Calls mount for new prisons
BOISE – Continuing problems with a private Texas prison that’s housing hundreds of Idaho’s overflow inmates have even the head of the Idaho ACLU calling for Idaho to build more prisons.
“Bottom line, we probably have to immediately start thinking about building more prisons in Idaho – which is a terrible thing for an ACLU activist to say,” said Jack Van Valkenburgh, head of the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho. “I want my money going to schools, I don’t want it going for prisons. But you’ve got to provide minimally adequate care.”
Van Valkenburgh noted that he favors sentencing reform and more drug treatment as “the way to solve the prison problem,” but said Idaho is risking more crime in the future by sending its inmates to facilities like the Newton County Correctional Center in Texas. “My sense is the mentality of … this facility … doesn’t have rehabilitation and reintegration into society as a goal.”
Ninety-five percent of Idaho inmates eventually will be released back into Idaho communities.
State Correction Director Tom Beauclair last year asked lawmakers to approve $160 million worth of new prison construction, providing 2,200 more beds. They instead approved a new 400-bed treatment center, plus a $16 million, 300-bed expansion of the Idaho Correctional Center south of Boise.
Now, Beauclair is working on a request for more than $300 million in new prison construction to present to next year’s Legislature.
“We need funding for a 1,500-bed prison, which would be full by the time it’s built – that’s the reality we face,” Beauclair said. That new prison alone would cost in the neighborhood of $100 million. “They do not come cheap.”
Idaho now has more than 400 inmates at the Newton County center, a former county jail that’s now a private prison run by GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut Corp. In less than three months, there have been two escapes; three prison employees disciplined after an incident in which they roughed up and sprayed pepper spray on six Idaho inmates; and a demonstration in which 85 Idaho inmates refused to return to their cells for hours in protest over conditions at the facility.
A public records request to the Idaho Department of Corrections yielded a stack of complaints about the Texas lockup from inmates and their families. “We are locked in these windowless rooms for 20+ a day,” one inmate wrote. “Many inmates are spending 22 hours a day on their bunks.”
Others complained of inattentive or abusive guards, cold food, lack of recreation and programs, and fivefold increases in the cost to families for phone calls to inmates.
“This jail is so dirty and unsafe,” one inmate wrote.
Another wrote about the guards: “This (sic) people hate Mexicans. They made that clear to me right away. They don’t like whites either.”
State Sen. Denton Darrington, R-Declo, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he is skeptical of inmate complaints. “There’s a way for those people and their families to avoid all this, and that’s for the person not to do the crime,” Darrington said.
But he said with Idaho’s continuing growth in inmate population, the state does need to build more prisons, send overflow inmates out of state and provide more treatment and sentencing alternatives for judges. “We’re going to have to do some of all of the above,” Darrington said.
As of May, Idaho had 6,981 inmates – up from 2,900 in 1994. More than half were serving time for drug, alcohol or property crimes.
Jim Tibbs, chairman of the state Board of Correction, said he’s “very concerned” about sending inmates out of state, but said, “There’s no place to put ‘em in Idaho.”
Idaho already has about 500 prison inmates housed in county jails across the state.
“Personally, I don’t like it, I don’t think the director does either, I don’t think the staff does,” Tibbs said. “It’s expensive, when you talk about an expense of $6 million a year that goes to somebody else’s economy, and you lose control to a certain extent over the management of the offenders.” But, he said, “the state has kind of fallen behind the curve as far as facilities.”
State prisons spokeswoman Melinda Keckler said the escapes and other concerns in Texas still are being investigated, and when that’s complete, the Corrections Department plans to give the GEO Group “a time frame for developing an action plan to correct any deficiencies or concerns we have.”
But for now, she said, there are no plans to abandon the Texas contract. “The facility is adequate,” Keckler said. “It meets constitutional standards.”
Idaho had several hundred inmates at a private prison in Minnesota earlier this year with hardly any complaints, but had to move them and others to Texas this spring because Minnesota decided it needed those beds.
Van Valkenburgh said, “My understanding is that we went to Texas because it was the best thing available. I would urge the director and others in government to not be satisfied. There have been too many problems, and I think there continue to be substantial problems.”
Idaho corrections officials are now working on a request for proposals for 1,400 out-of-state beds for the next four years. The ideal location would be somewhere all the inmates could be housed in one facility, Beauclair said.
“I don’t think anyone really wants to build new prisons, because of the cost and just all of the things that go along with it,” Beauclair said, “but then you reach a point of crisis. … I think that’s kind of where we’re at.”