Idaho ends Texas prison contract; will move inmates to Oklahoma

BOISE – The Idaho Department of Correction has terminated its contract with private prison company The GEO Group and will move the roughly 305 Idaho inmates currently housed at a GEO-run prison in Texas to a private prison in Oklahoma.

Correction Director Brent Reinke notified GEO officials Thursday in a letter.

Reinke said the company’s chronic understaffing at the Bill Clayton Detention Center in Littlefield, Texas, put Idaho offenders’ safety at risk.

An Idaho Department of Correction audit found that guards routinely falsified reports to show they were checking on offenders regularly – even though they were sometimes away from their posts for hours at a time.

“I hope you understand how seriously we’re taking not only the report but the safety of our inmates,” Reinke told the Associated Press on Thursday. “They have an ongoing staffing issue that doesn’t appear to be able to be solved.”

The contract will end Jan. 5. Reinke said the department wanted to pull the inmates out immediately, but state attorneys found there wasn’t enough cause to allow the state to break free of the contract without a 60-day warning period. In the meantime, Reinke said, Idaho correction officials have been sent to the Texas prison to help with staffing for the next two months.

GEO will be responsible for transferring the inmates to the North Fork Correctional Facility in Sayer, Okla. – also a private prison, but run by Corrections Corp. of America. GEO will cover the cost of the move, Reinke said, but Idaho will have to pay $58 per day per inmate in Oklahoma, compared to $51 per day at Bill Clayton.

Amber Martin, vice president for The GEO Group, of Florida, said she couldn’t comment on the audit or on Idaho’s decision to end the contract. She referred calls to the company spokesman, Pablo Paez, who could not immediately be reached by the Associated Press.

As of Oct. 1, Idaho had nearly 7,300 total inmates.

The Bill Clayton audit describes the latest in a series of problems that Idaho has had with shipping inmates out of state. Overcrowding at home forced the state to move hundreds of inmates to a prison in Minnesota in 2005, but space constraints soon uprooted them again, this time to a GEO-run facility in Newton, Texas.

There, guard abuse and prisoner unrest forced another move to two new GEO facilities: 125 Idaho inmates went to the Dickens County Correctional Center in Spur, Texas, while 304 went to Bill Clayton in Littlefield.