Some Vanderburgh Co. Jail inmates will be moved to jails in Ky., Ill., due to overcrowding

EVANSVILLE, Ind. — Eighty inmates at the Vanderburgh County Jail will soon be moved to other facilities as the county jail struggles with overcrowding.

The Sheriff’s Office is working on contracts with facilities in Illinois, Kentucky and Indiana that will almost double the number of Vanderburgh County inmates housed in other jails, Sheriff Dave Wedding said Tuesday.

The already crowded jail’s population has grown in the last few months, Wedding said, exceeding 800 people during one weekend last month. The facility is designed to hold about 550.

“We kept thinking that at some point, it would have a stopping point,” Wedding said. “It would eventually come to a certain number and stay static or — we tried to be optimistic — that it would go down.”

Jail officials plan to move the 80 inmates out within the next two weeks, Wedding said Tuesday.

The sheriff and jail staff contacted multiple jails, he said, but most facilities in Indiana could take fewer than 10 inmates at a time. Jefferson County in Illinois and Daviess County in Kentucky will take the majority of the inmates that will soon be moved out of Vanderburgh County, according to Wedding.

“It’s logistically very tough to move everybody around,” he said.

In the “very near future,” Vanderburgh County could have as many as 170 to 200 inmates housed in other jails. That includes 90 inmates already housed elsewhere.

“We’ve been moving them out over quite some time,” Wedding said.

Capt. James Mount, jail administrator in Jefferson County, said the Jefferson County Jail plans to take up to 50 inmates from Vanderburgh County. The facility has housed inmates from other jails before.

The Jefferson County facility, located in Mount Vernon, Illinois, can hold up to 260 inmates. Mount said it will likely have a population of about 180 people even after the Indiana inmates move in.

Wedding estimates that after the move, about half the Vanderburgh County inmates housed in other facilities will be people waiting for trial.

The other half are people convicted of level 6 felonies who are serving their sentence in county jail instead of a state prison. The state reimburses Vanderburgh County $35 per day for sentenced felons, but the county will pay $35 per day out of pocket for pretrial inmates sent to another facility.