With the Kansas state prison population threatening to overflow facilities, policymakers are calling for construction of new cell houses at the El Dorado Correctional Facility. Roger Werholtz, who runs the state Department of Corrections, said he was not ready to make specific recommendations for dealing with the exploding population, but expansion of the maximum-security prison "will be part of any discussion involving further capacity requirements." Preliminary plans calls for one or two new cell houses, each capable of housing 128 maximum-security inmates or 256 medium-security inmates. Two medium-security inmates can be housed in a single cell, but only one maximum-security prisoner. Estimates are that one cell house could be built for $7.1 million. If two were built, the cost would be slightly more than double because of the expanded infrastructure that would be required. The inmate population is expected to exceed 9,000 any day now, which would put state prisons almost at capacity.

The prospect of spending more than $14 million on prisons at a time when the state is scrambling just to reach a zero treasury balance this year is not attractive to building construction committee members. "I certainly don't want to do that if we don't have to," said state Sen. Steve Morris. "We also don't want to get into a court-order situation where we have to do something drastic." The Kansas Sentencing Commission already has come up with a much less expensive alternative. It calls for putting nonviolent drug users in treatment programs, some of which cost only $1,500, rather than in prison cells, where the tab runs about $20,000 annually. In the 2001 budget year, according to the Sentencing Commission, 1,257 people were sentenced to Kansas prisons for drug possession. They had no history of crimes against people. The commission estimated that placing drug users in treatment programs instead of prisons would free 400 to 800 prison beds for dangerous criminals.

To learn more about the alternatives to incarceration proposed by the Kansas Sentencing Commission please visit: http://www.accesskansas.org/ksc/