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| 44 violent sexual predators in SC to be transferred |
| By heraldonline.com - John Monk |
| Published: 03/27/2012 |
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COLUMBIA, SC -- Some 44 violent sexual predator convicts now in a high-security facility several miles north of downtown Columbia are likely to be moved to a state prison campus early next year. That’s what Mark Binkley, general counsel for the S.C. Department of Mental Health, told more than 70 residents of the area around the Columbia Regional Care Center at a public meeting Monday night. “Our goal is to have them consolidated at the Department of Corrections within the next eight or nine months,” Binkley told the residents, who turned out at the Midlands Technical College Northeast campus. Residents came to the meeting, called by Rep. Joe McEachern, D-Richland, after McEachern learned a few months ago that the Department of Mental Health was housing those inmates there in a facility off Farrow Road. The area surrounding the Columbia Regional Care Center includes schools, churches, subdivisions and a park that attracts hundreds of children each week. “I don’t care where they go,” one resident said at the meeting. “Just leave here!” Another revelation at the meeting was that taxpayers are paying a private company about $1.4 million a year more to house the violent sexual predators at the Columbia Regional Care Center than it currently costs to house and treat the same number and type of criminals at a state prison. No one at the meeting could explain why the General Assembly allowed the Department of Mental Health to pay a private company $1.4 million in taxpayer money annually when it could save that amount by letting state government — through the Department of Corrections — do the same job. Currently, it costs taxpayers $102,812 a year to treat a sexually violent prisoner at the private Columbia Regional Care Center, run by GEO Care Inc., a national group that provides care for various kinds of mentally ill patients. GEO Care has 44 such inmates. But it only costs $69,544 to treat the same prisoner at the Edisto Unit of the Broad River Correctional Institution, where there are 98 such inmates. Read More. |
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