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.