By Daniel Denvir
City Paper
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — The state Department of Corrections is constructing a $400 million, two-prison complex to replace the aging State Correctional Institution at Graterford, but newly released cost analyses fail to show the projected savings that Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration has claimed.
The administration, under fire for allocating money for prisons while public school districts struggle under severe financial pressures, has insisted that the new SCI-Phoenix prisons will save money in the long run, thanks to $33 million in operational efficiencies and the avoidance of between $50 to $60 million in repairs to Graterford once it is closed.
But two documents recently released by the Department of Corrections (DOC) indicate that the projected savings are based on an analysis, purportedly using data from 2007, that is superficial, unclearly sourced and woefully out of date.
The agency now admits that the projected savings from the Phoenix prisons project are uncertain: Questioned about the documents, DOC spokesperson Susan Bensinger told City Paper in November that savings from “more efficient utilities,” “slightly smaller staff costs” and “not repairing or upgrading the existing facility … are not sufficient to pay for the construction costs of Phoenix.”
The DOC maintains that these two documents, spreadsheets labeled “construction analysis,” were the only cost-benefit studies of the project ever performed. They include more than $33 million in annual savings — not from operational costs as previously stated, but mostly from the closure of a second state prison, SCI-Greensburg, and the rehousing of its prisoners at SCI-Phoenix.
Full story: Documents raise questions about cost of new prison