Area Gets Tougher Inmates Airway Heights Trades Minimum-Security Prisoners For Harder Cases

Tougher sentencing laws and budget cuts at a West Side prison are sending tougher inmates to Airway Heights Corrections Center.

In June, 85 medium-security inmates moved into the prison on the West Plains while 85 minimum-custody offenders were transferred from Airway to McNeil Island.

Medium-security inmates now make up one quarter of Airway Heights’ main institutional population. More of these more serious, and often problem offenders are expected to arrive in the months ahead as the state struggles with a bubble of inmates serving longer sentences than ever.

“It’s not like this bubble will end,” said R. Peggy Smith, the top researcher with the state Department of Corrections. “The bubble is continuing and it will only get worse.”

The medium-custody inmates were moved because although the state will spend $728 million on prisons in the next two years, nearly $774,000 was cut from McNeil Island’s budget. McNeil Island needed to send its higher-risk inmates to Airway Heights, which has the staff and capacity to handle them.

Secondly, the state continues to feel the ripples of stiffer drug laws and Initiative 159, the “hard time for armed crime” law that passed four years ago. The law lengthened sentences for people who commit crimes while armed, and it reduced the amount of good time those inmates could receive. Inmates who once were released after serving 70 percent of their sentences now are required to serve 85 percent. The result is that even with a new prison opening next year at Stafford Creek, prisons are running at 102 to 130 percent of capacity.

“Everything is full and we have 250 in Colorado,” said Deputy Corrections Secretary Eldon Vail. Vail was promoted to lead the state’s prison operations Wednesday when his predecessor, Dave Savage, retired.

The inmate wave makes medium-security prisons like Airway Heights valuable property. Half of the prison’s six housing units were built to handle more than 700 medium-security inmates, although they have been mostly used for long-term minimum custody inmates until now.

Medium-security cells have toilets, sinks and electronically controlled doors so that inmates can be locked down. In the three long-term minimum units, on the other hand, inmates must be manually locked in their cells and let out to get water or use the bathroom.

Airway Heights will not boost staff to handle the now 384 medium inmates, but it is boosting awareness. Medium-custody inmates are considered a more difficult population. Their classification is based on length of sentence remaining and their behavior in prison so far.

“People with longer time to serve are less inclined to be compliant and are more likely to act out than people approaching their release date,” said Cly Evans, spokesman at Airway Heights. “We have to be more vigilant with them. There’s more potential for problems.”

Meanwhile the state is renegotiating a yearlong contract with Correctional Services Corp. to continue housing Washington inmates at a private prison in Crowley, Colo. Washington inmates destroyed cells, injured an officer and were gassed into submission shortly after they arrived there in March. A new contract will keep inmates there up to a year but it will also require improvements in the prison’s performance.

Vail said it was a “tough call’ to know what the long-term affect of medium-security inmates may be on the Spokane community. Custody levels do not reflect the risk of recidivism. Sex offenders, for instances, are usually model or minimum-security prisoners inside but have higher rates of recidivism outside.

Nevertheless, he said the Department of Corrections is increasingly talking about how to help communities best handle released offenders of all kinds. The lead program in that direction, he noted, is in Spokane, where community custody officers work in neighborhood cop shops.

“Spokane is the lead for where the rest of the state needs to go,” Vail said. “We want to get our officers in neighborhoods working with law enforcement in monitoring offenders and intervening when they start to slip and slide.”