As a cost cutting measure, Ohio sold the Lake Erie Correctional Institution to the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) for $72.7 million. CCA promises to run the prison for eight percent less than the state did, thereby saving $3 million. Within the next few months, Management and Training Corporation Operations (MTCO) will begin operating the North Central Correctional Institution, and the Marion Juvenile Correctional Facility, which is currently empty. MTCO, based in Utah, also expects to save the taxpayers of Ohio an additional $3 million. MTCO, however, will lose its contract to operate the North Coast Treatment Facility, as the state plans to merge that facility with the Grafton Correctional Institution, resulting in an annual savings of $7 million.
All this merging and call for privatizing doesn’t seem to faze Gary C. Mohr, the director of Ohio’s state prison system. Mohr is pushing ahead with his reorganization plan, and has sent the Ohio Legislature four proposals. Mohr told the Columbus Dispatch that he is “focusing on a safer, more cost-effective, less crowded system that better prepares inmates leaving prison to adjust to the outside world.” Mohr’s plans is to reorganize state-run prisons into three groups.
Reintegration prisons: Facilities for low-security inmates with short sentences. Inmates at a reintegration facility will be expected to work eight hours a day in jobs that will include light manufacturing. Truck driving training will also be offered.
General population prisons: Classified as “transitional” facilities, these prisons will provide education, training and reentry programs.
Control prisons: Facilities for those with long sentences, including life, violent prisoners, and gang members.
Mohr’s legislative proposals include:
Broadening the “earned credit” statute to include those incarcerated before this new incentive became available.
Promoting the release of more inmates with six months remaining of their sentences into community residential facilities.
Aiding newly released inmates by removing some “collateral sanctions.” As an example, allowing inmates to keep their drivers licenses, rather than lose them while incarcerated, in order to facilitate an easier reentry.
Permitting sentence reductions for prisoners who work in the reintegration facilities.
Mohr’s ideas draw mixed reactions. While at least one state Representative, Jim Butler, R-Oakwood, thinks that Mohr’s plan to have inmates engage in light manufacturing is a good idea, the American Civil Liberties Union is troubled by the idea of the potential to exploit inmate-workers. Manufacturers of flat screen televisions and cell phones, two products Butler would like to see prisoners produce, are concerned about the impact cheap prison labor would have on their companies.
Members of the Ohio Civil Service Employees association are upset that Ohio became the first state in America to sell a state prison. The new union president, Christopher Mabe, claims that his union has worked with other state leaders in the past, and is willing to do so again, in order to improve the prison system, while reducing costs.
Source: Columbus Dispatch 9/4/11
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