Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, December 7, 1994 TAG: 9412070135
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WYTHEVILLE LENGTH: Medium
The main reason: The per-day cost that localities would pay to send their prisoners to the regional jail would be much less than the cost of sending them to a for-profit, private prison.
Representatives of Radford and the counties of Pulaski, Giles, Floyd, Grayson and Tazewell are seeking 50 percent state funding for a 360-bed regional jail, expandable to more than 600 beds, to be located in Pulaski County.
The agreement being circulated to the local governments stipulates that if the state share is not forthcoming, the localities can back out of the project.
Corrections Corporation of America announced Monday that it has an option on 533 acres of farmland two miles east of Wytheville for a private prison. In addition to state prisoners, it would accommodate prisoners now housed in the overcrowded, 68-year-old Wythe County jail.
Wythe County helped pay for the original data-gathering study required by the state before it would approve the regional jail project for state funding. The county withdrew from the project before CCA began talking to Western Virginia localities about a site for a private prison.
The regional jail study group is looking at per-day prisoner costs to localities ranging from a low of $2.46 in 1998 to as much as $9.24 by 2003.
CCA also operates regional jails - ``Prisons, jails, juvenile, women, pre-release - you name it,'' Dana Moore, CCA business development director, said Tuesday - and bases the per-day prisoner costs on the range of services.
``We've done jails in the high $20s - $28 or $29 a day,'' she said, or less, depending on whether the operation included such services as drug and alcohol rehabilitation or education programs. ``We don't like to just warehouse inmates.''
Dave Rundgren, executive director of the New River Planning District Commission,, said that although CCA representatives may have met with officials from some of the localities involved in the regional jail project, he knew of no meeting between the regional jail group itself and CCA. The planning district staff has been working with the group and supplying data required by the state.
Moore said the private prison would have as many as 300 employees and would hire many of them, including medical and other specialists, from the region in which it is located. Salaries would be comparable to those paid at Bland Correctional Center in neighboring Bland County so as not to lure state employees away from that prison with higher pay.
Wythe County already is surrounded by prison facilities of various kinds.
The Bland Correctional Center has been in business since 1949. Pulaski County, the proposed site for the regional jail east of Wythe, has a prison camp. The Marion Correctional Treatment Center in Smyth County, formerly the forensic unit of a state mental hospital, was taken over by the Department of Corrections in 1980.
Moore said CCA, which would have representatives in Wytheville to meet with people who have questions about its plans, could arrange tours of its facilities in other states.
A private prison in Nashville, Tenn., where CCA has its headquarters, would be the most similar to the planned Wythe County prison, she said, but on a smaller scale. The Nashville prison has about 900 beds.
by CNB