States Export Inmates in Effort to Cut Costs

Connecticut is compact, barely 100 miles from end to end. Yet when Barbara Fair and Anne McNamara want to visit their sons, they face a drive of eight or nine hours -- to a small Virginia town where 500 Connecticut men are imprisoned for lack of cells in their own state.

“It’s a big expense, but a necessary expense,” said McNamara, whose son is serving 25 years for manslaughter. “If they can’t see the face of a loved one, and know they have support on the outside, what’s the incentive to behave, to learn, to work, to look for the day they can be free?”

Grueling and costly as the 500-mile trip from Connecticut to Jarratt, Va., can be, it is short compared to the distances separating some families with an inmate relative.

Hawaii sends prisoners to Oklahoma; Alaska ships them to Arizona. Vermont has just signed a contract to house up to 700 inmates in private prisons in Kentucky and Tennessee.

In all, according to an Associated Press survey, 11 states export large numbers of their inmates -- about 8,700 -- because of space shortages. In addition, the District of Columbia, with no prisons, has about 5,800 inmates scattered in federal and private prisons nationwide.

To governors and legislators, exporting inmates can be a tempting, low-cost alternative to building new prisons or expanding old ones. Private prisons -- which house most of the out-of-state inmates -- generally charge less per inmate than a state would pay to imprison them at home.

Some officials see the disruption in prisoners’ lives as their own fault: If they hadn’t committed crimes, they wouldn’t be in this position.

But for the inmates’ families, out-of-state transfers add an extra degree of anguish to the hardships caused by any incarceration. Barbara Fair, for example, has three sons in prison for drug-related convictions, but says the pain of separation is felt most keenly by Keijam Tucker, her son in Virginia, because he rarely sees his three young daughters.

Even though most of the Connecticut inmates find the visitation and smoking policies more lenient in Jarratt than at Connecticut prisons, Tucker, 28, has formally requested a transfer to his home state -- to no avail.

“He’d take the deplorable conditions here in Connecticut just to see his daughters,” said Fair, 55, a social worker in New Haven. “They’re growing up without him.”

Fair is a member of People Against Injustice, one of several groups lobbying Connecticut officials to end the out-of-state transfers. Activists say the state should reduce prison crowding through sentencing reforms and the option of treatment programs for nonviolent drug offenders.

Also lobbying against the transfer are unionized prison guards, who resent the concept of paying Virginians to confine Connecticut residents.

Thus far, the protests have failed; instead, the legislature recently authorized the possible transfer of 2,500 inmates out of state, up from the previous cap of 500.

Robert Farr, ranking Republican on Connecticut’s House Judiciary Committee, said the out-of-state transfers save up to $10,000 per inmate while relieving crowding so severe that some inmates sleep on cots in hallways and cafeterias. These factors outweighed inconvenience for inmates’ relatives, he said.

“The public doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for prisoners,” Farr said. “Someone committed a murder and says, ‘Gee, I want to be closer to home.’ What about the family of the person they murdered?”

Stacy Smith, spokeswoman for Connecticut’s Department of Corrections, said that the transfers to Virginia are not punitive, and that the selected inmates represent a cross-section of offenders.

“The attitude of their families -- initially, there’s a shock, and then they acclimate,” Smith said.

But even families that have adjusted to the trip to Virginia fear that Connecticut may eventually make use of private prisons even farther away, following the example of Vermont.

Like Connecticut, Vermont has been housing 450 to 550 inmates at the Virginia state prison in Jarratt. However, on Jan. 2, Vermont officials announced a new contract -- replacing the deal with Virginia -- that soon will place up to 700 inmates in prisons in Kentucky and Tennessee run by Corrections Corp. of America.

“It’s horrifying -- driving that distance would totally exhaust me,” said Vera Leblond of Craftsbury, Vt., whose son is in Virginia, serving a 24- to 41-year sentence for sexual assault.

Vermont’s corrections commissioner, Steven Gold, said the state would like to get all its inmates back home eventually; the plan is to create space in existing prisons by placing more offenders in community-based programs.

“We recognize that when offenders are separated from their families and support systems, it has an impact on their current lives and their eventual re-entry,” he said.

Corrections Corp. of America is the nation’s largest private prison operator, holding 55,000 inmates in 60 facilities in 20 states. Of the 8,700 inmates housed outside their home states, more than 6,000 are in CCA prisons -- sent there from Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Indiana, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

The other states exporting inmates for space reasons are Arizona and Kansas, to private prisons in Texas, and Washington, to a state prison in Nevada.

