Last year, Governor Spitzer proposed that the Legislature set up a commission to study which prisons were needed, to make plans to help the communities where they would be closed and then to openly vote for an entire package.
The Department of Corrections and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association say the planned 5,000-bed prison is needed to help alleviate overcrowding in a system with roughly 161,500 prisoners in 33 prisons.
The speech was welcomed by prison reform groups as a major departure in Conservative prisons policy but they said that measures to tackle the "profligate use of prison" were needed to turn the prime minister's vision into reality.
Phone calls to prison leaders are needed.
They are enormously expensive, because of all of the prison cells that are needed to warehouse minor criminals who pose little threat to society, many of whom are elderly by the end of their sentence.
They show how badly prison reform is needed," said the prisons minister, Andrew Selous.
Neither Jack Straw's embarrassing U-turn on the nonsense that was Noms, nor Anne Owers's annual repetition of an avoidable and unworthy situation in our prisons, would be needed if it, and the Home Office before it, had done so over the years.
He said an extra 10,500 prison places were needed to house a projected prison population of 96,000 in England and Wales by 2014.
First Selectman Herbert Rosenthal received the letter in February from John Armstrong, commissioner of the Correction Department, in February, informing him of a report by the State Legislature's Prison and Jail Overcrowding Commission saying more prison cells were needed.
