In January, a consultant told county prison officials it would cost $169 million to build a new prison.

Next week, the same consultant will discuss the financial wisdom of abandoning the current prison entirely if a new prison is built.

Yet officials say that when it comes to dealing with the county's prison overcrowding problem, they'll be passing out thinking caps long before they break out any shovels.

"We're just not going to build ourselves out of this problem right now when there's other things we could be doing before we get to that point," said County Commissioner Scott Martin.

Martin, who chairs the seven-member prison board, said streamlining some court operations and setting up a day-reporting center are among the options that would free up space at the East King Street prison, delaying the need for a new jail.

"Will there need to be a new prison, whether that is 20 years, 25 years? The answer is, someday, yes. However, I really believe our focus should not be on building a new prison off the bat," Martin said.

The prison board consists of the three county commissioners, the district attorney, county controller, sheriff and a county judge.

At next Thursday's prison board meeting, L. Robert Kimball & Associates will outline for the board how much cheaper it would be to operate one big, new prison than to run the current prison and a scaled-down prison to be built somewhere else.

A January report prepared Kimball detailed the shortcomings of the circa-1851 prison at 625 E. King St., which  has a design capacity for 658 beds, but today is home to 1,143 prisoners.

That report discussed the projected need in 2025 for 2,114 prison beds, then laid out several scenarios to build a new prison. The most ambitious plan was for a new, 2,158-bed facility that would cost  $169.42 million to build, an amount roughly equal to the cost of the downtown hotel/convention center.

Yet most prison board members say the are now focused on how to save money, not how to spend it on a new prison.

"I don't want to even think about voting on spending that kind of money until I know every process, every avenue for improvement has been explored. And we're not there yet," said District Attorney Craig Stedman.

Among the improvements, Stedman said, would be to streamline the court's scheduling system to get people to trial quicker, thereby cutting down on the number of prisoners who are waiting for a trial date.

In 2006, the Kimball report said the average stay in the county prison was 71 days, while adding that every day knocked off that average could reduce the daily prison population by 16 prisoners.

And since about 80 percent of prisoners in the county prison that year were awaiting trial, getting them through the court system quicker could free up a lot of space.

For example, in York County the average prison stay in 2006 was 55 days, according to the Kimball report. If Lancaster County could reach such a number, its daily prison population would drop well below 1,000.

Commissioner Craig Lehman also highlighted the benefits of a day reporting center, which could be set up apart from the prison and include drug testing and job training services.

With such a center here, probation officers could send violators there instead of simply adding them to an already overcrowded prison, local officials say.

Commissioner Chairman Dennis Stuckey said he believes the county has a responsibility to assess all the stop-gap measures that could delay the major expense of a new prison.

"There is not one overall answer to the whole thing, but a lot of small things that we can do in the interim," Stuckey said.


Staff writer Chad Umble can be reached at cumble@LNPnews.com or 481-6031.