A prison unit co-located at Ancora Psychiatric Hospital is going to be shut down. Good, since this site was never intended as a jail in the first place.
Too often, efforts to site homeless shelters, drug rehabilitation centers and mental health treatment facilities get hijacked by neighbors' not-in-my-backyard fears that can border on the irrational.
Clients of these facilities usually are not dangerous, and most issues can be remedied by good management and security. When local zoners cave to the angry hordes and reject a sound proposal, it adds to New Jersey's critical shortage of spaces for programs with long wait lists.
Don't, however, include Winslow Township residents who live near the state's Ancora Psychiatric Hospital among the ranks of the needlessly paranoid. The neighbors have a real reason to be concerned, which has nothing to do with Ancora's mental health population.
Twice in a recent seven-month span, prisoners escaped from a building at the site into the the surrounding area. The state two decades ago set up a separate building at Ancora to house about 250 inmates who otherwise would have been serving their sentences at facilities originally intended for the purpose.
Now, Gov. Chris Christie wants to shutter the prison unit, which masquerades as a "satellite" of Bayside State Prison. It's one heck of an impersonation job, since the real Bayside is located about 30 miles away in Leesburg, Cumberland County.
All we can say about the announcement is, it's about time!
Last May, inmate Arthur Buckel led authorities on a week-long manhunt that cost taxpayers a reported $200,000 in police overtime before he was captured on the Garden State Parkway. Residents in several places as far away as Ocean County themselves became prisoners to a degree, as law enforcement swarmed in for the search. In October 2015, prisoner Panagioti Souris escaped from Ancora, although he was captured within a day.
Incidentally, Buckel is not a non-violent offender. He was incarcerated on aggravated assault and other charges, but previously served a manslaughter term for slapping around and killing a 10-month-old baby.
State corrections officials, with a straight face, bill Ancora as a "minimum security" prison. Psychiatric patient "walk-away" incidents used to be fairly common, which indicates just how "secure" the overall compound was designed to be.
"We're happy to have Ancora here, but I was never for bringing the prison unit in," said Winslow Mayor Barry Wright upon hearing the relocation news.
Gov. Christie didn't mention escapes as a reason for the shutdown. It's still not clear when the prison unit will close, or where its 250 inmates and 71 corrections workers are headed. During his budget message, he cited an overall reduction in state prison population as the reason the transfers can occur.
The prison at Ancora was opened in 1995, perhaps as a side effect of a too-rapid shutdown of larger state prison complexes at the time. Last May, we wrote that if the state needs Ancora for prisoners, it should send only those serving time for non-violent crimes. It's just wrong to include killers and physical attackers in the mix.
Ancora's residential neighbors, we're sure, will be just as happy to see the whole prison unit shut down. If the building can re-purposed as a shelter or drug-treatment unit, that's even better.
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