The state Senate’s budget proposal calls for closing the Orange Correctional Center, a minimum-security prison in Hillsborough, as part of a cost-cutting initiative — but the move will prove more costly than the Senate expects.
The budget’s authors claim that closing the prison, and six others across the state, is necessary considering N.C.’s declining prison population. But prison employees will lose jobs, and the state’s prison population will lose important rehabilitation programs.
While declining inmate numbers in N.C. should open the floor to discussions on increasing efficiency and cost-effectiveness in state prisons, the costs of closing Orange Correctional will outweigh any budgetary savings.
Orange Correctional employs 74 people from at least six area counties. The prison supports other Orange County jobs through the many educational programs it offers in collaboration with local colleges, nonprofits and ministries. And with 217 of its 220 beds currently occupied, the prison is far from underpopulated.
Less than four years ago, the state completed a multimillion-dollar segregation facility at the prison for inmates with behavioral and disciplinary issues. To close Orange Correctional so soon after making such an investment would amount to wasting taxpayer money.
And for inmates in need of rehabilitation, the loss would be critical.
The closure would transfer inmates to other prisons, in many cases further away from their families in Orange County. That would make visitation, an important element of rehabilitation, more difficult. And the state’s response to a decreased inmate population should not be to risk new overcrowding by shrinking the number of facilities.
Orange Correctional has also worked hard to develop strong educational programs to help inmates find work after release, programs that would end with the facility.
In closing the Orange Correctional Center, the state would be hindering its ability to effectively rehabilitate inmates. By trimming prison jobs, facilities and rehabilitation programs, the budget would not only hurt inmates, but the counties that host prisons.
