NOCC Correctional center housing detainees

The federal detainees are classified as medium security.
By PATRICIA MEADE
VINDICATOR CRIME REPORTER
YOUNGSTOWN -- With 349 federal detainees, the private prison on Hubbard Road is operating at roughly 16 percent capacity -- up from 6 percent in June.
The Northeast Ohio Correctional Center, a 2,106-bed facility, contracted with the U.S. Marshals Service and reopened a small portion of the prison in early April to house sentenced federal detainees awaiting placement.
Their stay at NOCC is about two months, Roseann Rubosky, public information officer, said Friday.
The inmates, classified as medium security, are coming from Baltimore, eastern Virginia, southeast and northeast Ohio, western New York and Washington, D.C., Rubosky said. They'll be placed in nearby federal facilities, such as the prison in Elkton, she said.
"We had hoped for a lot more" inmates, Rubosky said.
The goal is to house federal or state inmates for a portion of their sentence or for their entire sentence, she said.
Rubosky said Corrections Corporation of America, NOCC parent company based in Nashville, Tenn., continues to aggressively market the private prison to state and federal entities. She said several entities are interested but referred questions about contracts to Steve Owen, CCA spokesman in Nashville, who could not be reached.
The staff at NOCC remains at 135, the same as when it opened in April, and things have gone smoothly, Rubosky said. Officials have said that to partially reopen and remain viable, NOCC would need 300 to 500 inmates.
The marshals service pays NOCC about $70 per inmate per day. In turn, NOCC pays Mahoning County an administrative fee of just under $3 per inmate per day.
NOCC takes what has been termed the "overflow" of federal inmates from the Mahoning County jail, which can hold about 100 and had 95 on Friday, said Warden Alki Santamas. The county receives the going rate of $70 per day per inmate.
NOCC originally opened in mid-1997 and closed in July 2000, after losing its contract to house roughly 1,500 federal inmates.
, mostly from the Washington, D.C. area. It once employed 400 and had an annual payroll of $11 million.
meade@vindy.com