FORT MADISON (AP) — It wasn’t the move that Fort Madison has been anxiously anticipating, but residents of the historic prison town said they’ll take it.
More than 170 minimum-security inmates at the John Bennett Unit at the Iowa State Penitentiary complex packed their belongings and boarded buses Tuesday. Their destination: 400 yards down the road to their new home, the Clinical Care Unit, built in 2001 at a cost of $26 million to house 200 of the most dangerous inmates with mental illness and behavioral problems.
Prison workers have spent several weeks transforming it into a minimum-security environment, removing locks from secure doors and adding a larger visiting room. By Tuesday morning, inmates who used to sleep in open rooms filled with up to 50 bunks at John Bennett were moving into their small, mostly single cells with their own bathrooms.
Inmates will love their new privacy — but miss the large recreation yard they enjoyed at John Bennett, prison officials said.
Prison officials said the move makes sense, noting that the state has a shortage of minimum-security beds and that John Bennett needed expensive structural repairs to remain open. But one former CCU administrator questioned the logic and cost.
“It was designed for maximum-security inmates,” said Heather Brueck, who left in 2011. “They are wasting lockup cells on folks who don’t have that security level.”
Warden Nick Ludwick dismissed Brueck as “highly uninformed,” saying it’s common for prisons to be changed to different security levels.
The move is part of a wide-ranging — at times rocky — restructuring of Iowa’s prisons.
Residents of Fort Madison, where the Iowa State Penitentiary dates back 175 years, have been planning for “the big move” for years. That’s when the old prison will close, and authorities will move 550 offenders a mile down the road to the new but empty $132 million Iowa State Penitentiary.
But that plan is months behind schedule as a result of design problems that have made the new prison unsuitable for inmates. Workers have spent months repairing the geothermal heating and cooling system and the smoke evacuation system, which didn’t work as intended.
The Iowa Department of Corrections has no timeline for that move, causing frustration among employees and offenders. Original plans called for the minimum-security offenders at the adjacent John Bennett Unit, which was built in 1963, to stay put until after the new prison opened.
But with the delays mounting and John Bennett in need of repairs, the department decided to move its residents into the Clinical Care Unit. Prison officials said the transfer would be a practice run for the much larger move of maximum-security inmates.
And they said it made no sense to keep the 13-year-old Clinical Care Unit empty. The department moved most of the mentally ill inmates from that unit to other prisons last year as part of a reorganization.
Prison officials don’t have a long-term plan for John Bennett, but they will continue to maintain it in case it’s needed again. They said the kitchen inside the penitentiary complex will also have to stay open for now.
Deputy Warden Mark Roberts, who oversaw Tuesday’s transfer, said it was “great to see progress” amid anxiety about the larger move. He said that transfer will take longer and involve more outside officers, but many of the logistics will be similar.
“The community wants us up there. We want to be up there, too,” he said of the new prison. “As soon as we can do that in a safe way, mark my words, we’ll be up there.”