Updated at 2:38 p.m., Saturday, July 21, 2007
450 Hawaii inmates to move from Mississippi to Arizona
Associated Press
TUTWILER, Miss. — A prison operator is moving 450 Hawai'i prisoners out of Mississippi to a facility in Arizona to make space available for several hundred inmates from California."We expect to have all of them out of the facility within the next month," said Louise Grant, a vice president with Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, which operates the Tallahatchie County Correctional Center in Tutwiler and two other private prisons in Mississippi.
The inmates are going to a private prison in Arizona that will exclusively house inmates from Hawai'i, Grant said.
CCA has said it expects to have the first California inmate in the Tutwiler facility within two months if everything gets settled on California's end. Hawai'i pays $58.43 per inmate per day to CCA. California pays CCA $63 per day per inmate for housing its inmates at private prisons, including in Mississippi.
California prison officials announced recently that they would begin involuntary transfer of inmates to prisons in other states to ease prison crowding.
Some inmates who agreed to volunteer transfers were moved last year.
The 1,104-bed Tallahatchie prison is adding 360 beds this year, and an additional $17 million, 360-bed expansion is scheduled for completion in 2008.
