The unknown cost of county inmates

WINSTON, Miss. (WCBI)- Many people don’t think about what happens to inmates once they are behind bars.

When an inmate is sick, either when they are arrested or during their confinement, their expenses are covered by the correctional facility.

Sickness, injury, even preexisting conditions are all things that local jails have to provide care for. And who pays for it?

“It’s very simple in a county jail setting. The taxpayers pay the bills for that, and the bill can be limitless depending on the situation,” Sheriff Jason Pugh.

Sheriff Pugh says that the money comes out of the county jail’s budget, and the total cost can be unpredictable.

“You try to budget appropriately, you try to be as good a humanitarian as is possible, but at the end of the day a person that commits a heinous crime and ends up in a county jail he may stay in the county jail for a year or more before he goes to the state system. Can cause a small county like Winston a lot of money that we can’t afford,” says Sheriff Pugh.

Things as simple as dental work can come with a hefty price tag.

“It doesn’t seem like a person worries too bad about their dental situation when they’re smoking methamphetamines every day, because it’s rotting their teeth out, and when they come into the jail they end up doing a significant amount of time with us, those abscessed teeth and that sort of thing, they become our problems,” says Sheriff Pugh.

The Winston County jail has something that most jails aren’t able to provide, in-house medical care.

“We try to address any medical issues that come up be it dental, be it mental health, unfortunately sometimes people are injured whatever medical problems or issues that come up we try to address it in-house not listening to a local doctor or to the emergency room to get that addressed,” said Patrick Hall.

Sheriff Pugh says that a solution can be hard to pin down.

“Obvious a lot of the solution is to see how many folks we can let out of jail that rehabilitation of inmates that sort of thing. That solution has been done on the table the problem is that people are being turned back out to the world and they’re falling back into to the same things that they fell into before,” said Sheriff Pugh.

Some inmates can cost county jails around a thousand dollars a month in medical expenses.