Brian Rich / Sun-Times file
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is demanding the state prison system take hundreds of inmates off his hands.
Dart says they’ve cost him more than $38 million though some of that has been covered by the federal government to house the inmates during the coronavirus pandemic, and that’s forced him to keep open a large cell building that he otherwise would have mothballed.
People convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison have remained in the Cook County Jail near 26th and California instead of being transferred to the Illinois Department of Corrections because the state was trying to keep COVID-19 from spreading in its prisons, Dart said.