Yank the welcome mat for out-of-state felons

Gov. Tim Kaine and state corrections officials have become a little too neighborly.

The guv and prison administrators hatched a scheme to offer bed space to 1,000 out-of-state visitors - aka "criminals" - to fill up commonwealth coffers during a budget crunch. Already, Virginia is offering three-hots-and-a-cot to about 300 prisoners from Wyoming. That two-year contract should raise as much as $18.5 million.

But this form of rent control has angered several sheriffs, including Virginia Beach's Paul Lanteigne. They say the state isn't fulfilling its legal responsibility to pick up Virginia's own convicted felons within 60 days of sentencing.

That forces local jails to hold prisoners longer, at pitifully low reimbursement rates from the state, and exacerbates crowding in local facilities. Richmond pays the Beach $14 each for state prisoners in the Beach jail, but it costs the jail $75 a day to house them, the sheriff said.

The welcome mat extended to foreign felons, at the expense of local prisoners, "compounds the local burden on the taxpayers of Virginia Beach," Lanteigne told me. "The state is supposed to do what the state code tells them to."

Sounds practically like grounds for an arrest.

Earlier, Lanteigne sent Kaine a letter dated April 2 in which the sheriff cited the code section, the number of inmates "out of compliance," and a request to remedy the situation. This week, Lanteigne sued. As of Thursday, the Virginia Beach jail had 65 inmates who should've been scooped up already by the state Department of Corrections.

Fairfax County Sheriff Stan Barry, in a story this week in The Washington Post, calls the whole situation "ludicrous." He has 100 state inmates in his jail. "They clearly have the space. It's all a money-making proposition." The Post reported that, as of mid-May, 1,700 inmates in 75 local and regional jails were waiting to be moved to state prisons.

Kaine, in a wide-ranging interview this week with The Virginian-Pilot editorial board, seemed genuinely surprised by the reactions of the sheriffs. He said they didn't express concerns about the issue during budget deliberations earlier this year at the General Assembly.

"Now all the ink is dry," Kaine said.

But in this intergovernmental squabble, Kaine is wrong. He and prison officials are skirting state code, and easing state budget problems by transferring them to the localities.

It's not as if the local jails have vacancies. The Beach jail, for example, has a state-rated capacity of 889, but its head count was 1,480 on Thursday. The Norfolk jail, which is habitually overcrowded, has a capacity of 833 inmates, but on Thursday had double that number - 1,666 - said Bonita Harris, the Norfolk Sheriff's Department spokeswoman.

Not all of the local sheriffs, though, seem to be as upset as Lanteigne. That's partly because so many jails are accustomed to holding onto inmates while the state dithers.

It also could be worse. Norfolk Sheriff Robert McCabe, for example, remembers the situation in 1994, when the Norfolk jail held 442 prisoners that should've been in state facilities. The figure is now down to 84.

"We have a good relationship with the Department of Corrections," McCabe said through his spokeswoman. "These out-of-state inmates do help with funding for crucial [prison] staff. It's a complicated issue."

You should treat out of town "guests" with hospitality. But not at the expense of your neighbors. And certainly not by sticking them with a bill the state ought to pay.

Roger Chesley is associate editor of The Pilot's editorial page. Reach him at (757) 446-2329 or at roger.chesley@pilotonline.com.