The Marion County Sheriff’s Office is suing the Indiana Department of Correction, asking the court to force the state to speed up the transfers of people who have already been sentenced to prison.
The sheriff’s office is asking Marion Superior Court to require IDOC to transport people within five days of their conviction and immediately transfer people currently waiting in the Adult Detention Center in Indianapolis.
The complaint points to a state law that requires a county sheriff to transport a person convicted of a Level 6 or more serious felony to an IDOC facility within five days after conviction, but alleges that IDOC “routinely” delays transfers.
As of Sept. 2, the sheriff’s office says that the total was 258 people, almost 10% of the jail’s total inmate population.
The lawsuit is the latest turn in an ongoing frustration over Indiana’s prison transfer backlog. WFYI’s reporting in May found nearly 1,000 people statewide waiting, sometimes for months, for IDOC to move them from county jails to state prison, straining local jails, budgets and the people stuck in them.
“The law is clear about when these convicts are supposed to be transferred,” said Marion County Sheriff Kerry Forestal. “We are simply asking the Court to require the State to follow that law.”
WFYI has reached out to IDOC for comment about the lawsuit.
In 2025, county sheriffs' offices told the Indiana Capital Chronicle that IDOC had run out of money to pay county jails for holding people sentenced to state prison. The department owed at least 41 counties more than $6 million, but IDOC resumed payments in the fall of 2025.
But in the lawsuit, the sheriff’s office wrote that its estimates show that IDOC’s failure to fully reimburse Marion County costs its taxpayers about $4 million annually.
IDOC pays counties roughly half what it would cost to house the same person in a state prison.
Sheriff Forestal told WFYI about the consequences of the delays, including disrupting the treatment, job training and mental health care that judges and prosecutors built into plea agreements.
“If the agreement's been between a prosecutor and a public defender that they're going to go for this period of time, and we want to get them this program, but then they sit here for another four months — it's hard to sell the next person that example of how they can make their life better, other than just housing them,” he said.
In the 2026 legislative session, the bipartisan Senate Bill 252 would have required IDOC to transport sentenced people from the Marion County Adult Detention Center to a state prison every week. The bill failed.
But the bill’s co-author, Sen. Aaron Freeman (R-Indianapolis), told WFYI earlier this year that he plans to return to the issue before the 2027 legislative session, when lawmakers will write the next two-year state budget.
“It's an important topic for me,” Freeman said. “It's one that I think needs to be addressed.”
Farrah Anderson is WFYI's investigative health reporter. You can follow her on X at @farrahsoa or by email at fanderson@wfyi.org
