THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, October 9, 1995 TAG: 9510050001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines
Ground was broken recently in Portsmouth for the long-awaited Hampton Roads Regional Jail. The 875-bed facility, on a 38-acre site in the Hattonsville Redevelopment Project area, will accommodate up to 1,600 inmates from Norfolk, Newport News and Hampton. Its projected cost is $72 million.
That's a lot of money. But the cost of the Hampton Roads Regional Jail compares favorably with the 780-bed Riverside Regional Jail under construction in Petersburg at a projected cost of $65.2 million. The per-bed cost at Petersburg, $83,590, is somewhat higher than the $82,286 in Portsmouth. But these costs are markedly lower than the $100,446 per-bed cost of the 224-bed, $22.5 million Virginia Peninsula Regional Jail near Williamsburg.
Crime clearly pays jail and prison builders. And that taxpayers must spend tens of billions to build and run jails and prisons seems unavoidable, given the all-too-high crime rates. However, jail and prison costs can vary widely from facility to facility. Why such wide differences in costs?
There are no simple answers. Comparing the cost of Jail A with Jail B can be tricky, in part because jail-cell sizes differ and some facilities contain dormitories while others do not. When two beds are placed in a cell built for one - and the Hampton Roads regional Jail's cells will be large enough to do just that - the per-bed construction cost of jails and prisons drops dramatically.
The kinds of inmates confined to facilities also help dictate their costs. The Hampton Roads Regional Jail will house a full range: juveniles, inmates charged but not convicted, females and felons. It will be equipped to deal with pregnant, violent, emotionally disturbed, AIDS-infected and substance-abusing inmates. It will be ``escape proof'' - that is, inmates will be unable to overcome its physical barriers to freedom (escapes attributable to human error might occur, however).
Comparing jail costs with prison costs can be even more difficult than comparing Jail A to Jail B. Medium-security prisons aren't customarily as expensive as maximum-security prisons, for example.
But that said, the $33.6 million price tag of a 712-bed prison in Pasquotank County, N.C., not far from Portsmouth prompts one to ask whether Virginia could build its regional jails for less than it does.
Maybe not, and it is reassuring that the state's regional jails are being built in part with state financial aid, up to 50 percent of cost, and that state officials must approve the projects. Besides, neither jails nor prisons are built overnight. Need for a Hampton Roads Regional Jail was identified years ago, and much planning over many years preceded last month's groundbreaking ceremony.
There's no doubt about the need. Despite the removal of many state prisoners from the custody of local sheriffs around Virginia, Hampton Roads jails are still crammed with inmates, as The Virginian-Pilot recently reported. Meanwhile, although Virginia is shipping some state prisoners to Texas correctional facilities, construction of prisons already approved by the General Assembly has slowed to a crawl; spirited objections of Virginians who don't want felons in their neighborhoods is no small factor.
So the Hampton Roads Regional Jail can't come on line too soon (the scheduled opening is December 1997), if dangerous wrongdoers are to be safely kept where they can do no harm. This is especially so as the next violent-crime wave that will attend a swelling cohort of teenagers comes rolling at us.
But the Hampton Roads Regional Jail and the other Virginia regional jails are costing a pretty penny - the Portsmouth facility is costing closely to $150 per square foot, far more than the $84.85 per square foot of the ``close-custody'' prison (a notch below maximum security) that North Carolina is putting up in Pasquotank County. State and local officials probably know what they are doing, but the disparities are troubling. by CNB