Transcripts

JIM TIPPIE: Here we go.

MARK STEIL: Construction crews that include trusted inmates from other federal prisons are transforming the campus into an 1,100-bed lockup. Science labs will become inmate housing. A lecture hall is being converted to shop space. A horticultural building remains the same. Inmates will grow flowers and other plants in the college greenhouses. Warden Jim Tippy expects inmates by June 1.

JIM TIPPY: This will be a low security facility. I would say our average age is probably going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of early to mid thirties. Average sentence will probably be a little bit more than seven years. 65% of the inmates that we have here will be doing sentences for drug violations.

MARK STEIL: The prison is located at the southwest corner of the city of 8,400 people, some 60 miles south of the Twin Cities. The tree-shaded college campus has been transformed into a fenced-off island, surrounded by rolls of razor wire and twin 12-foot high lighted security fences. A wooden fence screens some of the prison from residents. But neighbor Jim Byron says it's still unsettling. His home is about a football field away from the prison fence.

JIM BYRON: Well, I see that with lights every night too, a golden glow there from all those lights and I have the feeling that's all the gold that Waseca is going to get out of that prison deal.

MARK STEIL: Byron says property values have declined in the neighborhood. He says one home owner received $20,000 less than he expected for his house, something he blames on the prison. Prison supporters dispute that. They say the reason the homeowner took a loss is because the house needed repairs. Jim's wife, Rita Byron, complains money talked loudest in the prison decision.

RITA BYRON: It seems as though they just were more interested in the money part than they were in what it was going to do to the people. They weren't concerned about the people.

MARK STEIL: The money versus people argument has been the dominant theme in the Waseca prison debate. Former mayor Judy Kozan was in office when the city decided it wanted a prison. She says economic considerations were important, but they didn't outweigh human concerns. Kozan says prison opponents falsely claimed the issue divided the town. She says with the exception of a small, but vocal anti-prison faction, most Waseca residents supported bringing the prison to town, to offset the loss of the college.

JUDY KOZAN: We weren't going to lay down and die. And this town came together in a big way, and reviewed options, and settled in on the one being the federal prison. And then we all worked together to make it happen and to bring it here. This was not a divisive issue for this community. On the contrary, it united this community very much.

MARK STEIL: She points to local election results as proof the town wants the prison. She says in city council or mayoral elections, prison supporters defeated prison opponents every time they faced off.

JUDY KOZAN: The process could not have been more open. The community spoke loud and clear how they felt about this.

MARK STEIL: That's not how prison opponent Laura Roadie sees it. She believes secret deals sealed the decision to convert the campus to a prison, long before anything was made public. She says the deal was worked out between federal and state officials. As proof, she alleges the former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons was rewarded with a state job in Minnesota for concluding the Waseca deal.

LAURA ROADIE: When Norm Carlson, who was bureau chief, is now a university alumni emeritus or professor emeritus, there were so many points along the way that have pointed out to the deal that had been made years before.

MARK STEIL: Norm Carlson says the allegation is false. He says prison opponents should get their facts straight, noting he is not a professor emeritus, but only a lecturer and that he retired from his federal prison job several years before the college closed.

NORM CARLSON: It is true that I am on the faculty, the Department of Sociology, at the University of Minnesota. But that has nothing to do with the decision of the Federal Bureau of Prisons to acquire the former university campus, which happened subsequent to my retirement.

MARK STEIL: Some Waseca residents say it was inevitable that there would be strong and unyielding opposition by some to the prison. They say, for some residents, anger over the loss of the university transferred over to whatever took its place. For many, the university campus was an open, green, tree-shaded center of optimism and problem solving. The prison is its opposite, a closed-off pocket of despair, filled with problems for which there seems to be no solutions. Warden Jim Tippy says he'll try to change that perception.

JIM TIPPY: Sure, we are a prison. But we've opened ourselves up much more to the public. I know there are some people in the community who did not want us here and who were part of the opposition group to the institution. But I think they've all gotten behind us. And as I said earlier, it's made our job that much easier.

MARK STEIL: One of the ways the prison may reach out to the community concerns the former college farmland now owned by the prison. There's a suggestion to plant the land with native prairie grasses and flowers and allow the public to walk and study the fauna. This is Mark Steil, Main Street Radio.