Senators question plan to close two Pa. prisons
HARRISBURG — Pennsylvania senators peppered state corrections officials on Monday with questions about the safety, savings, and speed of a plan to close two state prisons this year.
The timetable was a major theme of a Senate hearing called just three days before the Department of Corrections is scheduled to announce which prisons will close. The department released the plan Jan. 6, citing five correctional institutions being targeted, and said it would finalize the decision on Thursday.
"Why does this decision have to be made this fast?" asked Sen. Wayne Fontana (D., Allegheny), whose district includes SCI Pittsburgh, one of the prisons under consideration.
Corrections Secretary John Wetzel said the prisons targeted for closure must be empty by July 1 for the state to save a full year's expenses. Shuttering the sites under consideration would save the state varying amounts ranging from $44 million to $82 million apiece, according to department estimates.
The other prisons on the target list are in Luzerne, Mercer, Schuylkill, and Wayne Counties. Officials say the thousands of affected inmates can safely be housed at other sites in the 26-prison system. After multiplying in size over recent decades, Pennsylvania's population of inmates has declined by nearly 2,500 since a peak in June 2012.
The closures will affect hundreds of prison employees, though corrections officials have said the workers will be offered jobs elsewhere in the system.
Jason Bloom, president of the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association, suggested to senators that closing two prisons could be risky. He points to Department of Corrections figures saying its network of prisons for male inmates is running above "operational capacity," a measure the department describes as an ideal rate but says is not the limit of safe operations.
"You cannot put a system bursting at the seams and not expect somewhere along the line that it will not spring a leak," he said.
The walls of the hearing room Monday were lined with onlookers, including some corrections officers holding signs.
The corrections officials fielded questions about whether the prison closures really were needed.
Sen. Lisa Baker (R., Luzerne) said at one point that there are people who believe the Wolf administration's prison announcement might be an attempt at "leverage" to get a tax increase passed. Baker's district includes SCI Waymart, one of the prisons on the list, and SCI Retreat, another of the five, is in a neighboring community, she said afterward.
"After listening to some of the testimony, it seems very clear to me that we're not prepared to make a decision this week," she said. "It would be my hope that the administration would delay and at least have a more thoughtful, open process that doesn't appear that it's a rush to judgment."
A department spokeswoman said after the hearing that corrections officials still plan to go ahead with a Thursday announcement about which sites will close.
Not all the senators at the hearing were critical of closing prisons. Sen. Daylin Leach (D., Montgomery) said he thought reducing the prison count was a good direction for the state.
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