Frakes Says New Prison Needed; Some Are Skeptical

While some Nebraskans are skeptical about the need for a new prison, Corrections Director Scott Frakes said it is needed for public safety.

Frakes unveiled his proposal for a new prison housing 1,500 inmates and costing $230 million to build on Monday. In an interview with NET News Tuesday, he was asked, why now?

“We’re at a point where we’ve got a couple issues. One is the need to have enough space to safely, effectively house the population that we’re responsible for, and then the other is our aging infrastructure,” Frakes said.

Nebraska’s prisons, which were designed to hold about 3,500 people, currently house about 5,250 according to Frakes, and are projected to reach over 6,400 four years from now. Frakes acknowledged there would still be crowding, but it would be a lot less serious with the additional 1,500 beds.

“That puts us about 110 percent operational capacity, so yes, we would still be somewhat crowded, but that’s really a pretty good number,” he said.

Sen. John McCollister, who recently convened a Zoom meeting of lawmakers and experts to talk about Nebraska’s prison situation, criticized the plan.

“I was very disappointed. This new prison is unnecessary. Given that the (Gov. Pete) Ricketts administration is a proponent of federalism, you would think that we would look to what other states are doing, and doing correct, on criminal justice reform, and noticing that the prison populations were dropping in those other states,” McCollister said.

Asked for Ricketts' thoughts on the new prison proposal, spokesman Taylor Gage said the governor won't reveal his budget proposals until mid-January. But he praised the "great work" Frakes and his team are doing.

A study by The Sentencing Project, a group that advocates for alternatives to incarceration, said 44 states had reduced their prison population from its peak by 2018, but Nebraska was one of only six states still increasing. But Frakes cited a study by the Vera Institute, another group that opposes mass incarceration, that he said ranked Nebraska only 39^th among the states in terms of the percentage of the population imprisoned.

“A lot of the great successes that are touted in terms of reducing prison populations were those states where they had high rates of incarceration and were incarcerating a lot of very low-level felony people. Nebraska just isn’t in that position. We’re not overusing incarceration,” Frakes said.

In addition to its overcrowding problem, Nebraska’s prison system also suffers from a lack of staff. As of September, the Legislative Fiscal Office said, there were over 200 vacancies for corporals, sergeants and case workers. Sen. John Stinner, chairman of the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee, says that makes him hesitant about the new prison proposal.

“I’m reluctant to move ahead simply because we haven’t filled jobs on the current situation. So somewhere along the line we have to address jobs and position openings and how we fill those and then maybe look at what best practices are in other states,” Stinner said.

Frakes said many of those vacancies are at the state prison in the small town of Tecumseh, about 50 miles from Lincoln and 70 miles from Omaha. He said having enough people to fill the roughly 400 jobs in a new prison would be a key factor in deciding where it should be located. He was asked if that meant, as a practical matter, it would have to be in Lincoln, Omaha, or somewhere in between.

“As a practical matter, but I don’t want to take anything off the table until we see. Because there’s communities to the north that you could say they’re between Lincoln and Omaha but they’re kind of – it almost forms a triangle. And there’s a couple communities at least to the west – a couple/three to the west – that are big enough just by themselves to support a facility of this size,” he said.

Frakes said in addition to the $230 million construction cost, a new prison would add about $14.5 million in annual operating costs, after taking into account savings from reducing costs at other prisons by changing the security level of prisoners housed there.

Danielle Conrad, executive director of ACLU Nebraska, said those dollars would be better spent elsewhere.

“Use those precious taxpayer dollars to build up diversion. To build up mental health services. To build up treatment. That is a more effective way to advance our shared public safety goals and a much better value for taxpayers,” Conrad said.

Frakes said the programs Conrad mentioned are worthwhile, but not enough.

“All of those things are part of the solution. But at the same time there is a part of our criminal population that demonstrates the level of risk that, as a collective society, we need to say ‘We’ve got to put them somewhere where we can contain them, stop them from making victims of others,’ and then figure out what’s the programming, what’s the treatment, what’s the intervention that will help them behave like the rest of us out here in society?” he said.

Even before the prison proposal was made public, Sen. Steve Lathrop, chairman of the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee, was predicting prison issues would be an important topic in the coming year.

“I think we will have a debate over how much of the solution to overcrowding and the issue that plague the Department are going to be resolved by building, or are we going to take an approach that is more reform oriented, or some combination of the two?” Lathrop said.

That debate is already underway. But it will be formalized after the Legislature reconvenes January 6.