The Free Press, Mankato, MN

Local News

August 10, 2008

Waseca unlikely to notice prison change

Feds to convert prison to women's facility

By Dan Linehan

WASECA — The city of Waseca may barely notice that about 1,100 men will leave and an equal number of women will be moving to town during the next several months.

“As a rule, we don’t even notice anything that goes on over there,” Mayor Roy Srp said of the federal prison, which announced late last week it is turning the prison into an an all-female facility.

The prison was hardly invisible, of course, for a time in December 2006 when a media frenzy greeted the arrival of former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling.

The federal Bureau of Prisons has just begun the transition, which involves moving all the men to different facilities and replacing them with women.

The change was prompted by a lack of secure bed space for women in this part of the country, the bureau said.

The prison has 1,102 prisoners, a number that isn’t expected to change when they’re replaced with women.

Likewise, there’s no requirement guards be of the same gender as inmates, so there will be no staffing changes, spokesman Treavor Kroger said.

The Waseca prison is a low-security facility and a federal spokeswoman said in late 2006 that most of its prisoners are drug offenders.

“The city couldn’t ask for a better neighbor,” Srp said.

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