MORE INFO ON THECLOSURE OF THE DEUEL HOTEL

by Bob Walsh

There was a pretty good article in the RECORD this morning, page 1, above the fold, about the prison closing down.  For a long time, before a couple of Amazon warehouses came to town, it was the largest single-location employer in the area.  It opened in 1953 and provided some excellent training programs for younger prisoners and YA commitments.

The prison currently houses 1,500 inmates (it held as many as 4,000 when I worked there.  3,300 was common.)  It has 1,080 employees of all classifications.  About 650 of them are custody.  The prison is the sixth oldest in the state.  Right now one of the big strikes against it is its drinking water plant, which is constantly messing up and will cost about $30 million to get a semi-permanent fix.  I seem to remember when they built that plant.  It had a single-source set-up on the reverse osmosis filters.  They were troublesome and expensive and fairly soon became IMPOSSIBLE to obtain.  At one time the state was buying bottled drinking water for the prisoners.  The annual operating budget is about $182 million.  

It is very likely that all or virtually all of the non-custody staff will be relocated to other prisons.  The declining inmate population may make it impossible to absorb all of the custody people into other facilities.