During the presidential campaign, both Barack Obama and John McCain promised to close the detainee prison at the Marine Corps base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Obama won, and he’s been looking at ways to fulfill his promise. One complication is that there are people in custody who should stay in custody — where can they be kept if not at Gitmo?
Not many communities have raised their hands and said “We’d like those prisoners,” but one has: Hardin, Montana. It has a new state-of-the-art high-security prison that’s sitting empty, along with a high unemployment rate and a fading town.
But U.S. Senator Max Baucus doesn’t want them in his Montana. Similarly, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter said it wouldn’t bother him if they were housed at the federal “SuperMax” facility in Florence, Colo. However, Ritter may have been the only elected official in Colorado who wasn’t up in arms about it, and the story is much the same in other states.
Now, there may be practical reasons, like capacity, not to put them in SuperMax. But the place already has some of the worst of the worst, like Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols and various of the plotters of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
It’s only 65 miles away from me, one of four federal prisons in Fremont County, Colo., which also has nine state prisons, making about 7,500 inmates altogether.
That’s down the river from Salida, where I live. Up the river, about 25 miles away, is another state prison, the Buena Vista Correctional Facility, with about 1,200 inmates.
There are a lot of bad guys locked up around here. But I’ve never lost a moment’s sleep on that account. Prisoners aren’t a danger to the community unless they escape, and as Obama pointed out, no one has ever escaped from a SuperMax. So if Hardin is ready, willing, and able to help close Gitmo, why not?
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