Plan will reactivate women's prison

Plan will reactivate women's prison

By Alan Gustafson, Statesman Journal

Nearly a decade after the state closed its crowded and obsolete prison for women in Salem, corrections officials plan to move female convicts back to the same lockup here.

Here's why: The Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, Oregon's prison for women in Wilsonville, is packed with nearly 1,150 inmates. Prisoner managers are double-bunking inmates and using nearly 60 emergency beds as makeshift measures at Coffee Creek.

To ease the crunch, officials plan to shift some convicts to Salem. The women will occupy a fenced compound along State Street, formerly the Oregon Women's Correctional Center.

The compound currently operates as a 176-bed men's minimum-security prison, next door to
the walled Oregon State Penitentiary, a maximum-security men's prison.

"We have a pretty immediate need to carve out some additional women's beds somewhere in
the system," said Nathan Allen, planning and budget administrator for the state Department of
Corrections. "That unit, based on its size and proximity here in Salem to some work opportunities for women, just made a lot of sense."

Tentative plans call for moving the women inmates to Salem in September, said Jeanine Hohn, a Corrections Department spokeswoman. Relocation plans for male inmates now occupying the minimum-security prison haven't been determined, officials said.

"We're working out the details of it," Allen said. "The men that are currently there would be relocated to other housing environments, probably in some temporary emergency beds somewhere in another existing facility."

The state prison system consists of 14 institutions, collectively housing about 14,000 inmates.
Coffee Creek is the sole prison for women.

Five men's prisons operate in Salem: Oregon State Penitentiary and the adjacent minimum-security lockup, Oregon State Correctional Institution, Mill Creek Correctional Facility and Santiam Correctional Institution.

Corrections Department administrators recently proposed closing three prisons, including Mill
Creek and Santiam, as part of a $52 million budget-cutting plan. The cuts were fashioned in
response to Gov. Ted Kulongoski's order that state agencies slice 9 percent from the final 12
months of their 2009-11 budgets.

Kulongoski nixed the prison closures, saying he wasn't willing to use his powers to commute
the sentences of nearly 1,000 convicted felons. Instead, the governor plans to ask the
Legislative Emergency Board to dip into a reserve fund to cover the $15.3 million cost of keeping the three prisons open.

Officials said a prison work group has been studying ways to deal with Coffee Creek's crowding issue for a couple months. Converting the Salem prison back into a women's prison emerged as the best option.

"It's moving forward," Allen said. "It's really a question now just of timing."

The Wilsonville prison opened in autumn 2001, becoming Oregon's first new women's prison in
36 years. After women inmates moved to Coffee Creek, OWCC was converted into a minimum-security men's prison. Salem residents best remember OWCC for an escape by child killer Diane Downs. In one of Oregon's most infamous crimes, Downs fatally shot one of her children and badly
wounded two others in 1983. In 1987, Downs scaled a prison fence in broad daylight, then hitched a ride and spent 10 days on the lam with three men living in a rundown house along State Street, less than a mile from the prison. Downs was recaptured after investigators searched her cell and discovered a blank piece of paper with indentations that turned out to be a map to the house where she was hiding.
Sent out of state by Oregon prison officials, Downs hatched other escape plots that were foiled in New Jersey and California. In December 2008, Oregon's parole board denied her first request for parole, and she's still locked up in California.

The headline-grabbing escape by Downs placed a rare spotlight on OWCC. State leaders long
neglected the women's prison as they built new prisons for male offenders. By the 1990s, OWCC was overcrowded and obsolete, lacking space for treatment and work programs.

Plans to build a new women's prison surfaced in the mid-1990s, stirring controversy about where it should be located. Salem leaders argued against building it here, stressing the presence of a handful of state prisons and the Oregon State Hospital.

In 1996, a strong united front in Salem persuaded a prison siting committee to rule out the capital city. The panel opted for Wilsonville, and then-Gov. John Kitzhaber concurred.

However, Wilsonville residents put up a fierce fight against the prison complex, consisting of medium-security and minimum-security sections for women, plus a co-gender intake center for inmates entering the prison system.

After years of political wrangling and legal challenges, the Oregon Supreme Court in 1999
rejected the last attempt by neighbors to block construction of the prison in Wilsonville. The $171-million Coffee Creek complex, billed as a state-of-the-art replacement facility for OWCC, opened in October 2001. Female inmates in Salem were bused to Coffee Creek to occupy the new complex.

Nearly a decade later, prison population forecasters predict steady growth in the female inmate population, and prison managers are scrambling to find enough space for them.

agustafs@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6709
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