The Iowa Senate’s Oversight Committee plans to hold a public hearing to ask state officials why the new state prison in Fort Madison hasn’t opened.
Senator Matt McCoy, a Democrat from Des Moines, is a member of the committee and says he wants to know what’s happening and why no opening date has been set.
The state has spent more than 132-million dollars to build a new, maximum security prison in Fort Madison, but the scheduled opening in March was delayed due to problems in the prison’s heating and cooling system. There is no new date set for opening the facility, which is designed to house up to 800 inmates.
Senator Janet Petersen, a Democrat from Des Moines who is chairwoman of the Senate Oversight Committee, says legislators also have questions about movies that are being shown to prisoners. Prison officials in 2011 did bar videos with violent and sexual content, but movies of that genre had been shown in common areas of the prison prior to that, sometimes over and over.
