The prison was moved in 1951 from its aging Sugar House site because inmate escapes were becoming a daily occurrence, and the guards could no longer shoot at escaping inmates without posing a safety risk for the residential neighborhood that had grown around it.

If the prison were to move 30 miles away, it could be situated anywhere between Bountiful to the north to Spanish Fork in the south and from Grantsville in the west to Heber City in the east.

For a 40-mile move, the radius would expand to include Farmington and Antelope Island in the north to Santaquin in the south, remote Tooele County land in the west to Kamas in the east.

A 50-mile move could put the prison in Ogden to the north, Mona to the south, Skull Valley and Dugway to the west and the Uinta Mountains in the east.

A move of those distances will have an impact on the more than 1,000 employees who keep the 24-hour-a-day prison running.

Those employees come from all over Salt Lake and Utah counties. The locale with the highest representation is unincorporated Salt Lake County with 168 employees. Lehi follows with 141, and then Riverton with 101, Orem with 94, and West Jordan with 93 round out the top five.

With an average mean salary of $13.92 per hour for correctional officers, the largest group of employees, commuting costs could add up quickly and force employees to either move with the prison or find new jobs.

Moving the prison farther out from downtown amenities like courts and hospitals may also add heavy travel costs to provide for the needs and rights of the prisoners, Ford said.

The approximately 20-minute drive from the Draper site to downtown Salt Lake helps cut down on commuting costs and trips for the roughly 100 inmates who are taken to court hearings every day, Ford said.

In addition, about 20 to 30 inmates are taken to Salt Lake hospitals each day. Four inmates are currently on dialysis, which requires a routine hospital trip every other day. The department is analyzing the feasibility of purchasing its own dialysis machine to save on transportation costs, Ford said.

The Draper site's relative proximity to downtown hospitals has also been a plus in cases of prison violence, Ford said, when inmates have had to be airlifted to a Salt Lake trauma center.

The cost of moving a prison farther from downtown also has ramifications beyond spending tax dollars, Ford said. Longer commutes may also mean less family contact for the majority of inmates, 77 percent of whom were sentenced from district courts along the Wasatch Front, he said.