WINDHAM – Officials from the Maine Department of Corrections have started a feasibility study on construction of a new and more efficient Maine Correctional Center in Windham.

A modernized facility would bring local jobs to the area and be better designed to meet the overall needs of the facility, said Scott Fish, director of special projects at the Maine Department of Corrections.

The feasibility study is to be submitted to the Maine Legislature in the spring, with any construction of the building not beginning until “several years into the future,” Fish said.

While the proposal to redesign the Windham prison was raised about a year ago by Gov. Paul LePage, the proposal failed to gain momentum in the recent state budget cycle. The feasibility study will refine the Department of Corrections’ needs regarding the facility and that of other smaller prison facilities in the state.

Staff from smaller prisons would be given the opportunity to transfer to Windham as jobs become available, said Fish.

According to Department of Corrections Commissioner Joseph Ponte, the project would cost about $100 million, and would require demolition of most of the locked-down units on site, which Ponte described as outdated.

“Looking at facilities in Maine, most of them are old and several of them never started off as a prison – they were used as military barracks or other housing, then turned into prisons. Those designs, while they may save some initial money, in a sense of not having to [rebuild] secure prison facilities, they cost the state and municipal agencies a great deal of money,” Ponte said.

A new facility would require less staff, Ponte said, which accounts for three-quarters of the correctional facility’s $23 million annual budget.

“Staffing is truly the cost of running prisons,” Ponte said.

With a new building, the prison would also be able to create a first-in-Maine section for elderly prisoners, offer more rehabilitation programs for inmates and give minimum-security inmates an opportunity to get a job, Ponte said.

Since spring, lawmakers have balked at the project’s scale and about giving the Department of Corrections permission to borrow $100 million for the work, without holding a voter referendum. Some say Ponte’s proposal for a new prison lacks detail.

In response to concerns statewide, Ponte will conduct a feasibility study this fall to further examine his plan and justify the savings. He will then present a more detailed plan to the Legislature next spring, said Fish.

State Sen. Gary Plummer, R-Windham, a member of the Legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, which oversees state prisons, said this week he has not formed an opinion on whether the department should pursue the project, but has argued “strongly” for looking at its feasibility.

“I am not ready to say, ‘Yeah, it’s a good idea’ until we have the study done,” Plummer said.

He hopes the study will address the number of jobs a new correctional facility would provide and the maximum number of prisoners it could house before overcrowding becomes an issue.

“Show me the facts about whether you can pay the debt service, staff the facility and have money left over,” Plummer said.

According to Plummer, several Democrats of the legislative committee would rather not spend $100 million on a facility, and instead put it toward funding human services, education or other dilapidated buildings in Maine. The Republicans, he said, expressed support for the Windham prison project, while also preferring to see a more detailed plan.

“Part of the feasibility study is how is it going to work?” Plummer said.

“The key to it, for me, is that we can operate with less staff per capita, and … in the end, the entire facility would be run for less money or at least no more money than we are spending right now,” he said.

“For me, that’s the bottom line,” Plummer said. “If he can’t show us that, I am not sure if I would be on board with building a new facility.”

Projections

Despite concerns, Ponte guarantees that once the proposal is ironed out it will meet the department’s projections.

The department pays $23 million annually to incarcerate its inmates at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham and another $10 million to house them at smaller facilities.

The plan would close or reduce operations at smaller prisons, eliminating more than 100 staff positions, according to Ponte’s plan, and the inmates at those prisons would be moved to the Windham facility, increasing the inmate population by 50 percent, from 600 to 900.

One key to the savings is a reduction in staff, which Ponte has said could cover the $100-million bond in 15 years or less.

If all the inmates were housed in one central location, which would be the new facility Ponte said, costs per inmate would be nearly cut in half.

“Current costs per inmate per day at MCC is $102. With the new facility, we can get that cost down to $62 a day,” Ponte said.

Replacing the facility with a safer, more efficient one has less to do with its age and more to do with the design, said Fish.

“As Superintendent Scott Landry described it, the facility was built like an old New England farmhouse where you had the main structure built in the 1920s and other pieces added over time,” Fish said.

In other words, it represented a collection of jails rather than one large unified jail.

When built, the Windham facility was designed for officers confining inmates to one area and watching them from outside, Fish said. The new prison would be designed more modernly to have corrections officers and inmates in one space, Fish said, improving supervision

Fish said rough sketches have been drawn up for a new facility that corrections department officials believe will make the correctional center a “safer” facility.

The design will reflect the new reality of Maine’s population, which is aging, Ponte said.

“We don’t have units to house geriatric-type inmates, we don’t have units to house mentally ill inmates,” Ponte said, of the current prison.

Neither is it equipped to deal with women prisoners, Fish said. According to Fish, the increase in female offenders will be taken into account when designing a new facility.

The feasibility study will examine how the $100 million can be used in the best possible fashion when building a safer, more secure prison, Fish said.

In the study, the department will address how it plans to pay down the debt in a 15-year time frame, Ponte added, without asking for additional state funding.

From conception to completion, Ponte anticipates that the project will take three or four years.

“It [the feasibility study] will help us determine what we really need, the best way to build a prison, and then we will go forward,” Fish said.

An aerial view of the Maine Correctional Center in Windham shows how the sprawling campus was built in sections.