More Rooms for The Big House

By Richard Woodbury/Huntsville

In Connecticut, the department of correction is experimentally using two National Guard barracks as a temporary jail for drunken drivers. In Missouri and Oregon, prison authorities have renovated mental hospitals to house convicted felons. In New Jersey, where inmates have been sleeping in gymnasiums, classrooms and a chapel, officials are considering buying a World War II Navy troopship to use as a prison. Meanwhile, New York City is readying a second decommissioned Staten Island ferryboat to moor alongside the Vernon C. Bain, which has housed up to 162 prisoners on the East River since March.

Across the nation, law-enforcement officials are considering all sorts of imaginative and even outlandish ideas as they struggle with an endemic problem: the exploding U.S. prison population. Between 1980 and 1986, the inmate total shot up 78%, to nearly 550,000. In a dramatic protest against the incarceration crisis, the sheriff of Pulaski County, Ark., last week chained 50 prisoners, including 13 women, to trees outside the state prison at Pine Bluff because authorities said there was no room inside. Embarrassed officials quickly found space in the 696-bed complex, which is now officially operating at full capacity.

Budget constraints and long lead times for the construction of additional penitentiary space have helped spur the hunt for alternative prison sites. Corrections officials are also being prodded by judges: in 1986, at least 32 states were operating under court orders to reduce overcrowding in facilities. But an even bigger cause is the space crunch resulting from tougher sentences. "Until the public changes its mind on putting people away for long years, we're going to have a serious problem," predicts C. Paul Phelps, head of Louisiana's corrections department, which has 3,500 prisoners backed up in local jails awaiting space in state prisons.

Some of the solutions under consideration are vaguely reminiscent of the 18th century, when the English crowded thousands of prisoners into the hulks of abandoned ships. New York State, for example, hopes to be the successful bidder this month on the 870-passenger F.A.B. Pursuivant, a British troop barge. State officials want to use the vessel as a prison for 700 minimum- security offenders. The potential savings are considerable: as much as 70% over a comparable building, which would cost $50 million to construct. New York City's floating detention centers, says Ruby Ryles, a city corrections department official, are a "quick fix" to a prisoner glut that has swelled the local jail population to 102% of capacity.

Nowhere is the problem more acute than in depressed Texas, where a revenue squeeze has forced lawmakers to limit the rate of prison expansion. The prison system, with a theoretical maximum capacity of 40,476, has been closed to new arrivals 17 times in 1987, most recently last week. Last spring authorities were forced to release some 1,000 inmates ahead of schedule. Even with quarters for 5,500 more prisoners in the planning stage, the state is still on the hunt for additional rooms at low-budget costs. Says Andy Collins, deputy director of operations for the prison system: "We're looking at everything seriously. The wilder ideas are looking better and better every day."

Many of those ideas are too bizarre to meet strict operating standards imposed on the Texas system in 1980 by Federal Judge William Wayne Justice. Nonetheless, entrepreneurs keep trying. Hard times in the oil patch have spurred hucksters to offer up abandoned office buildings, foreclosed motels and warehouses to the corrections department as makeshift pens. A few down- and-out Houstonians are even trying to foist off their homes as mini- detention centers.

Dallas Real Estate Man Anthony Gange is trying to coax the corrections department into buying an unfinished 108-room mansion owned by followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, onetime spiritual mentor of the Beatles. Asking price: $2.9 million. Houston Salvage Operator George Walsh is hawking one of Britain's Falkland Islands barges, currently in the South Atlantic, for $6 million. The U.S. Government has offered to stash miscreants on offshore oil- drilling platforms.

Texas will have to make some decisions quickly. Despite its construction plans, the state faces a predicted 15,000-bed shortage by 1991. "What we've been doing hasn't been working," concedes Corrections Information Director Charles L. Brown. "We've got to try everything."