CAMP HILL — Each year, more than 100,000 people pass through the state's local jails and prisons — some to await trial and others to serve time for everything from misdemeanor drug and driving violations to felonies.

Conditions at the 68 jails can vary greatly. Some are by-the-book models of cleanliness and safety; others are poorly supervised institutions where lax security and poor sanitation expose prisoners and staff to violence and disease.

These locally funded and managed jails operate with little public scrutiny. They are not required to make public their annual state inspections or the reports they file on unusual occurrences, such as inmate beatings, suicides and murders.

But an Associated Press review of two years of state inspection reports, obtained under a Right-to-Know request filed with the Pennsylvania Corrections Department, found many jails are struggling to meet even minimum standards for safety, housing, food quality and medical care.

The reports provide a window on a system that has endured a string of recent scandals — inmates accused of brutally beating new arrivals in Somerset County, jailers charged with abusing prison labor in Lackawanna County and work-release inmates accused of smuggling drugs back into prison in Lawrence County.

They also raise questions about whether system wide reforms are needed.

Last year, inspectors found female inmates at Fayette County Prison in Uniontown housed in areas where they were given no privacy from male inmates. The Northumberland County Prison in Sunbury, with four showers for 177 inmates, failed more inspection categories in 2003 than it passed.

And maintenance problems at the Lackawanna County Prison in Scranton last year included graffiti, rust, mold, flies and the use of sheets as cell carpeting.

"Ninety-six percent of the people going into the jails and prisons are coming out, they're coming back onto the street, and so we as a society have to decide what's really important, and what's most cost-effective," said Jim Barbee of the U.S. Justice Department's National Institute of Corrections, which provides corrections training and other support.

The prisoner population of the state's county jails is about 30,000. But the actual number of inmates who pass through the jails each year is much higher — sometimes 10 times greater than a jail's average daily population.

The Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, one of the largest county jails under one roof on the East Coast, houses about 2,400 inmates at any given time but nearly 35,000 prisoners spent at least some time there last year.

County lockups house a diverse group of prisoners, including defendants accused of murder and rape, convicted drunken drivers and child-support delinquents. Some are serving sentences — the vast majority less than two years — while many others are awaiting trial.

William DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, which advocates for improved prison conditions, said the public should realize many people who spend time in county jails are not going to be convicted.

"So they're innocent people who are now made to live in these kinds of conditions. We ought to be up in arms about this," he said.

DiMascio said tougher sentencing laws, particularly in drug cases, are behind the surge in the jail population — which has quadrupled over the last two decades.

"The fact of the matter is that we don't treat, in any meaningful way, this addiction problem," he said. "You have addictive behavior; going to jail isn't going to stop it."

Other societal problems are also concentrated in jails, including infectious disease, mental illness, illiteracy and racism.

"The transiency of the population, it presents problems that are hard to understand," said Tom Schlager, one of two Corrections Department inspectors who crisscrosses the state each year, inspecting county jails for compliance with 25 categories. "You're dealing with people that you don't have a whole lot of information about."

Even with significant redactions by the Corrections Department, the 2003-04 inspection reports show more than half the state's county jails did not fully meet state standards for housing and food.

"It's the basic, it's the minimum standards," Schlager said. "These aren't some lofty goals."

Fourteen jails scored a perfect 100 by complying with state standards in all 25 categories last year, up from 12 the year before.

Some categories were passed by nearly every jail, including prisoner hygiene, mail handling and access to legal resources.

Pennsylvania is one of more than 30 states that require jail inspections. A failed inspection does not result in state penalties, although poor reports can raise liability insurance premiums or be used in lawsuits as evidence administrators neglected problems.

"If you have an inspection report that continues to show that you're not complying, or you're not making any effort to correct those issues, absolutely it would be fuel for litigation," said Julio Algarin, warden of the Montgomery County Correctional Facility in Eagleville and president of the Pennsylvania County Prison Wardens Association.

Angus Love, a lawyer with the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, has won landmark court rulings in lawsuits over prison conditions. He said most problems are due to a lack of resources.

"To be fair, they're really being asked to do more and more and more, and every county has responded differently to this tremendous surge in population," Love said.

Jail operations consume about 9 percent of a typical county's budget.

The role crowding plays in a jail's operations was vividly illustrated last year after Clinton County opened a 138-bed expansion. Before that, its state inspection score was a 64 out of 100. Afterward, it received a 92.

But new construction is expensive. The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania estimates counties have poured about $1 billion over the past decade into building, renovating or expanding their jails, and some counties are starting to look for ways to cut their populations.

A statewide task force studying county jails found about half are overcrowded or at imminent risk of overcrowding.

Some wardens use the inspection reports as a blueprint for improving their jails. But others complain the inspections create an unfunded state mandate that hands ammunition to lawyers and can unfairly embarrass their workers.

In August, the County Commissioners Association passed a resolution asking for the ability to have some other entity perform the inspections. The resolution described relations between inspectors and "many" county jails as adversarial.

The Corrections Department has been drafting revisions to the jail inspection law. Potential changes include giving the department greater authority to evaluate poorly performing jails.

Experts say citizens hold contradictory views about incarceration — they want more offenders locked up and for longer periods, but often balk at paying for it.

"It's nicer to build parks and recreation areas than it is jails," said William Laughner, the recently retired warden at Armstrong County Jail, which last year had a perfect inspection score. "And it certainly is expensive to run jails. But if you didn't have them, what would you have? Anarchy."