Senators deserve some blame in prison debate

There are a lot of unanswered questions concerning the Goose Creek Correctional Center.

Exactly how does the cost to open and run it compare to other facilities? With all the recent talk in the Legislature about those costs, will the prison even open? What will happen if it doesn’t?

But the one question lawmakers are dancing around is what really needs exploring — why now?

The building is 80 percent complete. It’s a year away from opening. And only now has a group of state senators seemingly suddenly realized how much the project is going to cost the state to operate. This past week, the Senate declined to give the Department of Corrections money needed to open the facility.

Senators say it’s just not proper to fund the prison now since an audit is in the works. Yet, the money is still in the state House of Representatives’ budget. Those kinds of discrepancies between the two bodies are usually hashed out at the end of the legislative session, so it’s really yet to be seen whether DOC will get the money.

The fact most worth highlighting here is that this is the money to open the prison. It’s not the money to buy the land, nor to pay to build the prison, nort pay to hook it up to utilities. This is merely the last influx of cash before the building becomes a regular fixture of DOC’s yearly budget.

How did this happen?

As a society, we elect people to represent us, to make decisions for the state as a whole. Those people make up new laws and new regulations. But probably one of the most important duties they have is to keep close tabs on the budget. It’s public money, after all, which means it’s our money. We expect these people to keep track of it. And if those senators truly are justifiably concerned, they have also truly failed in their duties to watch over that budget.

This newspaper has in the past been an advocate for the prison. It will create jobs at a time when they are sorely needed. It will bring convicts up from out of state where they are currently held in a private prison.

Public prisons, we believe, have proved themselves more capable of treating offenders properly and of managing their rehabilitation. Sending prisoners out of state also cuts them off from whatever support they had prior to offending. Contracting for the services also creates a disconnect where DOC officials cannot as effectively intervene to smooth out trouble spots in the operation.

We remain in favor of opening this prison. We believe the fears and last-minute grandstanding are overblown and much too late.

What has us scratching our heads in this whole debate is that if these elected officials are so upset by the cost they should have acted earlier, before the money went out the door, before the prison was 80 percent complete. The same people grilling DOC officials in committee hearings should also be apologizing to the people they represent for not catching it sooner.

That they didn’t catch it and that they’re not apologizing we find very telling. Politics, after all, is a game that shares a lot of traits with the theatrical. Maybe these state senators aren’t as upset as they’re making themselves out to be.