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A slow but steady rise in the jail population has county officials considering whether they will need to expand the correctional facility in Clarksburg, which opened in March 2003.

Arthur Wallenstein, director of the county Department of Correction and Rehabilitation, told a County Council committee last week the county needs to start planning how it will meet the expected growth in its prison population.

Council members had asked Wallenstein for an update on the inmate population given recent county and state funding reductions to his department.

Since the beginning of the year, the number of inmates in the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in Clarksburg has fluctuated little, between 700 and 744 inmates.

Warden Robert Green told the council's Public Safety Committee on Thursday that the population was 743 that day.

The jail's capacity is 1,028, but the actual number of usable beds is less, he said.

Some inmates need to be separated because they are members of the same gang, some need to be separated because they belong to rival gangs and some need to be separated because they are co-defendants, Green told the committee. There are also separate units for men, women and ill inmates as well as some set aside for isolation.

The jail has had to open up its final housing unit — which has not been regularly used or staffed — approximately 45 days since July to balance the complex prison population, Wallenstein said.

County Executive Isiah Leggett and the County Council supported a request by Wallenstein three years ago to begin a confinement study to determine long-range needs for the county jail, but they have not funded the effort. The study will cost $300,000.

The study would define the need for jail beds, work-release beds and programs in the county for the next 20 years, Wallenstein said.

"I was alerting them that we've got to do this study," Wallenstein said Monday of his testimony last week.

The last confinement study was done in the early 1990s, before the Clarksburg jail was open.

A study will take one year, and if an addition to the jail would be needed, that would take another five years, he said.

The jail in Clarksburg was built with infrastructure to support another 224 beds, Wallenstein said.

"Now we're ready to start the planning to add those 224 additional beds," he said.

Correction officials have not needed the additional beds because the pre-trial release program has allowed them to manage the prison population, Wallenstein said. The program has removed 150 individuals from the system, he said.

"We operate the best pre-trial system in the country," Wallenstein said.

The cost of one pre-trial case worker is $70,000 a year versus $800,000 to open one housing unit, he told the council.

Capacity could be further increased by greater use of the state prison for long-term sentences, Wallenstein said.

The maximum sentence for an inmate at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility is supposed to be 18 months, but judges sometimes allow inmates to serve longer terms in Clarksburg.

"We would like to recommend state prison for inmates whose jail records are poor and characterized by misbehavior," Wallenstein said. "This is to free up bed space for local prisoners."

He estimates 20 to 50 inmates a year in the county jail could be moved to the state prison system on a case-by-case basis.