SCI-Waynesburg on budget chopping block
The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections plans to close SCI-Waynesburg by the end of this fiscal year according to Gov. Ed Rendell’s first budget, but House Minority Leader Bill DeWeese plans to work “strenuously” to reverse that decision. The Morgan Township facility housed 494 prisoners at the end of 2002 and has a current fiscal year budget of $16.4 million, but projections for 2003-04 show the facility with a $5.7 million appropriation and zero prisoners at this year’s end, said DeWeese spokeswoman Barbara Grill.
Grill added that DeWeese staffers contacted the Department of Corrections and found out they intend to close the facility, transferring its prisoners to the soon-to-open SCI-Fayette prison in Luzerne Township.
SCI-Waynesburg is a six-decades-old structure that started out as an orphanage in the 1930s, then became a children and youth facility and a women’s prison before its latest incarnation as a men’s prison. It is a different facility that the relatively new maximum-security prison known as SCI-Greene, which houses many of the state’s death row prisoners.
Grill said the state projects SCI-Greene to hold 1,780 prisoners and SCI-Fayette to hold 1,600 prisoners at the end of 2003.
DeWeese (D-Waynesburg) vowed Wednesday to lobby against the closure of the much smaller SCI-Waynesburg, with state Sen. J. Barry Stout (D-Bentleyville) a key ally in that effort. DeWeese said that it makes no sense to put the facility on the budgetary chopping block when the state inmate population stands at 40,900 and climbing.
“We are going to fight strenuously to keep SCI-Waynesburg as an ongoing entity,” said DeWeese. “Any budget document is only a blueprint. In the many years I’ve been privileged to serve, every one of them has been substantially altered.”
Using a baseball metaphor, DeWeese likened the current situation to a game that’s just begun. But he tempered his comments with a reminder about the state’s dire financial situation in the form of a $2 billion deficit Rendell inherited from the Ridge/Schweiker administration.
“The bottom line is, this is the first inning of a nine-inning game. I’m very hopeful that by the end of the ninth inning, we’ll hit a home run and SCI-Waynesburg will be reinvigorated,” said DeWeese. “But I’ve been in public life too long to make that statement a hard, steel-like guarantee.”
With Rendell’s budget people wielding “the ax rather than the surgeon’s scalpel,” DeWeese said all 203 legislative districts in the Commonwealth got “hammered” with the first phase of Rendell’s “bare bones budget.”
Many of those cuts can be restored if Rendell’s plan for additional revenues – in the likely form of slot machines and/or additional taxes – come to fruition after Rendell unveils the second phase of his budget vision on March 25, said DeWeese.
“I will make a Herculean effort to help Gov. Rendell and simultaneously fortify the Waynesburg correctional facility for the long term,” said DeWeese. “We are in a daunting economic climate and potentially on the brink of an international conflict in the Persian Gulf. (State) revenue estimates are exceptionally jaundiced.”
Without some form of additional revues at the state level, DeWeese predicted that the cuts in Rendell’s budget would probably be irreversible. The $10.7 million cut and related plan to phase out SCI-Waynesburg is part of more than $1.6 billion in statewide budget cuts, according to a press release from DeWeese’s office.
In that same release, Stout noted, “Steep rises in the state’s inmate population continue, having reached an all-time high of 40,900. This is no time to be closing up shop when every bit of current cell space is needed to hold our prison population and protect the public.”
DeWeese said that he and Stout contacted Rendell and Department of Corrections Secretary Jeff Beard with their objections, and that the state senator sent a letter as well.
“Stout fired off an agitated epistle to the corrections high command earlier (Wednesday), and forwarded me a copy, expressing his bitter vexation at this new development,” said DeWeese. “He had been personally assured in the last session of the (General) Assembly that SCI-Waynesburg would not be affected.”
DeWeese estimated that slightly fewer than 200 people work at SCI-Waynesburg.