The cost to house, feed and provide medical care to inmates has gone up.

That's draining local and city coffers.

State leaders have known of this funding issue for many years.

But as our June Leffler reports, the push continues to overhaul how jails are funded.

The Kentucky Association of Counties, or Keiko, has led the call to reform jail funding.

Counties are now putting in, as you can see in this slide, about $170 million of county tax dollars in the funding of the local jails.

And so this really set the stage for us again a year or so ago.

The cost of incarceration is shared by the state and localities.

Keiko says the state reimburses local jails at a per diem rate that is nearly half the cost to actually house someone.

And right now, county jails are on the hook for housing and paying for inmates before they are sentenced.

So now let's talk about pretrial detainees.

And this is something that has been very important to me.

Senator Wheeler, you and I have both filed bills on this issue in the past.

So here's here's how the process works right now.

An inmate is arrested for a felony offense.

They're arraigned.

They have a grand jury indictment.

They sit in the county jail without bond or without the ability to bond out for a period of time.

Then there's a trial or a plea agreement and a verdict.

After that, there's a sentencing.

The state per diem takes takes place after that sentencing takes place.

State Representative Michael Meredith proposes something different again.

Why I say that is such an important portion of this bill would be some form of reimbursement on those credits for time served is it affects every one of those counties, whether you're a county that's in a regional jail authority, whether you're a county that has an open jail, or whether you're a county that has a closed jail.

Meredith proposed jail funding reform this year, though it failed in Frankfort.

A lawmaker who leads budget negotiations says local police, prosecutors and courts ultimately decide how long someone stays in jail pretrial.

At no point do we have anybody at the state level unless it was KSB that was the investigating agency that has any control or say so over what happens and how long that process takes.

Someone will figure this out, cleaned up our streets and we can always do credit for time serving.

The state still picks it up.

County jails can balance their budget by taking federal prisoners who have a per diem rate, more than double what the state pays.

That's in part.

Why?

Several county jails are holding immigration detainees for the federal government, despite overcrowding and other concerns from activists.

For Kentucky edition, I'm Jim Loeffler.