Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Editorial: Virginia is open to prison business
It wisely had quit renting prison space to other states, but in hard times, the money was too good.
From the RoundTable blog
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Virginia is planning to make money, and help make up for big budget cuts in its Department of Corrections, by renting 1,000 prison beds to other states.
The plan has sheriffs in Fairfax County and Virginia Beach fuming and threatening to sue, and no wonder: The state makes a habit of leaving its own convicted felons in local jails far longer than the law allows, at huge expense to the jails.
Yet now Virginia's prisons once again are open for business with other states. Corrections Department Director Gene Johnson told The Washington Post, "It was simply a budget situation. Everybody is having budget difficulties, and we are having them as well. It was done to generate money."
And lower on the food chain? The same sour economy that took a $2 billion bite out of Virginia's revenue projections for the biennium is having nasty effects on most localities, too.
The state does pay sheriffs for housing its inmates -- a whopping $14 a day. As of May 19, The Post reported, almost 1,700 jail inmates were waiting to be moved to a state prison. Virginia is renting beds to out-of-state inmates, meanwhile, for about $75 a day.
The state got out of that business in 2004, citing its own space crunch. However, the decision also followed two deaths of out-of-state prisoners that raised allegations of human-rights abuses. One inmate died after repeated stun gun shocks; the other committed suicide.
Moving human beings far from their families to prisons with new rules and a different mix of people hurts inmates' chances for rehabilitation, human rights groups argue. Local sheriffs claim that Virginia's inmates, too, lose out in the scheme because jails offer fewer rehabilitation services than do state prisons.
Virginia officials say the issue, in the end, is the bottom line. The state expects to make between $14.5 million and $18.5 million a year, The Post reports, by housing Wyoming prisoners in state facilities in Southwest Virginia.
It will be at a cost, though, to local and regional jails and their inmates. Something is lost to society, too, in treating people as commodities.
