A $400,000 federal grant will pay for an assistant Schuylkill County district attorney dedicated to drug court work.

County commissioners on Wednesday approved hiring James Caravan on an as-needed basis for $28.10 an hour as of Oct. 19.

The grant, through the U.S. Department of Justice, became available as of Oct. 1, said county Administrator Gary R. Bender, so Caravan can be paid for the time since Oct. 12 that he’s spent training for the job.

He has sat in on staff meetings, reviewed the manual and attended drug court sessions, said District Attorney Christine A. Holman.

The Adult Drug Court Discretionary Grant, procured by U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, will be used to hire more staff to help with drug rehabilitation and allow the county to accept more drug court participants.

In addition to the part-time assistant district attorney, the grant will pay for wages and benefits for a full-time person for the adult probation office, a treatment coordinator for the Drug & Alcohol program, and public defender’s office.

The county has to provide a one-third match for the three-year grant.

The county started its drug court, an intensive, 14-month program, in January. There are now about 35 participants.

In other judicial matters, the county prison board on Wednesday learned the number of inmates in the county’s aging jail on Sanderson Street in Pottsville is now packed with 298 inmates, with 48 triple-celled.

That’s over the maximum of 277 inmates the county promised the state Department of Corrections.

Warden Eugene Berdanier cited the unusually heavy court week as the reason for the spike. Last month, the daily average was 277, with a peak of 289.

Board member President Judge William E. Baldwin noted the overcrowding may spike again in the second week of November, when plea court is held.

He said many of the inmates are not yet tried or sentenced, and that makes it difficult to house them in other counties.

Schuylkill started shipping overflow inmates out to other jails after the state DOC in May 2016 ordered the county to stop accepting new inmates until it got the population below a daily average of 277. It lifted the restriction three months later, after the county kept the numbers down by housing inmates at other counties’ prisons.

Housing inmates out-of-county costs the county $65-$72 per inmate per day in addition to transportation and overtime costs.

As of Wednesday, 56 inmates were outsourced. There were seven in Berks County, 21 in Centre County, one in Columbia County, five in Lackawanna County, and 22 in Snyder County.

Commissioners hired Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates, Mechanicsburg, for $38,400 to update its 2008 prison study to determine what the county will need over the next 20 years.

The update, which will take several months, involves determining the needs of the intermediate punishment center through the review of current inmate statistics and update population projections and building program requirements.