Pay To Stay At Duval County Jail

JACKSONVILLE, FL -- It is nothing like a hotel, but now a person could have to pay to stay at the Duval County Jail.

Sheriff John Rutherford is proposing charging every inmate who comes through the jail two dollars a day.

"All of the major metropolitan counties charge this fee so it's just time for Duval County to get a little something back from our inmates," says Jail Chief Tara Wildes.

It costs the county $60 a day to house each inmate and Wildes says this fee would only be a small help.

Inmates now are supposed to pay a $20 processing fee and five dollars for any medical treatments.

But she says only one third of inmates at the jail have any money.

JSO estimates two dollars a day will bring them more than a half a million dollars a year.

The downtown jail alone costs 60 million a year to operate, but in tight budget times, it's a start.

"I think we're always trying to look for ways to do things better, to try to improve what we're doing, if we could think of something else tomorrow that might be better than this we'll look at that too," says Wildes.