INDIANAPOLIS — The Indiana Department of Correction expects to gain more than 2,000 beds for inmates by shifting programs and hundreds of prisoners to different locations.
Department Commissioner Edwin Buss said the changes would save money and space — but they won’t create more room for the state’s fast-growing number of maximum security inmates. Buss repeated previous promises that the state will not jeopardize public safety by releasing prisoners early as other states have done.
The shifts announced Tuesday affect eight prison programs and 440 employees. Officials said workers will have the opportunity to apply for revamped jobs, although some may have to relocate or be retrained.
Perhaps the most controversial change is moving female youth offenders from Indianapolis to Madison in southeastern Indiana. They will be housed in existing buildings on the Madison State Hospital campus, where the Madison Correctional Facility for women is also located.
But many of the female youth offenders are from counties far from Madison. About 7 percent of the 171 juvenile females in the prison system are from Lake County in northwest Indiana. About 15 percent are from St. Joseph County and about 9 percent are from Elkhart County in northern Indiana; about 6 percent are from Marion County.
Madison is about a two-hour drive from Indianapolis, and is nearly five hours from northwest Indiana.
Crystal Garcia, an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, said moving those offenders will make it difficult to maintain relationships that are so important to young girls.
“They jokingly talk about their families’ town cars — cars that are solely able to go around town,” Garcia said. “(Prison officials) are making it really difficult to maintain those family ties and relationships. It’s going to be hard for a lot of these families to get there.”
Buss said the department is working with volunteer groups to organize bus trips to Madison, and video conferencing can help families keep in touch.
Madison Mayor Tim Armstrong said he’s looking forward to the juvenile facility opening in October.
“It’s exciting to us because it’s going to create jobs,” he said.
Twenty-two teaching jobs at the current Indianapolis Juvenile Correctional Facility will be cut because the girls will move to Madison, but those teachers may apply for other positions.
Inmates from the Indiana Women’s Prison near downtown Indianapolis will move into the former juvenile facility. The Plainfield Re-entry Educational Facility will move to the current women’s prison. And a new program for short-term prisoners will be housed at Plainfield, about 15 west of Indianapolis.
Prison officials touted the short-term offender program as a new approach to deal with inmates who need programs such as drug and alcohol treatment and case management.
The state’s prison population of about 27,000 grows by about 4 percent a year, or about 1,000 inmates. The changes will create 2,040 beds and save $186 million, officials said.
But the reorganization won’t find more room for maximum-security prisoners — the fastest-growing segment of Indiana’s prison population. Indiana prisons have 26 beds left for the worst offenders.
Corrections department officials thought their maximum-security problem would be alleviated when Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels proposed expanding two prisons to add 1,200 beds. But Democrats who control the Indiana House objected, and Daniels later dropped the idea.
Buss said the department also didn’t get a funding increase it had hoped for in the state budget approved June 30.
If Indiana gets more maximum-security prisoners, officials could house some of those inmates at medium-security facilities in a move that Buss said could threaten public safety.
“We are at a crisis stage today,” he said.
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