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| Juvenile Justice panel approves unique plan for new prisons |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 04/12/2004 |
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An advisory panel wants the state to build 13 youth detention centers to replace four aging juvenile prisons that house roughly 500 of North Carolina's most serious offenders. The centers would cost an estimated $79.7 million to build, with the first sites opening in 2007. The General Assembly is expected to address the plan during its short session that begins in May. The proposal approved last Wednesday by the State Advisory Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention reflects a shift from iron-bar institutions of the past to a treatment-oriented approach for offenders. The plan calls for tearing down the oldest facilities - Swannanoa in Buncombe County and Stonewall Jackson in Cabarrus County - and replacing them with a 64-bed site in Buncombe and a 96-bed center in Cabarrus. Also, the 141-bed center in Lenoir County would be replaced by one of 11 smaller 32-bed centers. An existing, newer center in Granville County would stay open with 105 beds. A state audit last year recommended that aging facilities be replaced by building three new prisons and either renovating or moving the operations from the other two. Lawmakers haven't yet committed to building new prisons. Juvenile offenders are now sent to one of five state juvenile prisons that house about 500 of the most violent or delinquent prisoners in the system. Most of them are between 11 and 17 years old. The locations of those sites can leave a youth more than 100 miles from family and court counselors, officials said. The 32-bed centers are proposed for Catawba, Forsyth, Guilford, Chatham, Nash, Pitt, Lenoir, Moore, Cumberland, Onslow and Brunswick counties. The smaller centers would also be built to accommodate female offenders. Officials hope that scattering them around the state in counties with the highest number of offenders will help resolve those distance problems, said Leigh Powell Hines, spokeswoman for the state Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Smaller, more intimate settings will also better allow families of offenders to be involved in their rehabilitation, said Juvenile Justice Secretary George Sweat. |
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