(They are being sent out of state, to private prisons. SR)
Prisoners to be sent out of state Officials seek cure for overcrowding
Neil Nisperos, Staff Writer Inland Valley Daily Bulletin November 3, 2009
Chino - The bloated state prison system is getting a little leaner.
Corrections officials announced plans this week to ship more inmates out of state.
But the plans might not help the overcrowding at the California Institution for Men, officials said.
In continuing efforts to reduce the prison population and to comply with a federal judicial order to bring a higher level of health care to inmates, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced it will soon send about 2,336 inmates out of state.
Although state corrections representatives could not name specific institutions where transfers would be coming from, they said it would provide institutions like CIM in Chino and the nearby California Institution for Women enough flexibility to reduce the number of inmate beds in prison gyms and dayrooms statewide.
"I could say overall that the new contract with the Correction Corporations of America (for out-of-state inmate transfers) gives us additional flexibility to facilities statewide, including at CIM and CIW, but right now providing a concrete number, how it breaks down statewide and at each institution, would be hard to do," state corrections spokesman Gordon Hinkle said.
But with overpopulated county jails nearby, the availability of more beds at CIM won't really help matters, prison spokesman Lt. Mark Hargrove said.
"Understand that the county jails are also overpopulated and waiting to transfer state inmates to a reception center as soon as a bed is available at CIM, so in essence, beds are just as quickly filled back up at CIM as soon as bed space is available here," he said.
The Corrections Department in recent years has contracted with the private Corrections Corporation of America - the largest private prison system in the U.S. - in order to lighten the load. CCA manages more than 60 facilities, with design capacity for more than 85,000 inmates.
A 2006 Emergency Proclamation and subsequent passage of Assembly Bill 900 allowed corrections officials to transfer inmates to private facilities in other states.
Since the department began, the program has reduced the number of nontraditional beds - such as in gymnasiums, dayrooms and other areas of the prison not intended for housing - from a high of 19,618 in 2007 to the current total of 10,526.
Corrections officials began moving inmates to these facilities in October 2006. They anticipate that by January 2011, there will be 10,468 inmates housed out of state.
CCA, based in Nashville, Tenn., houses 7,911 California inmates in the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi, the North Fork Correctional Facility in Oklahoma, and the Florence, Red Rock and La Palma correctional centers, all in Arizona.
Officials are in the process of converting Heman G. Stark youth correctional facility into an adult reception center facility, with housing for about 1,200 inmates. A destructive prison riot in August at CIM caused the closure of its Reception Center West, which housed about 1,300 inmates. CIM and Stark together house about 5,620 inmates - 813 of them sleeping on nontraditional beds.
California's 33 prisons house about 150,000 inmates. Three federal judges earlier this year ordered a state prison population reduction that would limit the inmate population in the state's 33 prisons to 109,763, or a reduction of about 40,000 inmates.
http://www.dailybulletin.com/ci_13708865
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm