ID & TX: remind me again - why do we send our Idaho inmates to Texas?

From the Houston Chronicle:

55 Idaho inmates sidetracked during move from Texas prison

Fifty-five Idaho inmates who were moved out of a troubled Texas prison on Thursday have been forced by a contract delay to make a temporary stop before going to their final destination... More than 500 Idaho prisoners are in Texas and Oklahoma due to overcrowding at home. The prisoners being moved are bound for the Val Verde Correctional Facility in Del Rio, Texas, after more than a year at the Dickens County Correctional Center in Spur, Texas, where one Idaho inmate killed himself in March.

Because a Texas county official has yet to approve the contract to house Idaho prisoners at Val Verde, they have first been sent 100 miles away... There, they will sleep in groups of up to 10 men on makeshift cots in day rooms until resolution of the contract allows them to complete the final 250-mile leg of their journey to Val Verde...

Department of Correction Director Brent Reinke said he learned only last week that a Texas county judge wanted a lawyer to look at the contract one last time. "It was something we did not anticipate," Reinke said. "GEO is paying the transport costs..."

This is just the latest uprooting of Idaho inmates since they were first shipped out of state in 2005. Since then, they have bounced from prison to prison in Minnesota and Texas amid allegations of abusive treatment...

Despite the stopover, GEO has a hefty incentive to make sure the move to Val Verde goes smoothly, Reinke said. The company hopes to win contracts with Idaho to build a large new prison here to help accommodate the state's 7,400 inmates. "They're really monitoring this closely, and doing a good job at this point," Reinke said. "It's not a lot different than triple bunking..."

Great: when you get to the intersection of prison politics and institutional indifference, the two start hot-bunking.

ID: the "das Boot" cure for prison overcrowding

I'm always proud when one of my fellow Idahoans makes it into Boing Boing:

Prison inmates to sleep in shifts?


Robert Geddes, Republican president of Idaho's State Senate, suggests that one way to deal with limited space in prisons would be to make inmates share beds by sleeping in shifts...

That's Idaho Republican leadership! Dummkopf: go rent some submariner movies, and spare us your penological insights. At least one professor warns that "courts have tended to frown on prisons that are crowding their inmates, whether they have a bed or not." And if Geddes had bothered to ask, the head of the Idaho Department of Correction would have told him, "prisons are not submarines."

Geddes sounds delighted that his bold idea is getting Idaho lots of worldwide attention. Unfortunately and as usual for my home state, it's not positive attention. Says one libertarian:

Dude, I’ve spent over a decade in the Army, and I can tell you that hot-bunking is a morale killer and is to be avoided whenever possible. People need their individual space. That is unless you wish to create a climate where inmates are more likely to riot...

Thanks, Senator, for that torpedo amidships to my nostalgia for Idaho.

Update: 43rd State Blues' take on the pride of Soda Springs - Geddes 'hot-racking' prisoners idea makes Drudge: Idaho looks even more stupid