SPOKANE -- Several staff members worked their last shift Thursday at the Spokane County Jail and Geiger Corrections Center, where 36 employees face layoffs by the end of the year.

Geiger's work-release program and electronic home monitoring programs are being eliminated which could hurt the facility's effectiveness in dealing with repeat offenders.

Rayde Reyes was sentenced to a year in jail after his second DUI. Keeping Reyes in jail would have cost taxpayers $82 a day or $29,000 a year. So the sheriff's office decided to send Reyes through rehab and have him serve out his sentence in Geiger's work-release program.

“I really knew I had to start over, I just didn't really know how until the program pushed me in the right direction,” Reyes said.

But now the work-release program is being dismantled and its staff is being laid off as the sheriff's office slashes $3-million from its jail and Geiger budgets.

“We did cut back in some [maintenance and operations], some contract services that we had used,” Captain John McGrath, Spokane County Sheriff's Office, said. “The major cuts did come from staff level.”

Without probation staff to supervise work release inmates, they will be forced to be locked up at Geiger full-time and stand to lose their jobs.

CPT. McGrath worries unemployment will lead these almost rehabilitated prisoners to fall back into crime when they're released. McGrath is scrambling to find a way to wrap up the sentences by the end of the year of the inmates who are involved in the program.

“What we're doing is looking for help from the court so that we may be able to convert some of the remaining sentence to a work program, have them report back to do day-labor to complete their sentence,” he said.

About 100 inmates on electronic home monitoring might also have to be re-locked up at Geiger, which could cost the taxpayers more money as taxpayers don't have to feed, clothe or provide medical treatment for inmates on house arrest.