SALT LAKE CITY — Utah just built a new prison on the west-side of the city and now lawmakers are looking for funding to expand.
A request for appropriation filed by Rep. Karianne Lisonbee, R-Clearfield, seeks $130 million to expand the Central Utah Correctional Facility at Gunnison. She told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Appropriations Committee on Thursday that the state prison system is already in danger of emergency releases.
Current capacity at the Utah Department of Corrections' prisons at Gunnison and Salt Lake City is about 7,200 beds, she said. Right now, they are at 92% capacity. When the new prison in Salt Lake City was built? It had 1,000 fewer beds than the old prison at Bluffdale.
"We decriminalized a lot of drug crimes and so we weren’t going to need as much prison space, we’re going to work with people in the community and rehabilitate," Rep. Lisonbee, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, told FOX 13 News. "We are still doing all of those things, but our population has grown and our prison capacity has gone down and we need more beds. That’s just the math."
Her proposal faced pushback from Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, who balked at the $130 million price tag.
"What part of this money is going to reducing recidivism? What part of this money is going to go into providing services and education so we can reduce the number of beds we are working towards?" she said, criticizing the relocation of the prison site as "short-sighted."
Rep. Lisonbee countered that the prison population is growing and because the legislature's justice reform efforts were "in concept a nice idea but in practice became... but found recidivism was higher" without the proper capacity. Rep. Lisonbee warned of the potential of emergency releases of offenders without it.
The funding request will be considered as the legislative session goes forward.
