State should approve funds to open Goose Creek

We’ve written before about the Goose Creek Correctional Center and stand by our opinion that the state would be foolish not to use it now that it is built. We also maintain hope that once the rhetoric has softened and the Legislature is done taking the Department of Corrections to task, the prison will open and provide much needed family wage jobs to current and future Mat-Su residents.

There are a couple of other points we’d like to make. First, the prison is from now until it is retired is a state problem. This is no small distinction. When people talk about mothballing the prison and worry about the costs that will be incurred just letting the thing lie dormant, they’re talking about state costs.

Though the Mat-Su Borough built the prison, it is in the process of handing it over to the state. The contract governing all of this says that the state is obligated to pay the borough back the money it borrowed to build the facility — whether or not the state ever houses a single prisoner there.

So if the building never gets used, it would be the state and not borough taxpayers stuck holding the bag. And lawmakers who have lately been scoring political points decrying the costs to run Goose Creek will have to find the money to let the state-of-the-art prison unused.

Something so far lost in this debate is that many of the legislators beating their chests now were also serving in the Legislature when the state decided to walk down this path with the Mat-Su Borough. One would think it would also have been those lawmakers’ jobs to keep an eye on those costs from the beginning. That they let the project get this far without saying anything says more about the quality of their leadership than it does about the quality of what, to this point, has been a borough project.

A second point we’d like to make is that all of the talk recently comparing this prison to other famous boondoggles in state history misses the mark.

Commentators who like to compare Goose Creek to the Point MacKenzie Dairy Project or the Seward Grain Terminal are way off base. While it should have been obvious to grain speculators and dairy farmers that any markets for their products were yet-to-be established and Alaska is a very tough place to be in a business that relies on the weather, there is always a market for room to warehouse criminals.

While that grain terminal is empty and the railcars that were to haul the grain abandoned, no one doubts the state could easily fill Goose Creek if only the Legislature would approve funding. In short, until we get out of the business of isolating criminals from society at large, we’re going to need prisons.

Indeed, Lyman Hoffman, one of the legislators kvetching loudest about the cost to run Goose Creek, is well aware of that need. Prisons in his district are stuffed to capacity. He’s needed a prison there for some time. Unfortunately, voters there shot down a plan that would have made the same deal with Hoffman’s district that the state made with the Mat-Su.

Overcrowding is endemic to the state, hence the hundreds of Alaska criminals currently housed in Colorado. Multiple prisons have converted prison gymnasiums to dormitories and more are working on similar projects. Mat-Su Pre-Trial did it in 2007.

It’s unfortunate this need exists. But as independent Alaskans, aren’t we capable of meeting this need ourselves? Shouldn’t we endeavor to keep the costs — and associated jobs — that come with warehousing these offenders in-state?

We think so. Hopefully, those sitting in Juneau will agree — soon.