PLANNED INTAKE CENTER RESHAPES PRISONS

More extensive evaluations at the Wilsonville site should help the
corrections department blend work and punishment for every state inmate

OREGON CITY - Two guards in gun-metal gray jumpsuits and polished black
boots get the word first.

The Blue Bird is on its way in.

They walk quickly, shoulder to shoulder, down a long, fluorescent-bathed
hallway toward the inmate entrance. A half-dozen guards in dark-blue
uniforms round out the welcoming committee at the Oregon Correctional
Intake Center.

A blue-and-white bus, with the manufacturer's "Blue Bird" emblazoned in
silver letters across the front, quickly disgorges the two dozen newest
initiates to the state's burgeoning prison population.

As the chained prisoners in white jumpsuits walk awkwardly toward the
cluster of guards, they also are approaching an intake system that is
itself about to undergo a serious reshaping.

Although obscured by the roar of opposition to a women's prison in
Wilsonville, the statewide intake center envisioned for the former Dammasch
State Hospital represents a gateway to what prison officials say is the
future of Oregon's work-oriented penal system.

The center will constitute one-third of the entire $151 million project at
Dammasch. It will cover more than 110,000 square feet and account for 432
beds of the center's total of 1,112. It will be almost twice as large as
the state's cramped Oregon City intake center that it will replace. "It
used to be so easy," said Larry Daniels, intake center manager. "All the
older guys went to the state penitentiary, the younger guys went to the
Oregon State Correctional Institution, and the women went to the women's
prison."

Oregon prison administrators have hustled furiously for four years to
comply with ballot measures calling for longer prison sentences and
requirements that inmates log the same 40-hour work weeks that most voters
do. Taken together, the initiatives have swelled the state's inmate
population to record numbers and created a more diverse, and therefore more
difficult to manage, mix of prisoners.

Not only are administrators overseeing an unprecedented building boom, but
they also are pushed by mandates to provide enough training and education
to allow inmates to hold jobs. They also have to kindle the private-public
partnerships capable of producing enough work for the state's 7,950 men and
women prisoners, while at the same time avoiding competition with private
businesses in the same field.

Now, with a much larger and more complex inmate intake center preparing for
construction at Wilsonville, prison officials are putting the final touches
on a plan they say will better blend work into a system that has focused
primarily on punishment.

In the end, they predict, the revamped system will better serve not only
inmates but the taxpayers who finance their stay and the communities that
will, sooner or later, become home for ex-cons.

"This is not so much an altruistic approach as it is a practical one," said
Dave Cook, corrections department director. "If what we do doesn't
translate into more success for inmates once they are released, the
citizens haven't benefited from the investment they've made, and we haven't
done a very good job."

Prison officials say the in-depth psychological and vocational evaluations
at the new center will play a pivotal role in meeting public demands that
convicts must work.

"If there's one thing we've learned over the years, it's that
`one-size-fits-all' does not work," said Larry Herring, who administers
program support services for the state Department of Corrections. "We think
we've got something here that will."

Experts Praise Plan

What Measures 11 and 17 did not address were the stumbling blocks that
caused a sizable number of inmates to end up jailed in the first place -
deficiencies involving education, mental health, antisocial behavior, and
drug and alcohol dependencies.

None of those mattered much a decade ago, when the notion of prison as a
place where rehabilitation could take place had largely faded from the
legal lexicon.

The state's new plan for prisoners already has drawn solid reviews from
national prison experts. If it is implemented correctly, those experts say,
it could result in a 40 percent drop in the state's recidivism rate,
placing Oregon near the top in reducing the number of felonies committed
within a three-year period after an inmate's release from prison.

"I think that for many states, what is happening in Oregon will make it a
leader in this field," said Thomas O'Connor, director of the Center for
Social Research in Washington, D.C. "The intake center is just the
beginning of the process, but it is perhaps the most important single step."

Inmates Evaluated

The intake process now takes from nine to 15 days. During that time,
inmates funneled into the state system from Oregon's 36 counties undergo
medical and physical evaluations, receive individual counseling and take a
series of written tests designed to measure both educational background and
antisocial behaviors.

Their contact with the outside world is limited to collect telephone calls.
Visitors are not allowed. Prisoners get only two things to read: the Bible
and The Oregonian. There is no television or recreation yard available.

"The things we are asking them to do here are some of the things they
detest most in life, such as taking tests," Daniels said. "We want them to
be as focused as possible."

Now, only men are evaluated. Women will be included in the process for the
first time in Wilsonville.

When the Blue Bird buses roll into the new intake center, inmates will be
looking at a stay of between 30 and 45 days. During that time, they will
receive intensive evaluations designed to help administrators decide which
institution the inmate's skills will be most suited for.

One person might have a knack for the computer-assisted design program at
the Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario. Another may thrive
making Prison Blues, a jeans-manufacturing operation now run for the state
by a private company at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in
Pendleton. A third might fit in at the Oregon State Penitentiary's wood
design shop in Salem, which makes eye-popping art selling for thousands of
dollars.

Upon leaving Wilsonville, inmates carry a plan that will follow them
through their entire sentence. It will contain specific goals addressing
continuing education and job-training requirements, as well as any
treatment for mental health and drug and alcohol problems.

The plan includes incentives for good behavior and reaching goals that can
pay off in the form of increased canteen privileges and other benefits.
Indications are that the plan works, the Department of Corrections' Herring
said. Disciplinary reports have been cut by 35 percent at various
institutions where the incentives have been used in pilot projects.

"What people need to keep in mind is that no one is feeling sorry for
inmates or feeling that we owe them anything," Herring said. "This is
strictly about good business. We're using their labor to get the highest
possible return while they are incarcerated and training them to help
guarantee they don't victimize more people once they are released." Some
Wilsonville residents continue to oppose the prison and, usually as an
afterthought, the intake center. They call it a ruinous use of land that
they wanted for an "urban village" of homes, shops, businesses and schools
among Dammasch's tree-lined campus setting.

Several locals have vowed to fight the prison in court. So far, they have
lost every round - most recently on Friday, when the corrections department
turned down Wilsonville's nomination of a 130-acre alternative site.

Some of the center's staunchest opponents, however, agree that the
geography that has made Wilsonville the hub of the state's warehousing and
transportation business - its location at the vortex of Interstate 5 and
Interstate 205 - makes the area ideally suited to warehouse prisoners and
to receive and ship them around the state.

"It's really the specific location that we don't like," Wilsonville Mayor
Charlotte Lehan said. "This is just a bad land-use decision." According to
state projections, the intake center will continue to increase in
importance as the prison building boom makes the Department of Corrections
by far the fastest-growing state agency.

The department forecasts that Oregon's prison population will top 15,000
within a decade. Accommodating those inmates will mean building as many as
seven new prisons by 2007.

In the end, each and every bed will be filled by someone who, whether they
wanted to or not, caught a ride on a Blue Bird bound for intake.

Dana Tims covers growth and Wilsonville for The Oregonian's
MetroSouthwest news bureau. He can be reached by phone at 294-5973, by
e-mail at danatims@news.oregonian.com, by fax at 968-6061, or by mail
at 15495 S.W. Sequoia Parkway, Portland, Ore. 97224.