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Clearfield residents pan a plan for county-owned private prison
Sunday, March 05, 2000 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
CLEARFIELD, Pa. -- The session at the county courthouse was billed as a chance comment on a Texas company's revised plan to run a prison in Clearfield for some 700 sick and aged federal inmates.
In reality, the forum was just a wake with a decent turnout.
The proposal, the smaller of two plans to open privately operated prisons in Clearfield County, had a good enough hook. Privately held Corrections National Corp. promised 240 jobs -- "good-paying jobs," said Gene Lunsford, chairman of the county commissioners -- in a county with a 6.8 percent unemployment rate, third-highest in the state.
"Clearfield needs the jobs," resident Carl Undercofler told the meeting, about 50 people gathered in a county courtroom. "I have three college-educated kids who work elsewhere because they don't want the $8-an-hour pay here."
The controversy comes in the extra baggage those jobs would carry.
Corrections National's plan was caught in the same legal snarl that has tangled the other private prison proposed for Clearfield County. State Attorney General Mike Fisher said in September that Pennsylvania law did not allow a private company to run a prison inside the commonwealth. He threatened a lawsuit if one tried to open.
So Corrections National tried another tactic. The company asked: What if Clearfield County owned the prison and Corrections National operated it?
Clearfield County would get its 240 jobs. But it also would have to issue $70 million in revenue bonds -- leaving it, at worst, in deep financial jeopardy or with simply a blemished credit record, depending on who you ask.
County ownership would erase the land from tax rolls -- 45 acres, possible industrial development land, within sight of Interstate 80.
County commissioners also worry that the prison would be another breeding ground for inmate lawsuits that already are jamming the county's tiny court system.
That mix is leading Clearfield residents to pan the plan. It didn't play well before the 50 people who gathered for the public forum Thursday night.
"You take the pros and cons of this and put them to the people," resident Bob Harris said, "and it's going to be" -- and he swept both thumbs downward -- "pfffft."
Another man rose to say that residents "ought to hang our heads that we have to depend on prisons to bring us jobs. ... Our county's too good for that."
"I guess this meeting is just the viewing, where the idea isn't buried yet," Lunsford said beforehand.
Already, Clearfield County, population 79,000, has an appreciable stake in the corrections field.
Among them, the county prison, the State Correctional Institution Houtzdale and the state's Quehanna Motivational Boot Camp have a population of 963. They employ 357 workers, 1 percent of the county work force.
Add the two private prisons, and 2.5 percent of the work force would have a prison job. Plus, 3 percent of the people living in the county would be behind bars.
But with the thumbs-down reaction, Corrections National is out of the picture, president and principal owner Norman Cox said. "We're looking at sites in a number of states," he said.
Corrections National, a 3-year-old company based in San Antonio, has yet to build its first prison but is focusing on developing institutions for geriatric inmates, a niche in the nation's growing private prison industry.
Specialty medical care is a pricey item for prisons. It costs Pennsylvania's state prisons about $25,000 a year to house a healthy inmate but an average of $60,000 to keep sick ones, said state Corrections Department spokesman Mike Lukens.
Corrections National entered the market with the same business model that other private prison operators use -- that it could do the job more cheaply and more efficiently than government could.
Cox sought out property near Woodland, five miles east of Clearfield, and planned to solicit the Federal Bureau of Prisons for ill and aging prisoners from federal prisons in Pennsylvania and nearby states.
"There were no guarantees that the federal boys would send in the prisoners every year that you'd need," Commissioner John Sughre said.
The death blow, though, came with Fisher's opposition to private prisons. Spokesmen for Gov. Ridge say he shares that opposition.
It wasn't Corrections National that first drew Fisher's objection. Instead, the attorney general was reacting to a larger project, another 12 miles east of Woodland, near Philipsburg. There, Cornell Corrections Inc. of Houston, was preparing ground for a prison complex that would house 1,000 prisoners under a contract with the federal government.
That complex would employ 346 people, Cornell promised.
While Corrections National's geriatric prison plan had been in the works 18 months longer, Cornell's project was noisier, drawing a lawsuit and a federal judge's stop-work order shortly after the plan was unveiled last year.
The lawsuit charges that the Federal Bureau of Prisons was giving short shrift to environmental studies around the prison site. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has raised similar concerns.
Karen Nicholson, Cornell's acting project manager, said she expected to have the environmental concerns cleared up to resume construction by June.
But if work resumes, Fisher has promised, he will sue.
There, the attorney general and Cornell, third-largest private prison operator in the nation, are locked in a dispute over state law. Cornell says there is nothing in the law that bars private prisons; Fisher says there is nothing that allows them.
Spokesmen for Fisher and Ridge say the concerns about private prisons run much deeper. They maintain that state law allows only government to hold prisoners and does not provide, for example, for guards in a private prison to use deadly force.
Representatives for Cornell and Fisher have met, hunting for common ground. But discussions appear deadlocked, said Don Houser, an aide to state Sen. Jake Corman, R-Bellefonte, a lawmaker who has been monitoring the talks.
Critics say the opposition is a bow to the unions that represent guards in state prisons.
"No other county in Pennsylvania has two other prisons waiting to come in -- not Allegheny, not Indiana," Dan Ogden, a former Clearfield County Prison warden, said at Thursday's forum. "But somebody down at the state, worrying about losing union jobs, is keeping money from coming to Clearfield County."
The alternative to winning Fisher's approval is passage of legislation allowing private prisons.
"I don't think the votes are there," Cox said.
Lunsford added: "It took the state 50 years to decide you could right on red."
So, Cox decided to pull out while Cornell -- a company he co-founded then broke away from -- decided to stand and fight.
"They have more at stake," Cox said. "I've read that they've invested $10 million. I've invested about $28,000."
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