Northern Nevada prison to close temporarily
Department of Corrections officials are temporarily shutting down a northern Nevada prison and shifting employees to understaffed facilities, according to a statement released Monday.
The closure of Warm Springs Correctional Center in Carson City will also “help increase safety and security and reduce overtime” throughout the prison system, officials announced Monday.
“Placing (the prison) into a sustained temporary closure and distributing personnel to other institutions will allow for safer conditions for both staff and offenders,” the prison system’s acting director, William Gittere, said in a news release. “The increase in staffing at the other institutions will improve our ability to meet Constitutional and state law requirements related to the effective management of the offender population.”
He added: “Decreased overtime directly improves work stress and fatigue, which will be a key factor in the improvement to the quality of life and retention of staff.”
The three Northern Nevada prisons have an average vacancy rate that hovers around 50 percent, officials said, adding that the move would save the state about $14 million annually in operational costs, including overtime pay.
Prisoners will be transferred to a nearby facility in the coming weeks and won’t lose their “privileges or programming,” officials said. Likewise, prison employees will not lose their jobs or be transferred outside the jurisdiction unless they volunteer.
Originally built as a women’s prison in 1961, the Warm Springs Correctional Center has functioned as a men’s medium-security prison for a quarter century.
Gittere took the helm of the agency following the recent resignation of Charles Daniels in the aftermath of the escape of a prisoner, who was captured days later.
Porfirio Duarte-Herrera — convicted in a deadly 2007 Luxor bomb explosion — escaped from the Southern Nevada Correctional Center on Sept. 23, a breach that went unreported for several days. He was captured in Las Vegas five days after fleeing.
Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @rickytwrites.