DOC seeks $300,000 annual youth prison charge

By Gretchen Schuldt

​The cost to counties to incarcerate juveniles at the Lincoln Hills / Copper Lakes youth prison would soar almost 50% by June 2023 and hit an annual cost of $299,300, according to the Department of Corrections budget request submitted this week.

In a document largely of meaningful explanatory text, DOC justifies the requested increase in a single sentence: "Rates reflecting the cost of care in juvenile correctional institutions are set in statute and updated each biennium."

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The request comes as an agreement to close the scandal-plagued Lincoln Hills/Copper Lake facilities is teetering. 

Lincoln Hills is for boys; Copper Lake is for girls. As of Friday, there were 68 boys held at Lincoln Hills and four girls at Copper Lake, according to DOC population figures.

The state now charges counties $550 per day to house juvenile offenders at the secure facilities, the state's only juvenile prisons of their type. That amount is scheduled to increase to $615 per day on Jan. 1. The DOC's 2021-23 budget request seeks to increase that to $803 per day on July 1, 2021 and $820 per day on July 1, 2022.

That would increase the annual cost of holding a single juvenile at the facility from $200,750 at the current daily rate to $299,300, an increase of $98,500. 

Overall, the department is seeking a budget hike of 4.5%, or $126.5 million over the biennium, from $2.8 billion to $2.92 billion, according to the budget request. The budget assumes an average daily incarcerated population of about 23,205 adults and 102 juveniles, according to budget documents.

The budget request also includes increases of:

• $6.2 million and 43 positions for GPS tracking of sex offenders. The department anticipates tracking 2,681 clients in 2022 and 2,920 clients in 2023. 
•  $3.8 million for the serious juvenile offender program. Again, there is no real explanation  for the requested increase. DOC says only that the money is need to "provide juvenile institution care, alternate care, and community supervision for Serious Juvenile Offenders."