INMATES ENJOY NEW QUARTERS: TENTS

SPARTA, Ga. (AP) -- Eric Willis has seen the inside of four different
prison facilities since he began a 10-year sentence for drug dealing. His
current quarters rank as the strangest and the most comfortable: a tent.
"When I first heard about it, I thought it would be hotter than the regular
cells," he said inside the cool tent at Hancock State Prison, as the
temperature outside soared near 100 degrees. "But out of all the places
I've been, this is definitely the nicest and the most relaxed." Prison
officials moved 168 inmates into the insulated tents of "J Unit" earlier
this year.

Originally designed as a temporary fix, the move created an unexpected
benefit -- inmates like the 29-year-old Willis, just eight months away from
release, are willing to behave to get assigned to the unit. For one thing,
the tents are air conditioned in the summer, while the main prison has only
fans. "To me, this is definitely a perk," said inmate Larry Gibbins, 55,
who is in the fourth year of a 20-year sentence.

The four tents -- three for housing and one for a dining hall -- and a
cinderblock administrative building cost about $514,000, or $2,763 per bed,
according to Corrections Department spokesman Scott Stallings. A new prison
with 1,000 beds costs about $32 million, about $32,000 a bed. "This was
initially a quick fix," said J Unit manager Dwayne Johnson. "We got a deal
on them, but they've worked out much better than we thought." They look
more like doublewide mobile homes than something you'd camp in. They're
made of insulated canvas walls held up by steel poles, and stand on
concrete slabs buffed so frequently they shine brighter than linoleum.
Johnson hopes the tents last up to 10 years.

Each tent houses 65 inmates sleeping on rows of bunk beds and is attached
to its own cinderblock bathroom and shower area. Features include
fluorescent lights and two TVs.

Inmates are free to mingle in a common area or at each other's bunks, and
the air conditioners keep the temperature in the tents in the 70s.
"Everything around here is concrete, and it can still be over 100 degrees
in the main building after 10 p.m," Gibbins said. "This is a nice
alternative." These aren't the only tents in use at prisons, but they are
among the nicest. Inmates sentenced to a boot camp elsewhere in Georgia are
put in Army surplus tents as punishment. And in Arizona, Maricopa County
puts jail inmates in two-man tents in the blistering Phoenix heat as both
punishment and to save money.

Inmates at Hancock, in middle Georgia about 90 miles east of Atlanta, are
put through a tough screening process before they are allowed into the
tents. "Last month, we only had two discipline reports filed, out of all
168 inmates," Johnson said. "They know that if they act out, they're gone.
And they want to stay." Still, prison rights advocates say the fact that
they had to be built at all shows that the system can't cope with rising
inmate numbers brought by increasingly tough sentencing laws.

"You can't build yourself out of the overcrowding problem, because only
more and more prisoners are going to go to jail," said Kara Gotsch, public
policy coordinator for the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison
Project. "We really need to be exploring alternative sanctions."