
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, August 2, 1993                   TAG: 9308020112
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND                                LENGTH: Medium

INMATE BOOM LIKELY; STATE WONDERS WHERE THE PRISON SPACE IS

Virginia needs more prison space because the number of inmates is expected to grow rapidly during the next four years, state officials said.

The Department of Criminal Justice Services projects the number of inmates will increase 32 percent to 27,360 by June 1997 from the 20,760 now housed in Virginia prisons and jails.

Of the current number, 17,049 inmates are in state prisons and 3,711 are being held in jails, the department said Friday.

Officials last week dedicated a new $10 million training academy for the Virginia Department of Corrections and expect additional similar facilities to be built.

The six-building facility across from the James River Correctional Center in Goochland County replaces the department's old training academy operated in Waynesboro since 1976.

Other corrections projects that are proposed or under way are in Wise, Fluvanna, Lunenburg and Buckingham counties, and Chesapeake, Haynesville, Culpeper and Southampton.

State officials said $315 million has been appropriated in recent years for pending corrections projects, excluding the academy.

Jim Roberts, deputy staff director of the House of Delegates Appropriations Committee, said Corrections Department projects now make up about 20 percent of the roughly $1.5 billion in appropriations for all pending state capital projects, excluding highway projects.

However, should discretionary parole be eliminated or reduced - as some candidates for governor and attorney general have promised - the department's share of the capital budget could wind up larger than what is spent on all other state projects.

The department has estimated it would cost $1.1 billion to $2.7 billion to build more than 31,000 beds to accommodate the additional inmate space that an end to discretionary parole would require.

Clarence L. Jackson, chairman of the Virginia Parole Board, has said he thinks the figure would be as much as $4 billion.

George Allen, the Republican nominee for governor, has said that abolishing parole would cost about $750 million - most of it for new prisons that might be funded with voter-approved obligation bonds.

But the projected costs by the state and Allen do not include additional annual operating costs, which now range from $11,611 a year to $40,207 a year per inmate. Those costs could amount to an estimated $455 million to $470 million.

by CNB