Gov. Paul LePage’s administration is proposing an overhaul of the state’s correctional system that would expand the capacity for female inmates and prisoners with substance abuse issues.
Lawmakers are being told that the plan could cost more than $180 million.
Corrections Commissioner Joe Fitzpatrick said one key component of the plan is a nearly 50 percent increase in the size of the Maine Correctional Center in Windham, from 686 to 979 inmates of both sexes. Fitzpatrick told members of the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee that steps must be taken to accommodate the growing number of female inmates.
“Looking at women’s needs, geriatric, mental health, medical,” he said. “Those are things we aren’t doing and we need to be doing. It’s not OK that we have 50-60 women in a men’s prison in 2016 — we should be ashamed of that.”
Fitzpatrick said the department has the capacity to provide substance abuse services to 56 women, which would increase to 77 under the plan. It would add a dozen medical beds and 14 mental health beds for women, which currently do not exist.
Fitzpatrick explained the changes aimed at Windham to longtime committee member Sen. Stan Gerzofsky of Brunswick.
“We’ve expanded it by 24 beds so that there will be an additional 24 beds available at that facility, in Windham,” Fitzpatrick said.
“So the expansion of the women’s facility would be new beds, net new beds, to handle the overflow that we have in some of the holding cells that they clearly shouldn’t be?” Gerzofsky said.
“Yes,” Fitzpatrick said.
And Fitzpatrick said a major goal of the plan is to address substance abuse issues in the prisons. He says on any given day about 40 percent of all the inmates in the state system have a substance abuse diagnosis.
There are only 77 substance abuse beds in the system. That would more than triple to 240 beds.
“There are people at Maine Correctional Center, there are people throughout the whole system who might have a diagnosed mental illness and they are stable, we don’t move them to a special unit,” Fitzpatrick said. “But if they go off their medication, if their illness becomes such that they are unstable, we will move them.”
The total cost of the physical plant upgrades under the plan is estimated at between $160 million and $180 million. The department is proposing that it be paid for by the Government Facilities Authority, which can sell bonds that the department will pay off over several years.
Those bonds do not require voter approval, so the cost of borrowing is somewhat higher. Sen. David Burns, a Republican from Whiting, questioned the proposed funding mechanism.
“I have never been supportive of Government Facilities,” he said. “I think it bypasses the people, and they need to have a voice on this. It’s not scrutinized carefully enough, it just isn’t. Why can’t you go through general bonding for this?”
Department officials say the final decision on whether to use the Government Facilities Authority or send out the proposal to the voters is up to the legislature. But Fitzpatrick said he doubts that voters would approve the borrowing.
“People don’t want to give $160 million to prisoners. To offenders,” he said. “I am going to tell you that right now. I have been a psychologist in corrections for about 23 years.”
And without improvements, Fitzpatrick said the problems, and the price tag to fix them, will only increase. He said the administration’s plan will address needs that might otherwise result in legal action against the state by prisoner advocates, which could lead to even larger expenditures in the future.
The committee expects to get a more detailed estimate of the plan’s cost later this month from a national consultant hired by the department.
This article appears through a media partnership with Maine Public Broadcasting Network.