Schuylkill prison continues to struggle with overcrowding

Schuylkill County continues to struggle with overcrowding at its aging jail on Sanderson Street in Pottsville.

The county Prison Board on Wednesday learned that the peak census in January was 287.

That’s 10 more than the cap the county promised the state Department of Corrections it would maintain to prevent overcrowding.

As of Wednesday morning, the population stood at 272, said Warden Eugene Berdanier.

That doesn’t include the 41 inmates who are housed at out-of-county jails at a cost of between $65 and $70 per inmate per day.

Eight were in Berks County, 10 in Centre County, five in Columbia County, nine in Lackawanna County, and nine were in Snyder County.

The cost on that day was at least $2,665.

Prison Board Chairman and President Judge William E. Baldwin asked Berdanier to report the costs at each meeting.

Overcrowding has been an issue for decades.

The county started shipping overflow inmates out to other jails after the state in May 2016 ordered it to stop accepting new inmates until it got the population below a daily average of 277.

The DOC lifted the restriction three months later, after the county kept the numbers down by housing inmates at other counties’ prisons.

The board is developing specifications for an intermediate punishment facility to help alleviate overcrowding.

To help determine exactly what the facility would entail, the county hired Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates in Mechanicsburg, for $38,400 to update its 2008 prison study to determine what the county’s needs will be over the next 20 years.

In other matters Wednesday, the board hired correctional officer Michael Wallace, who has worked part time since 2016, as a full-time employee.

Wallace fills the vacancy created when the board in January fired Michael T. Dolan for what it described only as “policy violations.”