The Lackawanna County Prison will house Susquehanna County inmates under an agreement commissioners recently approved following the Susquehanna County Correctional Facility’s closure earlier this year.
Lackawanna County will be compensated at a rate of $118 per person per day for the housing and care of those inmates, an arrangement Warden Tim Betti said won’t necessitate additional staffing at the county prison in Scranton. The agreement that Commissioners Bill Gaughan and Chris Chermak approved earlier this month runs through 2028 and tasks Lackawanna County with providing housing, meals, necessities and basic medical care for Susquehanna County inmates and detainees.
“We do have essentially a right of refusal for individuals in case there’s any really complicated case or anything along those lines,” Betti told the commissioners June 4. “There are … out-of-the-ordinary medical expenses that will also be covered by Susquehanna County, so a lot of it is at no cost at all to Lackawanna County.”
The prison had yet to take in any Susquehanna County inmates as of Friday, though one arrived over the weekend who was detained on a bench warrant, county spokesman Patrick McKenna said. Officials expect to house at most 20 or so Susquehanna County inmates at any given time, Betti said earlier this month.
Susquehanna County Correctional Facility
Susquehanna County officials closed the jail there in late March, noting at the time that shuttering the facility should result in about $3 million in anticipated annual savings for Susquehanna County taxpayers. The agreement with Lackawanna County complements similar arrangements with other neighboring counties.
“The county jail was designed to house over 100 prisoners, but the number of incarcerated people normally ranges between 20-40,” Susquehanna County officials said in a mid-March news release announcing the then-pending closure. “Required facility staffing exceeds the optimum ratio of guards to inmates. Built in the 1990s, the current facility is also in need of substantial and costly upgrades and repairs. Those necessary repairs were not factored into the $3 million estimated savings.”
The average daily population at the Lackawanna County Prison for April was 689 inmates, according to Betti’s most recent warden’s report. Of those, 540 were county inmates and 149 were U.S. Marshals detainees.
Commissioners approved in January a three-year agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service that boosted the per diem rate the prison receives for the housing and care of federal detainees from $102 per inmate per day to $119.
Meanwhile, overtime costs at the county prison remain considerably lower this year than in recent years and continue to trend down.
This year’s prison overtime costs through the pay period ending May 6 totaled just about $407,020, county figures show. That’s less than half of the nearly $1.06 million in overtime expenses accrued at the prison over the same period in 2024.
The Lackawanna County Prison Board next meets Wednesday at 12:30 p.m. at the jail on North Washington Avenue in Scranton.