A prison in Enfield is slated to shut down as the rate of crime and the prison population continues to decline, the governor's office said.
The Enfield Correctional Institution located at 289 Shaker Road will close in early 2018, Governor Dannel Malloy announced on Tuesday.
The building currently holds around 700 offenders who will be transferred to other facilities and save the state approximately $6.5 million in annual operating costs.
"As crime in Connecticut has dropped to its lowest level in two generations, new prison admissions have declined 38 percent over the last ten years, and the prison population has reached its lowest level in 23 years, we’ve been able to create efficiencies by closing outdated facilities and reallocating these resources toward efforts that will further enhance public safety initiatives and keep our neighborhoods even safer," Malloy said.
Right now, there are 14,103 inmates incarcerated in Connecticut's state prison system, which is 836 fewer than last year at this time.
The Department of Correction (DOC) will work with staff members to reassign the approximate 190 workers at the prison.
"We are monitoring the situation to ensure that all aspects of the closure are handled properly, safely and in accordance with our collective bargaining agreement for all our staff," Larry Dorman, the public affairs coordinator for the workers' corrections union, said in a statement. "While we understand the reasons behind the decision to close Enfield CI, we are still saddened by the news and empathetic towards the staff who are negatively impacted."
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Enfield Correctional Institution is a Level 3, medium security, dormitory-style facility that originally opened in 1962 as a low-level, pre-release facility, the governor's office said.
The closing of the Enfield facility comes after several other state prison system closures in recent years, including the
The Radgowski Annex Building at the Corrigan-Radgowski Correctional Center in Montville in April 2017 and the Niantic Annex of the York Correctional Institution in January 2016.
