Talk of prison closure concerning

We listened with great interest this week to a meeting an Alaska House of Representatives subcommittee held to discuss changes to the Department of Corrections’ budget.

Towards the end of the meeting, talk turned to the department’s plans for Palmer Correctional Center.

We leave it to the politicians to decry the potential loss of jobs if that facility is allowed to shut down its minimum security wing. What we’re worried about is where are these 167 inmates going to go?

Acting Department of Corrections Commissioner Ronald F. Taylor told the committee that the idea would be to transfer what prisoners there was room for to halfway houses and get as many as possible onto ankle monitors.

Ankle monitoring is apparently way cheaper than putting a person in prison. Taylor pegged the average costs per inmate per day at $142 in his prisons. He said that Palmer is actually slightly cheaper, at $123. Ankle monitors, though, are just $24 per inmate per day.

That makes sense. You’re not actually paying to house the person. The person is paying for his own rent and his own food. The cost is just to watch him, though, obviously, not to the degree you’re watching him in a prison.

We reported this story in today’s paper. In Sunday’s paper is a story about housing in Mat-Su and how little of it we have. The biggest shortage is in affordable housing of the type it’s fair to assume that prisoners re-entering society on an ankle monitor will rely on.

So we’re concerned, to say the least, about any new pressures on our tight affordable housing market.

To cut to the chase: more people crowding that market means more homeless people in Mat-Su.

The part of the meeting that snapped our heads around, though, came when Rep. Jim Colver asked Taylor about the prospect of, in future budgets, closing the rest of Palmer Correctional Center.

Alaska’s prisons are maxed out. Closing an entire institution would mean, Taylor said, having to send prisoners out of state again. But, from a budget perspective, that’s actually a good thing as contracts with out of state prisons are way cheaper than housing prisoners in state.

This is where our jaws hit the floor.

We have taken to this space numerous times to defend the Goose Creek Correctional Center against those that have labeled it a boondoggle.

When we were sold the prison we were told that it would bring prisoners back to Alaska, which would therefore keep them connected to their families and their other support structures, making rehabilitation less difficult.

That seemed reasonable to us. The bulk of inmates will eventually be our neighbors again and we therefore feel a keen interest in their rehabilitation.

Building that prison was a massive undertaking. We undertook it to bring those prisoners home and to create Alaskan jobs in supervising them.

And now, with a budget crisis looming, we’re again talking about sending people out of state.

If we’re going to do that, why did we build Goose Creek in the first place? Maybe it was a boondoggle after all.