A divided House State Affairs Committee has voted to send Rep. Joe Palmer’s last-minute bill to sharply cut back the state prison system’s Correctional Industries program to the full House with a recommendation that it “do pass,” out of concern that it’s competing with private industry. Palmer said he was contacted last summer by a cabinet-maker in Meridian who said he was bidding against another business that utilized cabinetry made by Correctional Industries for a proposed apartment complex, and he saw that as unfair.

By law, correctional Industries can only sell its products to government agencies, non-profits, retailers or wholesalers. Currently, just one wholesaler or retailer, also in Meridian, buys cabinetry from Correctional Industries. Among those testifying against Palmer’s bill today were state Corrections Director Henry Atencio; state Corrections Board Chair Debbie Field, a former longtime state representative and committee chair; Kevin Mickelson, director of Correctional Industries; and Dan Romero, owner of Idaho Pacific Lumber Co. in Meridian, the business that buys the cabinets.

The bill, HB 711, is “going to handcuff our ability to create more work opportunities for our inmate population,” Atencio told the committee. The Correctional Industries program currently is self-sustaining; he said the bill would turn it into a much smaller job-training program that would require state funding, and more inmates would be idle in their cells.

Field suggested it would be better to just have the program stop doing cabinetry. “This is much more broad than it needs to be, and may cause more unintended consequences than we need right now,” she said. “Make sure we’re following the current law correctly. But we don’t want this legislation.”

An angry Palmer said, “Guess what – last summer I said you guys need to really not do cabinets. ... Then others were told we need to get out of the cabinet business so there’s not legislation coming forward.” He said the reason his bill has come forward so late in this year’s legislative session is, “I received a letter last week saying, ‘We decided to continue to do cabinets.’”

“We’ve heard over and over, ‘This is a training program, this is a training program,” Palmer said. “A training program that can produce enough cabinets to build an apartment complex – that’s not a training program, that’s production. … I just really do not think that we need to be in a situation where we’re competing with our industry that pays the taxes. ... You’re right, they are self-sufficient at this point. They didn’t start that way.”

The committee approved the bill on a voice vote, with five members asking to be recorded as voting no: Reps. Smith, Giddings, Barbieri, Kloc(Tway) and Loertscher.

Earlier, the House amended and unanimously passed a Senate-passed bill to expand current programs that allow prison inmates to work in agriculture to an array of additional types of ag businesses, from viticulture to logging to beekeeping. Many lawmakers said that measure would teach inmates marketable job skills while also helping out ag businesses that struggle to find workers. The House amendment to SB 1208 would have required those agricultural employers to provide workers’ compensation coverage for the inmates, but Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patti Anne Lodge, R-Huston, said that didn’t work legally, as prison inmates can’t be employees of an outside private company. As a result, the Senate didn’t concur in the House amendment and that bill died.

---

---