PRISONS : Tent City ‘Halfway to Hell’ for Inmates : Overloaded system sends repeat drunk-driving offenders into a blistering camp-out.

The tidy arrangement of bunk-filled, olive-green tents at 24th and Van Buren streets looks like an organized camp-out.

But its occupants are not at summer camp. And they certainly wouldn’t have selected a sweltering metropolitan site if they were.

The men living just northwest of Sky Harbor International Airport are there because they are felons convicted of repetitive drunk-driving offenses. And they are living in military tents because the state’s prison system is so crowded there is no room for them indoors.

Arizona Department of Corrections Director Sam Lewis proposed the tents this spring, when the Legislature was slow in promising budgetary relief for an overburdened prison system. At the time, 16,000 inmates were living in prisons built to house 15,000, the system was adding a net average of 95 inmates each month and 20% of those were driving-while-intoxicated (DWI) offenders.

Because of space problems, corrections officials had abandoned their policy of keeping DWI inmates together and separate from other prisoners. With more than 900 DWI offenders in a system built for 600, something had to be done.

“We had 340 DWI inmates in general population beds,” said corrections department spokesman Michael Arra. “We desperately needed to free up those beds for hardened criminals.”

In late April, officials began transferring DWI prisoners from other facilities to prison sites in Phoenix and Tucson, placing them in tents on loan from the National Guard. The move created outdoor beds for 96 inmates in Phoenix and 196 in Tucson.

Michael Dominiak, associate deputy warden of the DWI facility in Phoenix, said that to accommodate tent prisoners in a city where summer temperatures sometimes go over 110 degrees, officials have taken steps that include equipping each tent with fans, keeping ice water available at all times and installing a misting system around a large planter in the area.

Dominiak said new inmates begin in a tent, then move to the adjacent indoor facility as space becomes available. So, although their sentences range from six months to six years, their outdoor stays last only a month or two, he said.

Arra said daytime heat is something DWI inmates face regardless of where they sleep, because most are outdoors 40 hours a week in jobs arranged through intergovernmental agency agreements.

Back on prison grounds, tent dwellers may go inside the air-conditioned building for visits, showers, meals, substance abuse programs and weekend movies. At night, Arra said, “it’s uncomfortable.”

Most days temperatures top 100 degrees during Phoenix summers, and nights often cool only to the mid- or high-80s. In Tucson, temperatures are a bit lower, but inmates there have complained the loudest.

Wesley Coleman, a 45-year-old inmate serving a 2 1/2-year term, has filed a class-action lawsuit in U.S. District Court asking that the tents be torn down.

In a telephone interview, Coleman said the Tucson tent unit is worse than its Phoenix counterpart: It has no misting system, no grass surrounding the encampment and no opportunity for inmates to transfer indoors.

His complaint claims that DWI offenders are being targeted unfairly: “We DWIs are singled out from the other prisoners to endure these conditions. Murderers and rapists are treated with more respect and dignity than we tent people.”

While Coleman and the Arizona Civil Liberties Union contend that tent conditions are too harsh, others believe outdoor incarceration is not too high a price to pay for breaking the law.

“I would imagine the general public--especially veterans who have spent some time in tents like these--doesn’t have any sympathy for these guys,” Dominiak said.

State Senate President Peter Rios, who alleges Lewis erected the tents as a stunt to force legislators to allocate money for prison construction, agreed.

“John Q. Public and Jane Q. Public don’t really have any empathy for inmates,” he said. “But I realize the inmates there will be extremely uncomfortable. I mean, living in Arizona is like being halfway to hell as it is.”

Although lawmakers in June appropriated $43 million for 2,150 new prison beds, corrections department officials said because no immediate relief is in sight, the tents will probably stay up until early next year.