Source:Orange County Registernewspage,20
Contact:(letters@link.freedom.com)

Headline:Pullout of Missouri prisoners devastates small Texas town

PRISON:A videotape of inmates forced to crawl on the floor,shocked with
electric prods,bitten by police dogs causes outcries.

By MATTHEW SCHOFIELD KnightRidder Newspapers

GROESBECK,TexasIn the next few days,165 Missourians will leave a
long,red wedge of a metal building surrounded by Texas prairie and coils
of razor wire to return to a prison in their home state.

They are drug pushers, burglars and car thieves, mediumsecurity convicts
Missouri shipped off to a forprofit prison far from their homes, relatives
and friends.

Until two weeks ago, not too many people thought or cared about them.

But then a videotape of a different seat of Missouri inmates in Texasmen
forced to crawl on the floor, shocked with electric prods, bitten by police
dogssurfaced.

The tape from the Brazoria County Detention Center 200 miles to the south
has shaken the Groesbeck prison, the leading industry in town, focused
national attention on the Texas penal system and prompted Missouri to
remove 800 prisoners from Texas.

As a result of that tape, prisonforprofit plans are being reviewed by
states nationwide studies that could lead to the early release of
prisoners, millions more in tax money for new staterun prisons or laws to
stem the flow of nonviolent offenders to prison.

And in Texas, the tape has devastated a small town that had hooked its
future to prison money. Tim Kniest, spokesman for the Missouri Department
of Corrections, doesn't have much sympathy for Groesbeack's plight.

"This is not an economicdevelopment issue," he said. "This is an issue of
conditions of confinement."

Groesbeck residents brag about the town's 1991 state high school football
championship and the upcoming Ugly Truck Contest. They used to brag about
the jail.

Two decades ago it was in impoverished Limestone County, with peanut and
cotton farmers scraping a living off sandy soil. The beginning of this
town's economic revival came when Houston Power and Light decided to build
a plant nearby. Tax money from the plant put the county on firm footing.

Then, in 1989,the county raised $14 million in junk bonds to build a
500bed jail. A few years later it added an additional 300 beds.

Until last week, the Limestone County Detention Center had 165 of the
steadiest jobs this community had ever known, making it by far the largest
employer in town.

"In any small town, once you start talking about an employer who brings 10
jobs into town, it's a big deal," Mayor Jim Longbotham said. "Now this is
going to mean layoffs and lost business in town, which means more layoffs."

The county charged Missouri $42.50 a day per inmate (and paid the
management company $25 a day per inmate). The county still owes about $7
million on its bonds.

Paying that back will be impossible, officials said, if another tenant
cannot be found, With the amount of play given the taperepeated showings
on national newscasts, including segments on "Night line" and CNN talk
showsLimestone County Sheriff Doyle Coslin acknowledges, "the black eye we
got in Brazoria will stay for a long while. It'll create a hardship, and a
reputation that will make it hard to get anyone else in here.

"I suppose the best we can hope is that they're pulling out of here because
of what they saw in Brazoria, and not because of anything they saw here."

The privateprison movement in Texas started back in the mid1980s because
state prisons were overcrowded, with as many as 30,000 convicts "stacked
like cordwood in county jails awaiting transfer to nonexistent state
prisons," according to a Texas Department of Criminal Justice report.

Dozens of Texas counties answered the crisis by building bigger jails,
hiring private companies to run them and renting the beds out to the state
to pay for the construction costs.

It was a perfect system until the early 1990s, when the state went on a $2
billion building spree, increasing its number of prison beds from 54,000 to
144,000 in five years.

While Texas' overcrowding was solved, the counties had a new problem: fancy
new jails and no way to pay for them.

Enter Missouri. And, by this past spring, 11 other states, that shipped
5,503 inmates to 23 Texas county jails. Most were in the same situation as
Missouri for the same reasons: Legislatures passed gettoughoncrime laws
and increased mandatory sentences without providing enough new prison beds.

Everyone sent prisoners for the same reason: no space at home.

"In an ideal world, we'd keep our prisoners in Colorado," said Liz
Mycology, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections. "But very
few states can afford an ideal world."

In Missouri, inmates are stuffed into former workshops, gymnasiums
and hallways to cope with a system at 160 percent of capacity. The
state also sent about 900 inmates to Texas, making it one of Texas,
best customers.

The overcrowding in Missouri is so bad that those being brought back will
be kept in tents if they can't be farmed out to county jails. Oklahoma,
which is clearing its 400 prisoners out of Groesbeck because of
pepperspray allegations, is the only other state to take such action.

Dennis Walker, security director for Capital Correctional, says he fears
that the video fallout may prompt others to abandon private prisons.

The move back home for 165 Missourians means that the Limestone County
Detention Center, which at one time had 800 inmates, will be left with
about 70 federal inmates and one Texan. Residents expect 150 people to be
laid off, if the jail stays open at all.

Already, in Brazoria, 100 Capital Corrections employees have been
laid off.

"I would have the same questions everyone has these days about these Texas
jails," Walker said. "But what people saw in that film is not the way we
operate. It was an isolated incident, and I hope folks can understand that."

Some don't.

Politicians and policymakers nationwide are questioning farming prisoners
out of state and are voicing concern about the notion of forprofit prisons
run by private corporations.

"This bears out our reluctance to go into privateprison operation in
Missouri," Carnahan said. "It doesn't recommend the practice."