Tri-County Community Corrections had their Regional Corrections Board meeting Monday morning at the Northwest Regional Corrections Center. The committee began the meeting by naming Warren Strandell, Polk County Commissioner, as 2019 chair. Steven Bommersbach, Norman County Commissioner, and Ron Weiss, Red Lake County Commissioner, were named vice-chair and secretary respectively.
Each month Andrew Larson, executive director, provides an update on the inmate populations at the Northwest Regional Correction Center and Red River Valley Juvenile Center. “Each board meeting, we look at our numbers for the previous month to monitor trends throughout the year and for resource allocation. Our numbers for 2018, with 184 inmates per day on average,” said Larson. “That was really close to the record of 185, part of a three-year trend of high numbers, which is very much driven by our efforts to make sure we’re bringing in agencies outside of our three-county area with contracts with Clay County, Mahnomen County, Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Marshall Service or Department of Corrections. We make a concerted effort to bring those entities in here not because it generates a profit, but it helps to offset our operating expenses.”
The average daily population in the corrections center is made up from a variety of sources. Besides inmates from member counties – Polk, Red Lake, and Norman – there were on average 22.5 inmates from Mahnomen County, 1.7 from Marshall, 12.3 from Department of Corrections Work Release, 2.0 from Bureau of Prisons, and 15.5 from the U.S. Marshall Service per day during the month of December. Each different agency, particularly Federal, can have different requirements of work for each inmate. In particular, the amount of paperwork and monitoring required for a Bureau of Prisoners work release inmate is the equivalent of 10-15 local inmates.
The Red River Valley Juvenile Center saw a low population over the final six months of 2018, resulting in a lower than usual population for the year. “Juvenile Center saw a drop-off in our numbers over the last six months which has a despairing effect on our numbers for the course of a year because we’re not dealing with large numbers anyways,” said Larson. “For the year we averaged 8.4 kids per day, recently our numbers are back up again. We had 11 kids in there this morning and if I had to guess we’ve averaged 11-12 kids per day in January. Kyle Allen, program director at the juvenile center, and Paul Bissonette, deputy director, have been diligent in getting out and making other agencies aware of the programs and services we have to drive additional referrals into our facility. We see a lot of usage from Becker, Beltrami, White Earth, as the services we provide really resonate with those counties providing services for kids that might not thrive in larger juvenile centers.”
Tri-County Community Corrections also operates a work crew, which allows inmates to reduce the amount of time in custody by working either in-house or in a community program. “We’ve long operated the inmate work program providing inmates the opportunity to reduce the amount of time they spend in custody with us. For every eight hours they put in on a crew or in-house work assignment they reduce their sentence by one day,” said Larson. “The hours they put in on either sentence to service, available to government or non-profit agencies, provided at a significantly reduced cost and our chore service program that targets our elderly population, does outside chore services like shovel snow or rake leaves to allow those people to stay in their home. On an average daily basis, our inmate population is reduced by nine inmates a day over the course of the year which is a great benefit to us in cost savings, but also reinforces to the inmate population and the community the value these people can provide.”