Correction director sees solution in dome prisons

BOISE – The new chief of Idaho’s overcrowded prison system wants to expand enough to house 1,700 more inmates, saying the state could save “tens of millions” of housing dollars by making prison domes out of synthetic material stretched over aluminum beams.

Vaughn Killeen, who took over the Department of Correction from former Director Tom Beauclair in July after Gov. Jim Risch criticized the agency, says he wants to build a 1,000-bed men’s prison, a 400-bed women’s prison and a 300-bed prison for inmates with mental health problems.

They could be built using material like that made by Sprung Instant Structures, a West Jordan, Utah-based company whose domelike buildings house the Wright Brothers National Memorial in North Carolina, the U.S. military in Baghdad and facilities at Tamarack Resort, a new ski and golf area in Idaho’s Rocky Mountains.

Killeen said he wants to bring home the more than 450 Idaho inmates who are being held in Texas and Minnesota because of overcrowding here. He hopes to ask the 2007 Legislature for money to have the new facilities up and running by 2010.

That likely means Idaho’s shortage of prison space – nearly 7,000 inmates, but just 6,000 beds – will continue for at least three years. Idaho’s prison population grows by between 30 and 40 inmates a month.

“We’re at a critical juncture in the Department of Correction,” Killeen told Board of Correction members on Friday, according to the Idaho Statesman. “We’ve got to get moving with the crisis that we face.”

Killeen hopes to slash the estimated $232 million cost for new prisons – up from the $180 million figure Beauclair told lawmakers was needed during hearings earlier this year – by using domelike buildings from Sprung.

In the proposed new men’s prison, half the beds would go to inmates in intense education programs and treatment that lasts just months, so they can finish quickly and free space for more serious offenders.

Half the proposed new women’s beds would be destined for similar inmates, Killeen said.

Killeen said Idaho would operate the facilities, not farm them out to a private company.

Risch, who hand-picked Killeen, a former Ada County sheriff, for the job, said he wasn’t familiar with the plan, but is satisfied it’s moving in the right direction.