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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Way Cleared For Private Prison Judge Throws Out Hawkins’ Lawsuit Against The State

State Sen. Stan Hawkins’ lawsuit against the state was thrown out by a judge Monday, and state prison officials immediately said they’ll sign a contract for Idaho’s first private prison today.

Hawkins had sought to block the $100 million contract until the Legislature could review it, saying he thought Idahoans were getting a bad deal. He won a temporary restraining order last week, but 4th District Judge Duff McKee on Monday granted the state’s motion to cancel it.

It’s not the Legislature’s role to “micromanage” the details of a contract with a public agency, McKee told the court as he gave his ruling. Instead, the Legislature authorizes in general the construction of a facility, then has the final say by holding the purse strings.

“It seems to me that the Legislature has complete and total control over the contract by simply refusing to fund it,” McKee said.

Hawkins contended that by the time the Legislature considers contract payments in 1999, the state already will be obligated to pay payments on state Building Authority bonds that will finance the private prison’s construction.

“The taxpayers lost here today,” Hawkins said. “The real question ought to be who won here today. Bureaucracy won, taxpayers lost.”

John Hayden, chairman of the state Board of Correction, said the board’s objective was simply to get a new prison that could be built and run more cheaply than other state facilities.

The Legislature’s budget committee, on which Hawkins serves, two years ago refused to fund a new prison, and instead directed the Correction Department to explore privatization.

The new private prison will cost about $27 million less, over three years, than a state-run facility.

But Hawkins, R-Ucon, contended the state could have saved even more by picking a lower bid from among the eight it received.

The Corrections Corporation of America bid, at $49 million for construction and $38.42 per inmate, per day for operations, was the fourth-highest of the eight. But cost was just one of three areas in which the bids were evaluated. The other two were the quality of the plan to build and run the prison, and the company’s qualifications for the job.

“We’re building a good facility,” Hayden said. “We also have another charge of safety, along with the taxpayer dollars.”

Although inmate growth has been flat for the past five months, Idaho’s prisons are filled beyond capacity and hundreds of inmates are housed out of state or backed up in county jails.

State Correction Director Jim Spalding said even if inmate growth stays flat, the state could fill a new 500-bed prison addition that will open in January and the new 1,250-bed private prison with existing inmates. For the past four years, the state had average prison growth of 30 inmates a month.

Hawkins said he expects that growth to slow as Idaho looks into reforming its criminal sentencing laws and finding alternatives to prison for nonviolent offenders.

Seventy-eight percent of those sent to prison in the past year were nonviolent criminals. Four crimes accounted for 35 percent: drug possession, drunken driving, writing bad checks and driving without a license.

But Spalding said any changes in sentencing won’t affect those already behind bars. “We can’t sit back and wait for that to happen,” he said.

Idaho held off on building new prisons for the past seven or eight years, Spalding said, and ended up “behind the curve.”

“We’re trying to catch up,” he said. “This is going to be the first opportunity to do that.”

, DataTimes