OGDEN -- The Northern Utah Community Correctional Center, the state's largest halfway house, may be the wave of the future in a state where the inmate population is growing faster than new prisons can be built.
The 154-bed halfway house in West Ogden, or "The Nuke" as staffers call it, filled up 2 1/2 years after it opened, about the same time the Utah prison system hit the 5,000-inmate mark.Prison officials are preparing to evaluate bids for a new 500-bed minimum security prison. But Department of Corrections spokesman Jack Ford said it won't be open for a year. Meantime, halfway houses are the primary solution for overcrowding in a system that is growing by 500 inmates a year.
"Currently the prison takes in 230 inmates a month," Ford said. "And half of those are for technical parole violations, where they didn't commit a new crime. They just violated the terms of their parole or probation by not reporting, or having a dirty drug test.
"They don't always need to go back to prison, they just need a little adjustment."
Once the new medium-security prison has passed its public hearings and a location is found, officials will turn their attention to planned halfway houses in Davis and Utah counties, Ford said.
Officials hope to get them open about the same time as the new medium-security prison. Halfway houses are quicker and cheaper to build and don't carry the $40,000-per-cell price tag of prisons.
Director Ray McDonough said his halfway house operates much like a medium-security prison. But a work-release jail might be a better description for The Nuke.
"It's more like a medium-security prison than the other three halfway houses (all in Salt Lake County)," McDonough said. The biggest of the other facilities only has 68 beds, he said.
The Nuke is no ordinary halfway house.
It has three pods: a 38-bed pod for women "residents," a 50-bed pod for male sex offenders and a 66-bed pod for the rest. The whole facility is considered a lockdown operation, but there are only two traditional cells where problem residents are punished, or offenders who have violated parole wait to be sent back to prison.
Residents share two-bed rooms, and each set of two rooms shares a bathroom.
They can only leave with permission, and according to a schedule kept in the center's control room computers. On a recent day, 92 residents were outside the center either at day jobs or hunting for employment.
The residents are taken shopping in groups of up to 13 by correctional officers or the three Adult Probation and Parole agents who staff the center.
Escapees aren't a problem, officials said. They are called "walkaway" since no one has to tunnel out or scale barbwire fences. Residents just fail to return from jobs.
McDonough said the halfway house averages one walkaway every two or three weeks. Residents know that when they are caught they will automatically be returned to prison.
Another 200 parolees and probationers who live in the area use the center for classes and programs, such as drug abuse counseling and anger management.
Ford said corrections officials have been meeting with judges about making more use of facilities like The Nuke.
"More halfway houses is something we've needed for a long time, and the judges are looking for alternatives to incarceration," he said.