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  • tonight, an inside look at an operation that cost taxpayers 100 and $50,000 a day.

  • And it's all focused on the care and control of criminals.

  • NBC to Jacqueline Beavis went inside the Lee County Jail to see what you're paying for, as well as what's being done to keep costs down.

  • Sunrise over a city with its own rules.

  • 1600 inmates on any given day.

  • Care costing control.

  • We're nearly 1000 inmates.

  • Calm and go in just a week.

  • You don't have a no vacancy sign that we can flip on at night.

  • So we gotta take you got take everybody, costing taxpayers nearly $58 million a year, everything from a courtyard for weekly activity to their food.

  • They have to have at least 2200 calories a day, two hot meals to keeping them and the officers who guard them say, finding us a serious weapon for me.

  • It's very gratifying because I feel like I've made everybody's job here safer.

  • But the most costly is the multi $1,000,000 medical budget.

  • While they're in our facility, whether it's for a day or what it's for five years, whatever medical condition you come in with or that you acquire while in our facility.

  • We gotta treat as much as $8 million every year goes to carrying and treating every inmates medical needs.

  • It's a major chunk of the operating budget.

  • We're not doing anything.

  • It's unnecessary.

  • That's just the mandatory requirements to keep them healthy.

  • Well, there are facilities, but the jail works to save taxpayer dollars.

  • At the same time, inmate workers trim their time behind bars by clocking in 60 hours a week as maintenance workers, lunch hands, even seamstresses.

  • They paint, they do the dishes that they cooked.

  • Food waxing.

  • The floors are cutting the grass outside, and that work lessens the chance they'll return with punishment.

  • So you punish and then you put him back out without teaching many things.

  • So then what have they learned?

  • So then the possibilities I'm coming back is greater.

  • It's not perfect, but it's a system leaders here say works one out of could be 100 success story that we have.

  • You know, that is just a CZ important as having all 100 success stories with every stitch of improvement inside, correction officers hope for success outside keeping the community safer at a lesser cost.

tonight, an inside look at an operation that cost taxpayers 100 and $50,000 a day.

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