Chad Booth visits the newly completed jail in Kane County to talk about jail contracting. Jail contracting allows the state to contract with county jails to house inmates that don’t require a maximum security facility. This allows the state to relieve some of the overcrowding issues they face at the prison and creates a revenue stream for the county.
An issue that the counties face with contracting is that the rate which the state contracts with them hasn’t been raised for the last seven years. As a result the counties who have contract inmates are looking at a closing gap between creating revenue for the county and subsidizing state inmates out of their own budgets.