Richmond jail to start charging inmates $1 a day

Richmond's overcrowded city jail will start charging inmates $1 day to be there.

The charge takes effect Wednesday, said Lt. Col. Walter Allmon of the city sheriff's department.

"It's to help pay for the cost of operating the jail," he said.

It costs about $46 per inmate, per day to cover the jail's operating and administrative costs, city budget documents show. The $1-a-day charge could raise more than $500,000 a year toward the $30 million annual cost of running the jail.

Virginia has allowed sheriffs to charge inmates for their stays since 2003, and this year the legislature increased the maximum amount from $1 a day to $5. Chesterfield County has levied the $1 charge for two years.

Allmon said the money would be billed to inmates' accounts, which the jail sets up for them so they can have cash to pay for phone calls and snacks from the canteen. The money comes from what cash they have when they're arrested and from what their families send them.

Allmon said the sheriff's office won't sue inmates if they are indigent and don't have money. But he said any unpaid balance will carry over from one arrest to another, so if an inmate returns and has money in his account at that time, it will go first to pay off the charge.

The Richmond jail routinely houses nearly twice the number of men and women it was designed to hold when it was built four decades ago. Until recently, it was common for dozens of male inmates to sleep on mattresses on the floor of the jail's largest dormitory cells, but new triple-decker bunk beds have eased that problem.

Sheriff C.T. Woody has said hundreds of the 1,500 men and women housed in the jail on any given day shouldn't be there. Some are mentally ill, while others are awaiting trial on petty charges and can't get out because they can't afford even a $30 bond.

Pamunkey Regional Jail, which serves Hanover and Caroline counties and the town of Ashland, charges a fee for people serving weekends-only sentences; the fee generates about $29,000 a year. The after-hours desk deputy at Henrico County Jail-West said inmates there aren't charged.

Contact David Ress at (804) 649-6051 or .