OUR VIEW: Behind on the bars

Attention all law-abiding Virginians. Stop it. The state needs you to commit yourself to committing crime, preferably violent crime. If you don’t, prison beds here and prison beds to come in 2010, might have to be filled by more imported lawbreakers, or, worse, in the mind of the Department of Corrections, the state might have to scale back plans for prisons and close some of the ones that were built in the binge that promised to put a house of incarceration in every Southwest Virginia boy’s and girl’s backyard.
In a Richmond Times-Dispatch story about the state inking a deal to house 300 Wyoming prisoners in Wise County’s Wallens Ridge State Prison and Tazewell County’s new Pocahontas State Correctional Center, Corrections spokesman Larry Traylor said the alternative would be closing prisons and laying off employees. 
“Hopefully,” the paper quoted him as saying, this is a “short-term solution to meet current needs of the DOC and the state.”
Let us translate that for you. Traylor said that he hopes before long, like by the time the contract runs out and the planned Grayson County prison opens in 2010, Virginians will have gotten with the program, started committing the number of crimes the DOC requires of them and we can rid our neighborhoods of out-of-state bad guys.
The Wyoming deal, by the way, could bring in as much as $18.5 million over the next two years, so subtract that, if you will from the $69 million spent building the medium-security Pocahontas facility that opened in September. Hopefully, Wyoming, or maybe Utah, or Michigan or someone will come through for us again to help pay for the 1,024 beds in the medium security Grayson County facility. The cost for that is expected to be $100.5 million. Might need an Idaho or two thrown in for good measure. Each prison, according to a Times-Dispatch article, costs about $100 million to build and $25 million per year to operate. Make that two Idahos and a Florida.
So why are we still building and planning on building prisons?
That’s easy. Politicians are winning at a game of scare the voter. The Times-Dispatch reported that Delegate David Albo, the Republican chair of the Virginia State Crime Commission and the House Courts of Justice Committee, said that “These prisons are basically full of very bad guys.” Then, before you can say, “yes indeed, Wyoming born and bred bad guys on top of it,” he hits you with the question of “do you think they should be in prison or out in the neighborhoods?”
Who in his right mind would respond, “the neighborhoods please?”
But let’s assume you have a choice in picking what neighborhood. Then you might not be so out of your mind. We’d rather have those prisoners out – in a Wyoming neighborhood.
Albo said in order to keep all those bad guys locked up us taxpayer have to be willing to pay for some prisons, one a year. It’s worth the $100 million annually to “keep violent criminals and drug dealers out of my neighborhood,” he said.
Trouble is, Albo is sending the criminals to our neighborhoods, shipping them in from out of state when necessary. Notice that he’s from Fairfax. Count how many of the new prisons or ones in the works are located in Fairfax County. What? None? The closest is Coffeewood Correctional Center in Culpeper, built in 1994. Very nice, neat and politically expedient.