Union chief rips plan to shut down prison camp at Nellis AFB

Jace Radke

Monday, Feb. 14, 2005 | 10:54 a.m.

The president of the local union for the workers at the Nellis Federal Prison Camp isn't buying the Bureau of Prison's contention that shutting down the camp and three others like it will save the government millions of dollars.

Travis Raz, president of Local 4000, represents the 84 workers at the camp and says the bureau's plan would shut down a facility that supports Nellis Air Force Base and rehabilitates prisoners.

"Look at our $8.9 million operating budget and the conservative estimate that the inmates save Nellis about $6 million a year with the work they do," Raz said. "After you subtract that $6 million, that's got to be one of the cheapest prison operations in the country."

Raz and other union members say they are ready to fight to keep the 650-inmate capacity camp open after the Bureau of Prisons announced last week that it is looking to shut down the Nellis facility and three other minimum-security prisons across the country to cut costs.

The Bureau of Prisons estimates that $38 million a year could be saved once the Nellis camp and similar stand-alone prison camps in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida are closed. The initiative, that would have to be approved by Congress before it would become effective, would shuffle the inmates and workers at the camps to other facilities.

Bureau of Prisons officials say they want to close down older stand-alone facilities and move toward a new prison model that has a few facilities with different security levels at one site so staffing and services can be duplicated.

Bureau of Prisons spokesman Dan Dunne estimates that $36 million in repairs and upgrades are needed at Nellis and the other three camps, two of which are also located on military bases.

"Generally speaking these are all old facilities," Dunne said. "Some of the work that needs to be done are the repair of structural defects, physical plant problems and fire safety systems that need to be upgraded."

Dunne said that he could not break down the $36 million by the four prison camps, and that a breakdown of the cost of improvements needed at Nellis was unavailable.

At Nellis, where some of the prison buildings date back more than 40 years, the only improvement that is needed is a new fire alarm system, Raz said.

He estimates such a system would cost about $1.8 million.

"I have yet to see figures from the federal Bureau of Prisons to indicate what the cost will be to relocate staff and inmates that are at Federal Prison Camp Nellis," Raz said. "Nor have I seen any mention of sending inmates from these facilities around the country to privately run for profit prisons ... one of the leading hidden factors in these 'proposed' closures."

Along with government-run prisons the Bureau of Prisons uses several private contract facilities for housing prisoners. Correctional facilities in Taft, Calif. and Eloy, Ariz. are the closest contract detention centers to Nellis.

The workers at the Nellis camp would be allowed to transfer to other Bureau of Prisons jobs, possibly working at one of the country's 110 federal prisons, Dunne said.

About 250 inmates a day work at Nellis Air Force Base doing maintenance, janitorial and landscaping work for 12 cents an hour, Raz said.

It's that workforce, made up of white-collar criminals and low-level drug offenders, that the Bureau of Prisons wants to use as labor at its multi-security level facilities to save money, Bureau of Prisons officials said.

"I've worked at other prisons and there are already populations there to do that work," said Raz who has worked as a counselor at the Nellis camp for five years. "You end up seeing prisoners out picking up cigarette butts, and they have to resort to picking one up and walking it to the trash because there isn't enough to put in a day of work.

"It made me want to start smoking just so they'd have something to do."

The work that the 633-inmates currently held at the prison camp do at the Air Force Base is appreciated, Nellis officials said.

"Over the years we have shared a mutually beneficial relationship," said Capt. Steve Rolenc, a Nellis spokesman. "We provide the facilities and they provide custodial and landscaping services."

Without the inmates Nellis would have to task airmen to work the jobs that the inmates do or hire outside contractors, Rolenc said.

Judy Freyermuth, executive director of the Federal Prison Policy Project, a nonprofit prison reform organization based in Atlanta, said that the Bureau of Prisons is unhappy with its proposed budget and is threatening the camp closures in the hopes of bumping its bottom line.

"They are not going to save money from closing down these camps," Freyermuth said. "The $38 million figure is a bald-face lie. They just want money for the labor being done at the military bases."

If it's attention that the Bureau of Prisons wants, as Freyermuth suggests, Raz and other union members are only too happy to shine a light on the issue. On Friday Raz and more than 20 prison camp workers met with aides of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev, at the George Federal Building.

Congressman Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., has said he is against shuttering the Nellis camp and losing the benefits it provides to the community and Nellis Air Force Base, according to his spokeswoman Amy Spanbauer.

Chief U.S. District Court Judge Philip Pro said he thinks an important part of rehabilitation is for prisoners to serve time close to their families, and eliminating the Nellis camp would deny convicts with Las Vegas connections a chance to do that.

Kenneth Reith, a retired prison counselor who opened the Nellis camp in 1989 and retired in 1998, said that closing stand-alone minimum security camps makes no sense.

"In a stand-alone camp you don't have the negative influence filter down from the higher-security prisons like you do at the multi-level facilities," said Reith, who worked for the Bureau of Prisons for 30 years. "It's an incentive for the inmates to get to one of the stand-alone camps. They have a better chance of success there."

The Nellis camp is located in the Northeast corner of Nellis Air Force Base in an site known as Area II. Among the high-profile prisoners that have served time at the prison are Internet sports gambler Jay Cohen and Martha Stewart's former stockbroker Peter Bacanovic.

If the camp closes the buildings would revert back to the Air Force and could be used by Nellis-based units.