Work begins on Gunnison prison expansion to house 288

GUNNISON — Officials will break ground today for an expansion of the state's central Utah prison.

The new housing unit at the Central Utah Correctional Facility, expected to be completed in November 2006, will be dorm-style housing for an additional 288 inmates.

When CUCF was launched 15 years ago, the Utah Department of Corrections said it would be developed in three phases. When all three phases are complete, the facility will house up to 2,000 inmates as agreed upon by Gunnison officials and the Department of Corrections.

The groundbreaking takes place a week after corrections officials and a state legislator approached Gunnison city officials about a possible major expansion beyond 2,000 inmates. The city's answer was, "No thank you."

The council did leave the door open a crack, saying it might support expansion of the Gunnison prison beyond 2,000 inmates if there was strong public support.

Currently, 1,100 inmates are housed in Gunnison. But with 20 new inmates coming into the system every month and a spike of 75 inmates in July and 85 in August, corrections officials are concerned the current expansion here may not be enough.

"We don't know if that's going to continue," corrections spokesman Jack Ford said. "We have to make plans for down the road."

Now that the unnamed dorm is being built (the housing units in Gunnison are named for trees) the department plans to ask the Legislature for money to construct a 192-bed cell-style housing unit there, too. If approved, the inmate population could go up to 1,580 in 2007, still leaving room for planned expansions up to 2,000 inmates.

The Sept. 21 meeting with local officials was called by Sen. Darin Peterson, R-Nephi, a member of the Criminal Justice Appropriations Subcommittee. He said that Scott Carver, executive director of the Utah Department of Corrections, had asked him to get a read on how Sanpete County and Gunnison officials would feel about turning CUCF into a much larger prison.

Peterson invited Sanpete County commissioners, the Sanpete County sheriff, the county's economic development director, a regional director for the Corrections Department, the CUCF warden and the Gunnison City Council.

Utah has no choice but to either expand the Gunnison site or build a third major prison somewhere else, Peterson said. Otherwise, prison crowding could reach unconstitutional levels, leading to federal takeover of the state's prison system, he said.