DOC Announces Additional Prison Unit Closures and Delayed Openings

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                    June 2, 2009

The Department of Corrections announced today that it will close a unit at one prison and delay the opening of a unit at another to bring prison capacity in line with the declining prison population and to meet the assumptions in the budget recently passed by the Legislature.

A unit at Pine Lodge Corrections Center for Women near Spokane will be closed by July 1. Closure of this unit reduces the Pine Lodge operating capacity to 187 female offenders. A 256-bed medium-security unit at Coyote Ridge Correction Center in Connell that was expected to open in June will not come on line as previously scheduled. Prisons Director Dick Morgan said the next unit at Coyote Ridge is on track to open in September.

Human Resources staff members will attempt to find vacancies within the Department for the approximately 30 staff members who will be impacted by the closures.

“We simply don’t have enough offenders to operate these units at full capacity,” said Morgan. “Consolidating these units made the most sense to address both the need to reduce the total number of beds in the prison system and the need to operate within our budget.”  

The offender population has steadily decreased over the last two years and the caseload forecast in November projected that trend will continue. The female offender population has dropped by about 80 offenders since July 2007. It is likely there will be further reductions due to new legislation such as increased community treatment beds, housing vouchers and sentencing changes.

The Department has already reduced prison capacity at a number of facilities to address this trend. Two units at the Washington State Penitentiary and one unit at the Coyote Ridge minimum-security camp were closed in February. A 48-bed intensive management unit at McNeil Island was closed last fall.

The Office of Financial Management was directed by the Legislature to complete a study to determine which facility or facilities may close due to the declining prison population.

Pine Lodge Corrections Center in Medical Lake houses 359 female offenders. Coyote Ridge Corrections Center operates a 300 bed minimum-security camp and was recently expanded to eventually house 2,048 medium and minimum-security offenders. Its current population is 812.


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Contact:  Maria Peterson, Communications Department (360) 725-8804



 


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