Texas prison’s new operator tells Idaho: Send more inmates
Tuesday, November 27, 2007 11:57 AM PST
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A company that’s due to take over a troubled privately run Texas prison in 2008 made a sales pitch Monday to Idaho Department of Correction officials, saying it hopes the management shake-up and $1.2 million in proposed renovations will overshadow past problems and persuade Idaho to ship more inmates to the lockup.
Civigenics, a unit of New Jersey-based Community Education Centers, Inc., with prisons or treatment programs in 23 states, will manage Dickens County Correctional Center in Spur, Texas, starting Jan. 1 after winning a competitive bid. Until now, The GEO Group Inc., based in Florida, ran the facility.
In March, Idaho prison officials called Dickens under GEO’s oversight ‘‘the worst’’ prison they’d seen, citing what they called an abusive warden, the lack of treatment programs and squalid conditions they said may have contributed to the suicide of inmate Scot Noble Payne, who was held for months in a solitary cell.
Idaho is nearly ready to move 54 prisoners who remain at Dickens to a new GEO-run facility near the Mexican border, after shifting 69 inmates elsewhere this summer.
Dickens County and Civigenics officials came to Boise to offer assurances they’ll remedy concerns over their 15-year-old prison as they aim to stay in the running to house some of the hundreds of prisoners that Idaho plans to ship elsewhere in coming months to ease overcrowding. Some 550 of Idaho’s 7,400 inmates have been sent out of state since 2005.
GEO ‘‘thought they were too good,’’ Sheldon Parsons, a Dickens County commissioner, told Idaho officials. ‘‘They’re used to running bigger facilities. That just kind of didn’t fit into our program. Civigenics will definitely fit.’’
Idaho plans to send 120 additional prisoners to a private prison in Oklahoma in January. It’s also looking for space in other states for groups of inmates in increments of about 100 starting in mid-2008.
Bob Prince, a Civigenics salesman, said his company could house as many as 150 Idaho inmates at a revamped Dickens.
