WOMEN'S CORRECTIONS FACILITY IN BLUFFS NEW BUT EMPTY

COUNCIL BLUFFS - While state officials say methamphetamine use among women
keeps soaring, a women's halfway house built last year to help female
prisoners with drug problems remains empty. Ready to open last November,
the women's Residential Correctional Facility in Council Bluffs was built
to house up to 26 women, but it remains closed. Officials of the 4th
Judicial District officials maintain the facility by checking on lights,
running water and flushing the toilets just to make sure the place doesn't
slide into disrepair.

"That's one of the facilities I catch the most flak on," said Delbert King,
a Pottawattamie County supervisor who sits on the 4th Judicial District
Board. Matt Gelvin, director of the judicial district, said it would take
about $618,000 to run the facility for a year, but the judicial district is
about $525,000 short. He is hopeful that a recommended 9.4 percent budget
increase for the Iowa Department of Corrections next year will allow the
facility to open.

"Right now, we don't have the operating funds to hire staff and put the
programs in place," Gelvin said.

Judicial district officials began building the $1.2 million halfway house
in May 2000 after prison officials determined that southwest Iowa needed a
facility targeting counseling and drug treatment for women. Iowa's only
other correctional halfway house specifically for women is in Des Moines.
Last year, officials estimated that it would take about 15 staffers to
operate, including guards, counselors, managers and clerical workers.
Officials were prepared to begin hiring last November when they were told
to halt.

Right now, women take up 10 beds in the men's Residential Correctional
Facility just across the street from the empty women's building. While as
many as eight women also are waiting for an Residential Correctional
Facility bed to open up, so are at least 46 men in the judicial district,
which serves southwest Iowa. Beds open up in the facility about every 60 to
90 days. "Ten beds is a lot when it comes to jails or corrections," Gelvin
said.

Women who enter the facility typically would be required to work, submit to
drug testing and undergo various drug, alcohol and family counseling services.

Gelvin said the judicial district might be able to hire a counselor and
drug-treatment coordinator to begin offering day programs at the women's
center as early as January. That would put the building to some use until
it is fully funded.

The women's facility was 99 percent built and ready to open nearly a year
ago when it was put on hold because budget problems forced lawmakers to cut
projects. The Iowa Department of Corrections right now is trying to manage
employee furloughs this year to trim $6 million in salaries. Iowa's
drug-policy czar said last week at a regional summit on methamphetamine
that the growing use of the drug among women is becoming one of the state's
biggest problems in corrections. Bruce Upchurch, director of the Governor's
Office on Drug Policy, said Iowa would need more community-based
correctional facilities to keep the population down at the state's costlier
prisons.