,000 contract to provide anger-management classes to inmates at the Bucks County Prison has Commissioner Charles H. Martin seeing red. Martin said he has no complaints about making the classes available to inmates, but in this case the state government has mandated the classes but provided no money to pay for them. ''If the state requires it, the state ought to pay for it,'' Martin complained Wednesday. Specifically, the classes must be provided to so-called ''state-sentenced'' inmates, prisoners whose offenses would ordinarily qualify them for sentences in state prisons but have been given permission by their judges to serve their terms in the county prison. Bucks County Prison has 183 such inmates. Those inmates make up nearly a third of the inmate population in the Doylestown Township prison. The county receives no subsidy for the inmates, each of whom costs county taxpayers $65 a day, or more than $4 million a year. Commissioners in Bucks and other counties in Pennsylvania have long called on the Legislature to provide subsidies for state-sentenced inmates, but those pleas have always fallen on deaf ears. Chief Operating Officer Kathleen Dominick said the anger-management class isn't the only service the county has to provide to state-sentenced prisoners. Under a new state law, she said, DNA samples must be drawn from all state-sentenced inmates as part of a state Department of Corrections program to classify the inmates and create a DNA data bank. In previous years, she said, the state mandated DNA samples drawn from only sex offenders, who usually make up just a handful of inmates in county jails. Now, she said, it appears that all 183 state-sentenced inmates will have to undergo the tests, which usually involve taking blood samples. She said the county will probably have to assign a public health nurse to the task and, of course, pay for the lab work. Dominick said that at this point there is no estimate for the cost of the DNA program. A contract for the anger-management class was awarded by the commissioners to Marian Ehrlacher of Doylestown. Ehrlacher also provides similar classes for programs sponsored by the Bucks County Council on Alcoholism and Drugs and the Central Bucks School District Community Education Program. Ehrlacher's bill will be paid out of the inmate welfare fund. The fund is financed by profits from the prison commissary, which sells snacks to the inmates. Usually, the welfare fund is used to buy sports equipment or to build recreational facilities at the prison. Before the inmate welfare fund is tapped, Martin said, he plans to send the bill to the state Corrections Department to see if it will pay it. ''We're paying $65 a day for 183 inmates sitting in our jail who shouldn't be there,'' said Martin. ''How can they require us to do something when we keep their people for free?'' Lisa Aaron, deputy press secretary for the state Corrections Department, said Martin should not expect the state to pay the bill. She said that the department regards those inmates as county inmates as long as they are serving their sentences in county prisons. ''Technically, they aren't our inmates,'' she said. |
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