Kane County sheriff has 'I-told-you-so moment' with jail inspection

Kane County Sheriff Pat Perez issued an I-told-you-so after a state inspection of the Kane County jail concluded the facility is too small and should hire more guards.

A criminal justice specialist from the Illinois Department of Corrections inspected the 2-year-old facility in August and had two recommendations. The first calls for the hiring of eight more officers to "bring the facility up to the recommended safe operating level." The second recommendation says the mothballed units of the new jail should be opened "to both save money, which is being spent to house detainees in other facilities, and to earn money for the county by being able to house detainees from other jurisdictions."

Asked about the report, Perez said he thought the jail was too small and undermanned even before it opened.

"Our average daily population (at the old jail) was 677," Perez said. "It may be a touchy subject, but the day we moved in ... what's reality? The day we moved into this 640-bed facility we had 711 in custody."

Perez said the new, undersized jail continues a trend started at the old jail: It's costing the county millions of dollars. When Kane County's jail is full, it must outsource additional inmates to jails in other counties. The county is then charged a daily fee plus transportation costs from the other counties to house the inmates. Perez said from 1998 to 2008, before the new jail opened, Kane County spent $23 million on housing inmates in other county jails.

"That's money that left this county that the county will never see back," Perez said.

And that's money that's still leaving the county. In July of this year, the county spent $40,000 to house inmates in the Kendall County Jail, Perez said. In August, the county spent $65,000.

"I can guarantee you September is going to be even higher," Perez said. "What do I do? I have no control over that. I can't just open the doors and say, 'OK, you go, you go, you go.'"

Those costs become a double-problem for Perez because the county board hasn't put a single penny in Perez' budget to pay for housing inmates in other counties since the new jail opened.

Instead, the county has given judges more authority to place would-be inmates on electronic home monitoring and release inmates who aren't being held for violent or repeat offenses. And yet, Perez said the county had 732 inmates on Labor Day for a facility that holds 640.

Opening the shell spaces at the jail would add 127 more beds. However, the county board has always said it doesn't have the money to hire the additional people it would take to staff that new space. Both the state report and Perez said the long-term profit is worth the short-term additional cost. Perez said the added space would allow the county to stop giving Kane County taxpayer dollars to Kendall County. It also would provide extra space for the county to take more inmates from the federal government. The county currently is paid $88 a day for a handful of female federal inmates housed at the new jail.

"The federal government is begging for bed space," Perez said. "In an instance like this, you have to take that staff hit upfront for the long-term because it will be a net profit. It's just a matter of time before you turn that net profit. But what are we doing? This is history repeating itself. We're doing the same thing we were doing (at the old jail). As it stands right now, those shell spaces we have sit vacant. They're not doing us any good. But what do I know? I'm just the sheriff."

Perez is up for re-election in November, but the I-told-you-so won't stop even if Perez is gone. His Republican opponent, Don Kramer, said back in January the county must open the shell spaces in the jail and hire new corrections officers.