Ohio prepares to privatize some state prisons

Associated Press

MARION, Ohio

David Kah will report to the same job in the same training kitchen at Ohio’s 17-year-old state prison in Marion in January — but much about his life will be changed.

Kah is leaving the public payroll and taking a job with Management & Training Corp., the Centerville, Utah-based prison vendor that takes over operation of North Central Correctional Institution on Saturday. The longtime culinary-arts instructor, who’s 67, says he’ll see significant reductions in pay and vacation days, but he’s looking forward to the new operator’s plans for his program.

Ohio turns over the keys to MTC at 10 p.m. Saturday, the start of the last shift before the management transfer. The prison is among five state facilities seeing management or operations changes that night in a consolidation and privatization effort by Republican Gov. John Kasich.

“Everybody’s a little anxious,” Kah said. “Any time you go from a union, unions are just a lot different, so when you work for the private guy, they’re going to do things a little different. But really, I’m excited about it.”

NCCI will be merged with an adjacent previously shuttered juvenile prison as part of the changes. The resulting camp will be renamed North Central Correctional Complex.

In other changes, the previously private North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility in Lorain County will be returned to state control and merged into one complex with adjacent Grafton Correctional Institution.

Kasich put five state prisons on the block, but only the privately run Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Conneaut was sold. It was bought by Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest prison vendor, for $72.7 million in the first deal of its kind in the nation. CCA already ran the facility.

The sale generated more than enough to close a $50 million prison budget gap that loomed, so other offers were rejected, and the ensuing management changes were announced. The state says the changes will bring ongoing savings of $13 million a year.

The savings will be realized even as the state adds 702 beds to its overcrowded 50,200- inmate prison system, said prisons spokesman Carlo LoParo.

Annette Chambers-Smith, deputy administration director at the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, says the bulk of the savings comes from more-liberal staffing requirements allowed at private institutions, where fewer employees can be scheduled to cover vacations, sick days and absences for training and other work-related matters than under public-union contracts.

No state-prison workers lost jobs in the move. At North Central, MTC has hired 70 employees to stay, 297 transferred to other state jobs, and eight retired.

Tim Roberts, president of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association’s corrections assembly, met with prison officials Wednesday. The union disagrees with the privatization effort but is working to ensure things go well for both the roughly 2,300 inmates and about 350 staffers, he said.

“If I’ve been at a facility for 20 years, and all of the sudden I’m being uprooted — some have to go as far as Mansfield, Marysville, Lima — there’s not an excitement about that,” he said.