100 more inmates will be moved out of state

BOISE – Beset by overcrowded prisons, Idaho will transfer 100 more inmates out of the state, bringing the total prisoners who will have been sent elsewhere to about 550.

Idaho also plans to send 419 prisoners now in a private Texas prison to another, undisclosed facility, after allegations of prisoner maltreatment emerged there and because that state’s prison officials said they wanted the space for Texas inmates.

Gov. Jim Risch, as part of the state Board of Examiners, approved the latest inmate transfer Tuesday morning, declaring an emergency. The state’s prison population has doubled to nearly 7,000 over the past decade and left Idaho about 1,000 beds short.

“This can’t go on,” Risch said. “I don’t want to be running the Correction Department from the Board of Examiners.”

The state is planning a new $16 million, 300-bed expansion at the Idaho Correctional Center south of Boise, plus a 400-bed, privately run substance-abuse treatment center. It’s unclear when those facilities will be open.

Three Idaho counties – Kootenai, Caribou and Twin Falls – want to reduce the number of state inmates at their jails, and a construction delay on a 100-bed housing structure at a state prison near Boise have exacerbated the situation, Department of Correction Director Tom Beauclair said.

Still, Risch and other Republican lawmakers expressed concern Beauclair’s agency hadn’t properly planned for the scarcity of beds, forcing the situation to be addressed piecemeal.

“I’m concerned we haven’t had very forward-thinking direction from the director,” said Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert. “It just cries out for some long-term planning. We should have better evaluated the prison load, and we should have gone out for a (request for proposals) long before it was necessary to ship prisoners out of state.”

Prisoners’ daily costs are about $53 outside of Idaho, compared with about $48 in state.

Beauclair said there may be room in Minnesota for 50 Idaho inmates, though he declined to say where the rest of the prisoners, including those in Texas, might go, citing “security.”