Penobscot County could pay hundreds of thousands of dollars more a year to send inmates to other jails across the state after the facilities raised their costs.
People are “boarded out” to other county jails when the Penobscot County Jail is at or near its state-mandated capacity of 157 people.
An average of 69 people were boarded out per day in 2024, Penobscot County Sheriff Troy Morton said. The county spent a total of $2.1 million on boarding people, at $85 per day per person, last year.
Since the daily cost per person increased to $100 on Jan. 1, Penobscot County will pay $2.5 million if the daily average stays at 69 people. However, Morton said at a Penobscot County Commissioners meeting Tuesday that he expects the overall cost of people boarded to increase this year.
The county provided $2.1 million for boarding out people in the jail’s 2025 budget, which totals $15.6 million overall.
The cost is set by the counties that accept people, such as Lincoln County’s Two Bridges Regional Jail in Wiscasset, where Penobscot County currently is sending about 50 of its inmates, according to the jail roster. Inmates are also sent to Piscataquis, Knox and Somerset counties.
While the increased cost of housing people in other jails puts a larger a burden on the county budget, it also creates a strain for incarcerated people, their loved ones and legal counsel.
The Two Bridges jail is 102 miles from the Penobscot jail in Bangor. Sending people to a jail far away moves them away from their family, lawyers, local services, Morton said.
“Renting beds from across the state is not a [humane], efficient or fiscally responsible option,” Morton said.
The spokesperson for American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, Samuel Crankshaw, said “far flung” jails can make it difficult for lawyers to track down their clients, and slow the legal process as people are transported to and from jails.
“It further separates them from their communities and their families and their attorneys, and this includes many people who have not even been convicted of a crime and who are still presumed innocent,” Crankshaw said.
In 2019 Penobscot County spent $537,000 to board people at a cost of $30 per person per day, according to previous reporting. The county budgeted $780,000 for 2020 and $950,000 for 2021.
The costs have continued to increase as the daily rate goes up, but also after Maine Department of Corrections Commissioner Randall Liberty started enforcing the maximum capacity of 157 at the jail at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak. The jail would regularly have 20 to 40 more people than it was licensed for before the enforcement.
Changes to the bail code has helped reduce the number of people in the jail, as well as using Maine pretrial services and the PACE Day Reporting Program, which allows certain people to choose educational experiences instead of spending time in jail, Morton said.
Not having a jail facility large enough to house everyone without boarding them out shows a new jail is needed, Morton said. There are jail population factors outside of the sheriff’s control, like the court system and who is granted or denied bail, he said.
The county has debated a new jail for at least six years, and public outcry in 2020 ended a plan for an eight-story jail in downtown Bangor. In September the county narrowed down the potential site of the new jail to four locations.
A 2018 proposal included plans for 200 to 300 beds, which critics have said is bigger than the county needs and could lead to more people being incarcerated. The county is not attempting to build a larger jail but instead one that is “appropriately sized for the population we manage,” Morton said.
The Penobscot County Jail handles the “highest number of criminal cases in the judicial system,” despite having less than a third of the number of beds of the Cumberland County Jail in Portland, Morton said. The new jail needs a bed capacity around 285, he said.
But Crankshaw, the spokesperson for the Maine ACLU, said if the system cannot handle the number of people charged with crimes, then it needs to look at why so many people are being charged, what they are charged with and if it is the right approach.
