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| Corrections Department will ask Legislature for funds to build cell blocks at El Dorado prison |
| By kansas.com - Hurst Laviana |
| Published: 12/03/2013 |
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With state prisons operating near capacity, the Kansas Department of Corrections has completed plans to build two cell blocks at the El Dorado Correctional Facility. The 512 new beds would make El Dorado, which opened in 1991, the state’s largest prison. Corrections spokesman Jeremy Barclay said the plans call for opening the first cell block on Jan. 1, 2017, with the second one opening 18 months later. Each block would have 128 cells with double bunks for medium-security inmates. The project is expected to cost $24.3 million, and the annual cost of operating the two cell blocks will be $8.3 million. Barclay said corrections officials will ask the Kansas Legislature next year to approve the bonds needed to finance the project. If the Legislature rejects the proposal, he said, the state will have to start housing inmates in other states or look at leasing space in county jails. Both of those options are more expensive in the long run than adding the new beds, he said. “We are running out of capacity,” Barclay said. “We have no more space, so we’ll have to be asking for some kind of option.” If the state ignores accepted prison standards and starts shoehorning inmates into existing prisons, as it did in the 1980s, the courts will likely step in and force the state to add prison beds, Barclay said. “I don’t think anybody who has an institutional memory of those days would want to go back to those days,” he said. Read More. |
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