State to begin sending inmates to Minnesota

BOISE – More than 300 Idaho inmates will be housed in Minnesota under an agreement with a private prison company, state Department of Correction officials announced Friday.

The inmates will be transferred from Idaho facilities to the Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Minn., by the end of the month.

Department Director Tom Beauclair said shipping the prisoners out of state was the only option open to Idaho’s overcrowded system.

“Idaho’s prisons and jails can no longer manage inmate growth and our ability to stretch the system is over,” Beauclair said in a prepared statement.

“This move creates burdens for our state fiscally and can harden our prison system, but it is what we must do to safely manage our growing offender population.”

The state has about 6,700 inmates in prisons designed to hold a total of 6,068 inmates.

Each prison has been at full capacity for more than three years, department officials said, and about 550 inmates are being housed in county jails.

In September, U.S. District Judge James Fitzgerald said the state’s overcrowded conditions were “dehumanizing” and ordered the state to remove nearly 200 beds from the Idaho State Correctional Institution in Boise.

Housing the inmates in Minnesota will cost Idaho taxpayers $53 per inmate per day, officials said. It costs about $48 per day to house an inmate in an Idaho prison.

More inmates could be sent out of state soon, the department said. Idaho’s inmate population is growing by about 30 offenders each month.

About 150 inmates volunteered for the transfer, according to the department. The others were chosen because they had no medical or discipline issues and had no pending parole or legal hearings.