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.

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