JAIL NEARING PROFITABILITY

ULLIN, Ill. -- After a little more than a year in business, the Tri-County Detention Center has yet to show a profit, but Michael Kleinik is trying.

Kleinik operates the only private, for-profit jail in Illinois.

If his prisoner population wasn't so low for the first five months of 1999, the facility might have made money.

"Down the road we could make money, but at this point we're just making the debt service on our building," said Kleinik, jail administrator.

The Tri-County jail has avoided many of the negative sentiments that surround privately owned prison operations elsewhere. Mistreatment of inmates has been charged at other private prisons, which critics say look past prisoners to their profit margins. Legislation at both the state and federal levels is trying to slow growth at these jails.

Missouri state Sen. Larry Rohrbach of California has presented several bills in the legislature over the past four years to keep new private jails from being built in the state.

Kleinik thinks that more jails serving fewer counties is inevitable.

"It's getting too expensive to keep the status quo of one jail for one county," he said. "When it costs $3 million or $4 million to build an average jail, no one county has this kind of money."

The Tri-County Detention Center came into being through joint efforts by Alexander, Pulaski and Union counties. All three were experiencing various problems with keeping prisoners.

Union County hadn't had a jail since 1994 when state officials closed it because it didn't meet required standards, Sheriff Jim Nash said. Since then, deputies had been driving prisoners back and forth between Union and Jackson counties.

Until the new detention center was opened, Union County was paying Jackson $35 a day to hold each prisoner, Nash said.

Although the price has increased to $51.50 a prisoner at the Ullin facility, Nash said his county is saving money overall. Jail personnel handle most prisoner transportation, which frees Union County deputies for other duties and saves wear and mileage on patrol cars.

As a former Illinois sheriff from Fayette County, Kleinik understands the demands of running a jail while maintaining law and order in a county. Sixty percent of his time as a sheriff was spent on Fayette's jail, he said.

"As a sheriff, I had to get everything I bought approved by the county board," Kleinik said. "Then we had to wait to go through the bid process."

Now Kleinik deals directly with suppliers, acquiring supplies more quickly, he said.

Pulaski County Sheriff Rusty Dankin serves as the detention center's warden because it sits in his county, and Kleinik speaks with him daily. But Kleinik has the final say about how the jail operates.

The administrator noted that his jail has passed code inspections by federal and state boards.

"There aren't too many jails in Illinois that can do that," he said

Some jails that violate codes are allowed to operate simply because of a lack of alternatives, he said.

Using past relationships with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Kleinik negotiated an agreement with the federal agency to house its prisoners for $45 a day. A few months before, the U.S. Marshal's service signed a contract to keep its Southern Illinois prisoners in Ullin.

Earlier, Kleinik had estimated the jail needed 169 prisoners a day to break even financially. Of the 198 prisoners in the jail last week, 166 were federal inmates, he said. The jail's capacity is 210.

"If we would have had them sooner, our financial situation might be different now," he said. "From January to May last year, we only had county prisoners here."

The jail, operated by GRW Corp. of Brentwood, Tenn., lost money during its first five months of operations, the administrator said.

GRW Corp. has two facilities in Kansas, one in Texas and another in Joplin. It is among the smaller companies that build and manage jails nationally. The largest private prison firm, Corrections Corporation of America, handles 58 percent of the estimated 112,000 prisoners in private jails, reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. This represents 6 percent of all inmates in the United States.

In January, 700 Missouri inmates won a $2.2 million class action lawsuit against Capitol Corrections Resources, Inc., a private jail management firm. The lawsuit showed the inmates had been physically abused while they were being kept in Texas jails owned by the firm. Missouri had a contract with Capitol Corrections Resources to hold inmates.

In Ullin, all prisoners are treated equitably, Kleinik said.

"The federal prisoners like to think that they get better treatment," he said.

Some allowances are made for practical reasons. Relatives visiting federal prisoners might receive extra time, because often they have traveled across several states to the jail instead of through a county, Kleinik said.

A high number of Chinese speaking inmates from the Immigration Service necessitated hiring an interpreter. Although the 48 jail employees are supposed to be hired from the three counties that established the facility, a Chinese speaker could only be found in Carbondale, Kleinik said.

Employee turnover has caused some staffing problems, because few of the jailers have ever worked in a jail before, the administrator said.

"It takes a special kind of person to work in a jail," he said.