Broome County Jail’s Secret $ millions:  profiting from COVID and incarcerated families

Broome County devotes a large share of its budget to maintaining its reputation as having the highest incarceration rate among New York State’s 62 counties. The Sheriff alone gets over $30 million each year for his jail, even as the number of persons incarcerated there has steadily fallen in recent years. Meanwhile the official county budget for the jail increases year after year.

What remains unseen and unaccountable however is additional, rapidly growing funding on the scale of millions of dollars as COVID conditions have been exploited.  And the most punishing and hidden funding comes directly from the poorest residents of the county—the families and friends of those incarcerated in the jail.

$7 million in COVID funding

Take for example last month’s County’s allocation of $7 million in Federal COVID recovery funds to reportedly “public safety revenue replacement.”  Did these millions go to public health, housing, infrastructure, or youth employment recovery?  Far from it: a freedom-of-information (FOIL) request reveals they were sent directly to the Sheriff’s budget for correctional officers—even as the jail, built and expanded to hold 600 persons, now holds less 300 local residents and only 42 persons convicted and sentenced for a crime. How and why $7 million?  We don’t know.

Unseen Cell Profits by the $ millions

Even more hidden and unaccountable are the profits generated in recent years by selling cells to the Federal government and other local Sheriffs.  Last month the jail housed 25 persons for the federal government, for example,  and received $100 to $300 per day for each. That’s $ millions in cell profits over time, not counting payments for holding persons for other counties.

Preying on incarcerated families: another $1 million+ ?

Most punishing are the funds charged to the incarcerated and their family and friends. COVID has had a dramatic impact here as well.  Unable to visit in person and desperate to talk to their loved ones, families have been forced to pay for both telephone and video calls. For the Sheriff it’s a lucrative enterprise, as county contracts dictate high commissions to be paid directly to the Sheriff to be used as he decides. Here too it took a FOIL request to uncover the contracts and revenues, and how they were spent behind closed doors.

The pages attached here contain the response from the Broome County Sheriff to the FOIL request that asked for telephone and video revenues for 2019, 2020, and 2021. County contracts dictate that the Sheriff rake offs 44% of all costs from telephone calls to/from the jail, and 20% for all video tablet use (both calls and content).   The figures supplied by FOIL show the commission payments to the Sheriff (but exclude the GTL shares, which means that the total charges for families are much larger (2.27 x larger for telephone calls and 5 times larger for video)).

As reported by the Sheriff, telephone calls alone generated these commissions, and by extrapolation the calculated total cost that includes the GTL share (based on the contract commission rate). 

	Sheriff’s Commission $	Estimated Commission plus GTL charge $
2019	303,722	690,360
2020	309,779	704,129
2021	528,900	1,202,190

Are these excessive costs?  You judge. The  rate for a one minute phone call for persons in

State prisons:  3.9 cent
Broome County Jail: 25 cents

To the telephone figures one must add profits from video calls.

It need not be this way: one could have open competitive contracts, eliminate commission fees, or even drop fees for telephone calls as some jails have done (comparative jail rates are available from the striking reports generated by www.prisonpolicy.org ). Meanwhile all state prisons and surrounding jails have restored in-person visits, which Sheriff Harder refuses to do—ensuring a continuing flow of profits under his control.

And where did the Sheriff spend these funds? As reported elsewhere, telephone and video profits were spent on everything from retirement party banners to a second, $273,000 armored personnel carrier.

Super profits from Commissary

And even that is not enough. Cut off from families, and denied access to outside vendors, those languishing in the county jail under COVID  became even more dependent upon food, hygiene products, and other basic goods purchased from the jail commissary run by a private corporation—and from which the Sheriff skims off yet more profits.  

State regulations dictate that profits be modest and be spent on the welfare and rehabilitation of the incarcerated.  As the attached foil demonstrates, under COVID profits accelerated by 50% to over $300,000 a year–and were spent on purchases that had nothing to do with rehabilitation or welfare, from carpeting and vacuum cleaners, to religious plays, to gardening supplies and lawn tractors.  When Justice and Unity for the Southern Tier in 2019 asked the County Executive and State Commission of Correction to investigate these misappropriations, they declined to respond–as did the NYS Attorney General and Comptroller to whom copies were sent.

Demanding Oversight

The lesson here is straightforward:  excessive $ millions are secretly spent every year on the jail, much directly taken from the pockets of the poorest Broome county residents. There is no accountability, no county or state oversight.  The solution? Independent community oversight.