WESA · Julia Zenkevich · September 9, 2026
Allegheny County Council on Tuesday introduced a bill meant to address a yearslong staffing crisis at the Allegheny County Jail — and establish a protocol for transporting incarcerated people to the hospital.
Hospital runs “are the number-one contributor to overtime in the jail, especially forced overtime,” said bill sponsor Bethany Hallam.
Under the current system, a prisoner who leaves the jail must be accompanied by two corrections officers. If the patient is admitted to the hospital, a sheriff’s deputy takes custody. Hallam said that can result in hours of overtime for both corrections officers and deputies.
A recent county controller report identified an overreliance on overtime at the jail as a major driver of Allegheny County’s mounting fiscal issues.
The overtime problem was exacerbated in mid-August, after Sheriff Kevin Kraus told county officials that deputies would no longer guard incarcerated people admitted to the hospital, citing fiscal and safety concerns. The move ended a decades-long partnership.
“The fiscal impact of this cooperation has never been an issue until this year,” sheriff’s office spokesperson Mike Manko told WESA in a statement. “Already in 2026, the amount of overtime needed to cover these hospital shifts has greatly exceeded expectations due to a substantial increase in the number of incarcerated individuals being sent to the hospital for inpatient treatment.”
According to Hallam, the number of hospital visits has been on the rise in recent months as medetomidine, a strong veterinary sedative, has entered the drug supply. Withdrawal symptoms can be severe and sometimes deadly , and often require admittance to critical care units. Hallam said the situation has led to “an exorbitant amount of forced overtime,” both for the corrections officers who now must stay at the hospital and for the guards needed to fill their posts in the jail itself.
“So we're paying overtime for four people for one person to go to the hospital,” Hallam said.
The personnel shortage has also caused lockdowns, during which school, other programming, family visits and non-emergency medical appointments are canceled.
The ordinance would codify the sheriff’s deputies’s responsibility to guard incarcerated people after they’re admitted to the hospital.
Ultimately, Hallam said she hopes to “move that funding from the jail that we're currently spending on overtime and shift it to the sheriff's department budget so that they can hire more sheriff's deputies, purchase more vehicles, and be able to take over those responsibilities.”
Manko declined to comment on Hallam’s proposal, but said “Sheriff Kraus remains willing to assist and has been working with the respective partners on a solution-based approach.”
Still, he added, “absent an immediate budget infusion to cover the increased overtime, [Kraus] is requesting a clearly defined interagency agreement that will firmly establish the dedicated funding for these details and also include the necessary safeguards to protect our deputies, hospital personnel, the incarcerated individual in our custody and the public.”
Advocates for incarcerated people praised the plan at Tuesday’s meeting.
“The Sheriff's Office and the jail administrators need clarity and the necessary funding to ensure that these hospital runs continue to happen and no longer result in a staffing crisis at the jail,” said Sharon Bonavoglia, a member of the Pennsylvania Interfaith Impact Network.
Abolitionist Law Center community organizer Tanisha Long described the plan as a win for deputies, corrections officers, incarcerated people, and county taxpayers.
“The sheriffs do the hospital runs. The incarcerated people get their out-of-cell time. The county doesn't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing this with corrections officers’ overtime,” she said.
The bill was sent to a council committee on public safety.
Also at Tuesday’s meeting, council members Alex Rose and Dan Grzybek introduced a bill that would require disclosure if artificial intelligence is used in campaign content for county elections. It was referred to a committee on government reform.