Somebody forgot to include the plastic spoons with lunch Tuesday in cellblock 6A of the Allen County Jail.

As some 50 inmates ate, played cards, pondered their next move on a homemade chessboard or watched television, confinement Officer Jody Merriman requested more spoons, monitored his computer, listened to his handheld radio and did paperwork. All while trying to watch the inmates.

After spoons were delivered and the meals eaten, he scrambled to count the spoons and trays to make sure none were missing, knowing anything and everything is a potential weapon.

“When I first started, there was a time of day when you could probably sit down and read the newspaper,” said Officer Jeff Kroemer, who joined the department in 1998. “Now you're going constantly.”

The economy may be in trouble, but in Allen County and around the country, business is booming at the jail. With some 2.3 million people behind bars, the U.S. leads the world in imprisoning its citizens. A new report by the Pew Center on the States found 1 in 100 Americans is imprisoned. “Prison costs are blowing holes in state budgets and barely making a dent in recidivism rates,” the report concludes.

Stiffer drug laws and sentencing guidelines helped trigger the explosion, from about 450,000 inmates in 1980 to about 2.3 million at the end of last year. Indiana's prison population grew at a slower rate but still outstripped population growth by more than doubling in the last 20 years.

When it opened at 417 S. Calhoun St. in 1981, the jail was designed to hold about 180 prisoners, according to Jill Werling, Allen County controller. It most recently expanded in 2004 and, as of Tuesday, housed 658 inmates. Between 1991 and 2007, the number of prisoners processed annually increased 31 percent.

Many of the new inmates are mentally ill. The Department of Justice reports 21 percent of inmates at local jails are mentally ill, and officers say the Allen County Jail is no different. The influx has required greater patience and training, said Jail Commander Chuck Hart. Officers go beyond the call, such as when they brushed the teeth of a catatonic inmate. Hart said officers are well-trained, but money for more training is needed.

“We get individuals who aren't able to be on their own on the streets, in their houses and there's no room for them anywhere else. So they come to jail,” Hart said. Aside from the $35 it costs to house an inmate for one day, an emotional price is paid by officers such as Kroemer and Penny Lake.

“You could have somebody that's come in and out of here for practically the 18 years that I've been here,” Lake said. “I trust them no more than when I saw them in 1991 than I do if I would have (seen) them yesterday. You never know when mentally, that's it.”

Like serious violence, officers say suicides are infrequent, but inevitable. When an inmate hanged himself, it was Kroemer who performed CPR to no avail, a memory that won't go away. Neither will hearing a 13-year-old boy being tried for murder ask to play with Legos in his cell.

“I had a child the same age, and I couldn't imagine grounding them to a small room and that's where they're going to stay,” he said. “And then they're facing prison. It's just unbelievable.”

These are the stories you don't want to tell your loved ones, Kroemer and Lake say. So what happens behind bars often stays there or is shared among fellow officers. “All the difficulties we go through makes us friends as confinement officers,” Kroemer said.

Despite the camaraderie among colleagues, the prospect of a never-ending increase in prisoners is disheartening to Kroemer, who believes the system is failing and more alternatives to incarceration need to be tried, such as house arrest and work-release programs.

“With the increasing numbers, everybody's working harder, and when you put that extra stress on them, there's just some point where you're going to break,” Kroemer said. “Something has to change.”