CCA’s chief executive, John Ferguson, believes that out-of-state inmate transfers will be a fact of life as long as state governments face the twin dilemmas of crowded prisons and tight budgets.

“Every state would love to have the right amount of bed space within their jurisdiction,” he said in an interview from his Nashville, Tenn., headquarters. “But they have choices they have to make -- obligations like education, health care.”

CCA says it tries to accommodate out-of-state inmates in various ways -- arranging charter buses for visiting relatives, for example, and providing sweat lodge ceremonies for American Indians sent by Alaska to Arizona.

But there are limits to such efforts.

Kat Brady, coordinator of the Honolulu-based Community Alliance on Prisons, says virtually no Hawaiian families can afford to visit the 1,400 inmates from the islands held at CCA prisons in Oklahoma and Arizona. She said the consequences include sky-high phone bills and a recidivism rate that, according to state officials, is higher for inmates sent to the mainland than for those held in Hawaii.

“Kids are great motivators for parents in prison to get their act together,” Brady said. “You take away the possibility of kids’ visits and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy -- ‘See, these people can’t be rehabilitated.’ ”

Alphonse Gerhardstein, a Cincinnati-based civil rights lawyer, said prisoners and their families have been unable to prevail in any legal challenges against out-of-state incarceration.

“Current progressive corrections thinking is all about re-entry” into society, he said. “Wouldn’t it be easier to re-enter from across the street than from across the country?”

Some of the states that export inmates seek to ensure that their training out-of-state at least matches what they would have received in-state; others try to promote family visits. Connecticut, for example, funds once-a-month bus trips to Jarratt operated by a group called Families in Crisis.

The group’s executive director, Susan Quinlan, said no more than about 55 people can be accommodated on each bus trip, often resulting in a long waiting list. Because of a series of pickups and drop-offs in Connecticut, the full trip can take up to 18 hours each way, and each family must verify in advance that it has hotel space reserved in Virginia.

“It’s a hardship for the families, emotionally and financially,” Quinlan said. “Not all families want or need to be together, but we should do everything we can for those that do, and being four states away is certainly a barrier to that.”

Anne McNamara is among those struggling to sustain family ties. She has made repeated car trips over the last three years to Jarratt from her home in Stamford to see her 25-year-old son, Anthony. No gifts are allowed, but she and her 19-year-old daughter bring extra quarters to buy him food from visiting-room vending machines.

“Every time, it’s very emotional; you learn to grab onto whatever you can,” McNamara said. “The experience can destroy you. I’ve seen that happen to many families.”

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Prisoner relocation

Eleven states send substantial numbers of inmates, roughly 8,700 in all, to prisons in other states because of insufficient space in their own systems. A breakdown:

* Alabama: 1,708 inmates out of state as of last month -- 1,423 men at a private prison in Mississippi run by Corrections Corp. of America; 285 women at CCA prison in Louisiana. Officials hope that the men can be returned to Alabama within three months.

* Alaska: 706 men at CCA prison in Arizona. With inmate population rising, corrections officials say there could be 1,000 Alaskan prisoners out of state within three years unless new cell space is created.

* Arizona: About 625 inmates at a private prison in Texas. Under a plan approved by Legislature in December, the out-of-state number could rise temporarily to as many as 2,100 while Arizona adds new prison beds.

* Connecticut: About 500 inmates at state prison in Virginia; ceiling recently raised to allow up to 2,500 inmates to be sent out of state, but timetable and location uncertain.

* Hawaii: 1,439 inmates housed at CCA prisons on mainland as of last month -- 843 men and 64 women in Oklahoma; 532 men in Arizona.

* Indiana: About 655 inmates at CCA prison in Kentucky.

* Kansas: 48 inmates at a private prison in Texas.

* Vermont: About 450 inmates at state prison in Virginia. These inmates and others, up to 700 total, are to be transferred soon to private CCA prisons in Kentucky and Tennessee.

* Washington: 240 inmates sent to a state prison in Nevada in May, to remain until Washington adds more space to its prison system.

* Wisconsin: 1,890 inmates at out-of-state CCA prisons -- 1,388 in Minnesota, 502 in Oklahoma. Space being cleared in Wisconsin county jails to bring back 276 of them; two new prisons are also being built.

* Wyoming: 499 inmates out of state -- 368 at two private prisons in Colorado, 131 at a state prison in Nevada.

* In addition, the District of Columbia, which has no prison system of its own, has about 5,800 inmates housed throughout the country in federally supervised prisons.

Sources: State corrections officials; American Correctional Assn.; Federal Bureau of Prisons, Associated Press

Los Angeles Times