A prison in Anson, a west Texas town of about 2,300 people built in 2009, sits empty according to the Austin American-Statesman. The facility was to house 1,100 state convicts who never arrived, the $35 million
lockup sits empty at the edge of the town. Its promise of
creating 195 jobs and a $5 million annual boost to the local economy never materailized.
Research by the
American-Statesman shows, the situation is increasingly common in Texas and
across the country because of declining crime rates, government budget cuts and
increased use of treatment programs that have deflated a 20-year boom in
building jails and prisons.
Although having fewer
people locked up should be good news for Texas taxpayers, as the associated
costs of Lone Star justice go down, the trend is drawing few cheers in Jones
County and other places where taxes are going up to pay for the empty lockups.
While counties mostly
operate jails, which house pre-trial prisoners and those serving time for minor
offenses, more than a dozen counties in Texas have for years housed state
prison convicts — either in their county jails or in prison-like lockups built
with the help of private firms.
The American-Statesman also found, more than 30,000 of the
state's 93,000 county beds currently sit empty — both at county jails and at
the ones built with county-private partnerships, like Anson, according to the
Texas Commission on Jail Standards.
In Littlefield,
northwest of Lubbock, a $10 million, 373-bed prison has sat empty for two years
— costing local taxpayers $65,000 a month to pay the outstanding loan.
More than 1,400 jail
beds in Angelina, Newton and Dickens counties in East Texas stand vacant as
well, and one in Jefferson County reopened only recently — at just a fraction
of its former population.
In Falls County, about
an hour's drive northeast of Austin, officials are scrambling to fill beds in a
county-built private prison after the private company announced it was pulling
out.
Outside Waco, an 833-bed, $49 million prison
sits less than half full — the same problem according to the American-Statesman.To read more:
http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-politics/county-private-lockups-sit-empty-drain-money-as-2275211.html?viewAsSinglePage=true
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