Otter proposes private prisons

BOISE – Idaho Gov. Butch Otter wants to change state laws to let private prisons set up in the state and house out-of-state prisoners – as long as Idaho gets first rights to the beds.

That’s part of the plan for getting Idaho a new and sorely needed 2,100-bed prison within the next three years. The state’s expecting to be short 5,500 prison beds over the next 10 years and now has hundreds of inmates housed out of state.

“It’s really a question of capital,” Otter said Thursday. “We just simply, without absolutely busting the budget, we can’t make that kind of capital available as we need it.” Private companies, on the other hand, “can go out in the marketplace and kind of work their magic.”

The state has convened a work group of key legislators, corrections officials and representatives of two private prison firms that house Idaho prisoners to look at options for new legislation that Otter could propose to next year’s Legislature.

“The fact is, it saves the taxpayers between $250 million and $350 million in capital outlay, because whether we build the prison or we lease the prison, we’re still paying X-number of dollars a day to feed the prisoners and house the prisoners,” said Robin Sandy, chairwoman of the Idaho Board of Correction.

Idaho has one privately operated prison, near the state prison complex south of Boise, operated by Corrections Corporation of America. But the facility is owned by the state. When legislation was crafted to permit it a decade ago, Idaho carefully steered clear of allowing any out-of-state inmates to be brought to private prisons here.

Brent Reinke, state corrections director, said, “If we want investors to invest in Idaho, they need to be able to get a return on investment. … There’s a desire by both the board of correction and the governor’s office to have Idaho’s next prison be privatized.”

Otter said he wouldn’t want to permit any private prisons other than those that are contracting with the state to house Idaho prisoners. “Actually what we’re doing is we’re asking them to overbuild,” he said. That way, the company could rent out the extra beds that Idaho doesn’t immediately need, but the state could “bump” the other prisoners when it needs those beds. That would let Idaho “grow into” the new prison, the governor said.

Added Sandy, “It would only be to fill these beds up until we need them.”

Sandy noted that such arrangements already are common in the private prison industry. Idaho had some of its prisoners bumped from a private prison in Minnesota because that state needed the beds; the Idaho inmates were moved to Texas.

Idaho has had numerous problems when it has placed its inmates out of state, from riots and multiple escapes at a private lockup in Louisiana in 1997 to escapes, complaints and an inmate’s suicide amid substandard conditions this year in a Texas private jail.

Fifty-six Idaho inmates still remain in the Dickens County Correctional Facility in Spur, Texas, where Idaho inmate Scot Noble Payne committed suicide in March. Reinke said the state hopes to move them all shortly to another private Texas prison operated by the same firm, the GEO Group, in Del Rio, Texas. He said GEO plans to sever its relationship with the Dickens County lockup in December.

Reinke and other corrections officials just returned from a site visit to the Del Rio prison, the Val Verde Correctional Facility, and found it clean, newer, well-run and closely supervised by the local sheriff’s department, he said. On the downside, inmates there see the outside only through the skylights of a gym and spend much of their time idle.

Also, four inmates there are ill, and two others died in July from a mystery illness. But Reinke and GEO Senior Vice President Don Houston said all are foreign nationals who apparently brought their illnesses with them.

State and federal health officials, including some from the Centers for Disease Control, have examined and tested the facility and found nothing amiss.

“They don’t know what it is yet, but … it looks like it was something brought in with these offenders,” Houston said. “They’re illegal aliens. The chief of the Texas Department of Health has been very satisfied with what they’ve seen at the facility.”

Hospitals in San Antonio and Del Rio that handled the sick foreign inmates also have been evaluated, Houston said.

Reinke said Idaho’s prison population has been growing far faster than the state’s population for the past decade. He’s working with an array of criminal justice officials on proposals for alternatives to incarceration to help slow that growth, but at the same time, Idaho clearly will need more prison space, he said.

He estimated that by 2012, half of Idaho’s inmates will be housed somewhere other than state-operated prison beds, including county jails, the current privately operated prison and new private prison space.

His hope is that with the development of private prison space in Idaho, the state could keep all its inmates in-state. That would give the state more control over their supervision and programming, ensuring they can meet parole requirements and preserving crucial connections to their families that can help them once they’re released.

Otter said he’s not thrilled about opening Idaho to out-of-state prisoners. “Do I like it? No, not really,” he said. But he said with Idaho’s current prison trends, “We’ve got a problem, and this is one of the ways to get us out of the problem.”