Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 24, 1990 TAG: 9007240316
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B/1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER SOUTHWEST BUREAU
DATELINE: BLAND LENGTH: Medium
Such a facility would take state or federal prisoners from Virginia, the District of Columbia and perhaps other states where overcrowding is a problem. The localities would pay the private firm to house the prisoners for a daily charge.
Jail Builders Inc. would offer to pay the county $100,000 a year and would provide a cruiser each year for the county sheriff's office once the prison was operating. It would require about 60 employees from the area, and a site of perhaps 100 acres to allow for expansion.
There are no private prisons in Virginia, although some state legislators have suggested that using them could save the state money. The state would have to approve a private facility before it could take any prisoners from Virginia jails or prisons.
"We don't compete with the state at all," Jimmy Roberts, a representative of Jail Builders, told the Bland County Board of Supervisors. "We cooperate with the state. If the state doesn't want us or the county doesn't want us, we don't want to be there. It's too large an investment."
Roberts said Jail Builders is not looking at any other Virginia county for one of its facilities. Its representatives decided to approach Bland County because the Bland Correctional Center - a medium-security state institution currently with 592 prisoners - is already located there and people are used to it.
"We usually try to choose one that's not automatically afraid of it," Roberts said.
"This will be the wave of the future," he said. "There's drastic [prison] overcrowding in the United States - more than you realize, because people don't like to publicize their problem." But he said it is becoming publicized as more inmates file suits against states.
Jail Builders has only one facility operational now, in Sneedville, Tenn., but is looking at 300-acre and 100-acre tracts elsewhere as other possible prison sites.
The Sneedville facility is about seven miles from the Tennessee-Virginia border at Lee County. It is a 67-bed facility built and owned by Jail Builders and operated since it opened about two years ago by the Hancock County, Tenn., sheriff's office.
"We'd be under your-all's jurisdiction and would probably be under your Sheriff's Department," Roberts said. "That's why we want to keep them happy by giving them a cruiser."
Supervisor William R. Ramsey, a 14-year Bland Correctional Center employee in charge of its recreation programs, suggested that some county officials visit the Hancock County facility to see how it is run. After that, the board could schedule an informational public hearing where county residents could ask Jail Builders' representatives any questions about the proposed project.
Prisoners are governed by the regulations of the state where they were sentenced, he said, so far as early release, work release or good-behavior time goes. "In most cases, they're rotated from one place to another and we'd be taking them in the middle of the sentence . . . They wouldn't be jailed here and they wouldn't be released here."
The private facility also could be used to ease temporary overcrowding at the Bland County jail, he said, or a certain number of beds could be set aside for county prisoners on a permanent basis.
by CNB