Schuylkill County plans to build an intermediate punishment center to house inmates ready for discharge to alleviate overcrowding at the county jail.

It has yet to be determined how large the center will be, where it will be built, and how much it will cost.Commissioners on Wednesday agreed to ask Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates of Mechanicsburg for a proposal to update a 2008 needs assessment it had done so the county can more accurately determine what the specifications should be.The county in April sought requests for qualifications for long-range plans to ease overcrowding.Five companies, including Crabtree, responded with various options for brick-and-mortar centers, programs, or combinations of both.The others were Heim Construction Company, Orwigsburg; Fedetz & Martin Associates, Allentown; Core Civic, Nashville, Tennessee; and Geo Reentry, Houston, Texas.The updated needs assessment will concentrate on properly sizing the center, said county engineer and real estate director Lisa Mahall."This will include research on prison population projections for five, 10 and 20 years to determine the current and long-term correctional needs of Schuylkill County," she said.Upon completion of the assessment, commissioners will review the proposals submitted from an April request for qualifications, and move forward with the selection of a consultant for the construction, and possible operation and programming, of the center, she said.Overcrowding has been a problem for decades at the aging jail.The state Department of Corrections in May ordered the county to stop accepting new inmates until it got the population below a daily average of 277. It lifted the restriction in August.The county reduced the population by sending overflow inmates to prisons in Centre, Columbia, Delaware and Berks County at a cost of $60 to $72 per inmate per day.But that is expensive. As of Wednesday, 53 inmates were being housed out of the county.Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates did the 2008 assessment in anticipation of a pre-release center on a plot of land near the state prison at Frackville.But the project turned out to cost at least twice as much as planned, and so was scrapped.The intermediate punishment center is also known as a stand-alone sentenced inmate facility, Mahall said.A new prison is not an option, she said.The decision to build was not taken lightly, said Commissioner Frank J. Staudenmeier.He has long maintained that "we exhaust all of our options before we go down this road. To the credit of the prison board, to the credit of the previous prison board, and the previous boards of commissioners I served with, we have done. Now, it's time to do this.""This is a good first step," said Commissioners' Chairman George F. Halcovage Jr. "We need to move this forward. However, we need to make sure we're taking the proper steps. We felt that Crabtree updating that 2008 study is going to provide us with even more accurate information."Commissioner Gary J. Hess said officials have given the solution to overcrowding a lot of thought."We've tried every angle, everything that we could do," he said.But the prison population, driven in large part by the opioid epidemic "is still escalating. Our numbers continue to go up. We have to look at incarceration in a different way," Hess said."We're not just building a facility for today; it's looking at tomorrow. And that's what this needs assessment will do," he said.