Private Prisons Cheaper; Legislators Ask Why Panel Promises Inquiry Into All Departments Of State Government

If contracting for a private prison will be quicker and less expensive for Idaho than building its own, does that mean something’s wrong with the way the state does things?

That was the question on the minds of members of the Legislature’s budget committee Monday, as they heard the results of a study they ordered last year on prison privatization.

Corrections Director Jim Spalding told lawmakers that private prisons usually cost 15 to 25 percent less to build than public ones, and operating costs typically are 5 to 15 percent less. A 1,000-bed medium-security private prison could be built in about 18 months, while a comparable public prison would take three to four years.

Rep. Robert Geddes, R-Preston, the committee’s co-chairman, said afterward, “What that study proved is government is not very efficient. We have to see why.”

Sen. Atwell Parry, R-Melba, the other co-chairman, agreed. He and Geddes will launch an inquiry, he said.

“I think we may be interested to look into the whole of state government,” Parry said. “If it’s true in prisons, it must be true in other buildings.”

But the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee is likely to let the private prison project go forward, Parry said, even while it looks into the broader question.

“I think there is some support to go private,” he said.

Gov. Phil Batt has come out strongly in support of the idea, saying the state has no choice. Idaho’s inmate population is growing at a rate of more than 400 inmates a year, and the state has no money to build a big new prison. Hundreds of inmates already are being housed in county jails or through expensive contracts with out-of-state prisons.

Spalding said Idaho is nearly ready to send out requests for proposals for a 1,250-bed private prison, with expansion space to bring it up to 3,000, to be built on state-owned land south of Boise or elsewhere.

“This venture would be one of the largest private ventures in the country,” Spalding told the committee.

Seven-hundred-fifty of the beds would be medium-security, and 500 would be minimum-security.

Sen. Stan Hawkins, R-Ucon, said he was uncomfortable heading into such a large project without more study of why Idaho’s prison population is growing so quickly, and whether sentencing patterns are appropriate.

Batt convened a task force last year to look into that question. The group found that Idahoans generally support strict sentences.

Spalding said the state has run out of time for study. “We are out of beds right now,” he said.

The reason state buildings take so long to plan and build probably is because of state purchasing procedures, he said. They are designed to ensure fairness.

Private companies’ main cost advantage comes because they don’t have the employee retirement costs the state has.

Rep. Don Pischner, R-Coeur d’Alene, said, “I would privatize this whole place, if I had the opportunity.”

“I believe in the competitive process. That’s my philosophy,” said Pischner, the budget committee’s only Panhandle representative. “I think competition is what made this country.”

, DataTimes