Indiana to House Arizona Inmates 

Phoenix — Indiana has too many empty prison cells. Arizona has too many prisoners.

Consequently, 1,260 minimum- and medium-security Arizona inmates will be housed at Indiana’s New Castle Correctional Facility. The prison, which opened in 2002, has a 2,416-inmate capacity, but currently only houses about 1,000 inmates.

Arizona will not transfer high-risk criminals, sex offenders, or prisoners that have attempted to escape and have disciplinary problems. The state will pay $64 per inmate per day, generating an expected $6.1 million in revenue for Indiana, which can terminate the contract after one year. The facility is expected to be at capacity by Memorial Day.

The transfer will create an additional 230 jobs at the privately managed Indiana prison, which will make the facility the fourth-largest employer in the city.

A representative of the Arizona Department of Corrections says the agreement is a win-win situation. But opponents of the plan say it’s a bad idea because family visitation is an important aid for inmate reintegration into society and family visits will be difficult or impossible in Indiana. Arizona officials will offer at-cost charter bus trips and video visitation to the relatives of inmates transferred to Indiana.

Residents in New Castle are generally accepting of the decision to house the Arizona inmates and hope it will bring an economic boost to the area, which has faced financial hardships in recent years, according to reports. The city was home to some of the best manufacturing jobs in the United States at a Chrysler Corp. auto plant, but those jobs are now gone.

The inmate transfers are expected to be a temporary fix for Arizona. Indiana officials anticipate they will need the prison space by mid-2008 to house their own offenders. To avoid potential problems, the inmate population of each state will be separated at the facility.

Arizona, whose prison population is one of the fastest growing in the nation, is also housing 1,500 prisoners in Oklahoma.