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| Senators Support Penn. Prison |
| By Pittsburgh Post-Gazette |
| Published: 06/10/2002 |
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Four state senators from Allegheny County built support recently for the survival of the State Correctional Institution - Pittsburgh, which still lacks a place in Pennsylvania's long-term prison plans. 'From my point of view, it embodies what a prison should look like,' Sen. Jane Orie, said about the 120-year-old facility, which houses 1,740 prisoners within its 30-foot-high stone walls. Orie joined three other senators, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the future of the prison, which earlier this month was spared from a 2003 closure when the state announced plans to keep part of it open until at least 2004. But state Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard complained that SCI Pittsburgh's annual operating costs of $33,277 per inmate far exceed the $20,000 costs of the newest state prisons and said it should be closed. The parade of speakers who followed Beard all but begged the senators to find a way to keep the prison open. Several of them asserted that SCI Pittsburgh's operating costs are relatively high only because the state sends many of its most troublesome inmates to the prison's 24-bed mental health unit, the 64-bed special-needs unit and the long-term segregation unit. Other speakers addressed the physical condition of the old prison, painting a much rosier picture than did Beard. Officials from various counties, meanwhile, complained that their costs will rise if they have to transport inmates to and from their courthouses and a new prison in Luzerne, Fayette County, set to open next year as the replacement for SCI Pittsburgh. The current short-term plan, announced by Beard on May 8, entails downgrading SCI Pittsburgh from maximum to medium security and reducing the number of inmates from 1,740 to 900 next year, when the new prison in Fayette County will open. The work force at SCI Pittsburgh will drop from 781 to less than 500, Beard said. In early 2004, the state corrections system will gain another 2,868 beds with the opening of a new prison in Forest County and the expansion of three existing lockups. |
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