January 19, 2005

Good morning,

            I thought perhaps a few words on the prison construction issue might be in order. After all, I might be living there one day!

            A brief history of some aspects of the prison issue first. Our State Constitution, Article 7, Section 23 calls for the penitentiary to be located in Rawlins, although there is also language that the legislature may locate other correctional facilities elsewhere.

            The ‘old prison’ in Rawlins was built around 1903, and lasted until the early 1980’s. At that time the move was made to the new prison (North Facility), and life was good. Unfortunately as the years passed it became apparent that there had been some huge shortcuts made during the planning and construction of the new/North facility.

            Meanwhile due to lack of space a new, new prison was planned. Originally the plan, developed in the early 1990’s was to site the new prison in Lovell; that idea was amended to once again put the facility in Rawlins. Since this was going to be a maximum-security prison, the idea was to have the two prisons adjacent, a North (old) facility for medium and lower security and a South (new) one for the max inmates.

            Somewhere along in here the poor construction of the old facility reared its head, and the decision was made to abandon the North facility, capacity around 950 inmates, and move to the new building, capacity around 650 inmates. Hmmmmmm. That is why we have so many out of state inmates today.

            So now we are going to build another prison, this one with the educational and technical offerings that our new max prison lacks, due to the fact that it was designed to be used in conjunction with the old/North facility that had the programming space to have vocational, technical and educational programs.

            Are you with me so far? And so the question of where to locate the really new prison was discussed. After some discussions, three towns were still in the running, Riverton, Rawlins and Torrington.

            Riverton was the scene of significant local opposition and was dropped. Rawlins really wanted it, but Torrington was the winner. The slam against Rawlins seems to mostly center on the lack of a labor pool, the doubts about Torrington center on the fact that a large percentage of the employees will undoubtedly come from Cornhuskerville/Nebraska and so the Wyoming tax money paid as wages is going to go to Nebraska.

            Proponents in Rawlins will say that the reason they have trouble hiring and keeping staff has more to do with the management policies of the Department of Corrections than anything else.

And that is where the issue sits right now; the legislature is taking the first steps to make a final decision as to where the new, new, really new prison is going to be.

Chat with you later!

Keith