Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 18, 1995 TAG: 9502200012
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID M. POOLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
The plan - approved by a 5-1 vote - would provide funds to plan for beds to accommodate 10,340 additional inmates. It includes construction money for only some of those beds.
Republican Gov. George Allen said the plan would be inadequate to help local jails already overcrowded with state inmates, and that it would force the state to release dangerous criminals "into our streets and neighborhoods."
"It will endanger the safety of Virginians," Allen said in a statement released by his office.
But state Sen. Richard Holland said the proposal is a responsible measure that provides funding for prison spaces that could reasonably be built in the next few years.
Holland, a Windsor Democrat who served on the conference committee, said the plan would get new beds on line fast by including money for private prisons and shipping 500 more inmates to out-of-state prisons.
"You know what the governor can do?" Holland said. "He can send down an amendment and see if it flies."
The rhetoric signals that prison construction, unlike last fall's bipartisan effort to reform the state's parole system, will become another front in the partisan battle between Allen and the Democrat-controlled General Assembly.
Allen proposed borrowing more than $400 million to build 9,090 prison beds over the next few years.
The assembly's conference report - put together by three senators and three delegates working to find a compromise between the prison plan each chamber passed last week - would scale back the borrowing to $97.5 million and provide $8.6 million on a pay-as-you-go basis in the 1995-96 budget.
The plan now goes before the full Senate and House of Delegates.
Holland noted that the state can build prisons only so fast; the assembly already has approved $172 million in prison construction that has yet to be put under contract.
In his statement, Allen called the conference report part of a "cynical political game" in which Democrats appear to solve a problem while preserving the status quo.
"The conference report offers a blue-smoke-and-mirrors plan that shortchanges prison construction funding, yet magically is said to produce more beds," Allen said.
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GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1995
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