It’s explained in the Connections 81.2 project’s mission and description, as well as earlier posts on this thread. The place where Central Prison and Dix Park is was at the edge of Raleigh when they were built, where citizens could all but forget the existence of imprisoned and mentally ill people.
Like @Buck and others mentioned, you have to be careful about where and how Central Prison gets moved because of its fraught history. There’s a reason why so many of the proposed high-level designs focused on memorializing the prison walls as a symbol rather than tearing them down without a trace.
Does anyone know how the number of NC prisoners has trended in recent years? I think the ideal scenario is for central prison to be torn down and for it not to rebuilt anywhere because it isn’t needed.
There’s 87% fewer people in prison for misdemeanors in 2020 since 2010, but it went slightly up for felons in that same timespan. From this report that was literally the first search result on Google:
Central Prison only holds adult male felons sentenced for 20+ years and special populations (e.g. death row, “safekeepers” that need medical care). So naturally, its population has also stayed roughly the same. For the last five years (you had to query their database one date at a time so I got lazy after 2016), their population hasn’t changed much:
Remember, though, that state prisons are different from jails, federal prisons, probation, and parole. While we’re at it, despite the decreasing number of imprisoned misdemeanants, we have plenty of reasons to not be proud of our incarceration system.
I just noticed that there are google reviews for Central Prison, such as this one: “Really enjoyed the all you can eat sausage and meatball buffet.” Five stars. Overall it has 3 out of 5 stars lol.
…yikes. Did the reviews say anything about showers and soap there, too?
Click here for your answer. I thought someone else would answer you, but.. whatever.
You hold people suspected of crimes in jailsuntil they get tried and sentenced. They usually go to prisons to serve those sentences (though it seems like this is sometimes done in jails, too).
Like most legal things in America, you go through a state or federal system based on which ones have power over you (in this case, what kind of law(s) you broke). You’d go to a federal prison if a federal prosecutor charges you with wire fraud (since the Constitution gives the feds power over interstate commerce), but I think you’d just go to a state prison if you stabbed another North Carolinian on North Carolinian soil.
You may get to serve a part of your sentence outside of a cell as a part of your initial sentence (probation) or as a kind of reward after serving some time (parole).
San Quentin in California is still crumbling away on a gigantic slice of the most valuable residential real estate on planet earth because of government inertia and San Francisco lawyers loving the easy commute.
The “mothballed” (abandon or switched to other uses) prisons were older “local” ones for low risk short term prisoners and keeping them close to home and family. Central is for the HIGH risk and long term prisoners.
Lots of good and accurate, if unfortunate, points being made about the prison. I’ll add that about 15 years ago, the state made the decision to build a new regional medical center for the prison system on this site. It opened in 2012 and cost $180 million and the state plans to get several decades’ worth of use out of it.
The prison system certainly needed a new medical facility, but the decision to build it on this particular spot is definitely questionable and is going to have ramifications for Raleigh for decades. That’s probably going to be the biggest long-term hurdle to repurposing this land. Prison populations are declining nationwide, and prisons are getting decommissioned all the time. Yes, this is also a close-custody facility, which is the highest custody level of North Carolina prisons, but that would likely be only a minor impediment to shutting it down since upgrading an existing prison would not be especially difficult. But the medical center is the thing that’s going to be a sticking point for a very long time, unfortunately.
It was way the heck out of town when they built it - part of that huge acreage the state owns/ed property - Dix, blind school, the college and its fields.
A huge part of the expense will be building anew. That will be the deal breaker. When it gets cheaper to rebuild than fix - or the value gets to where a sale will pay for the new - then state will move it.
Well, first of all you have to have another maximum security prison ready. That’s expensive. The cost to demo a structure built like a prison is expensive. Not like tearing down a hotel, politics and major personnel decisions have to made. I’d rather not have my taxpayer money go to a new one when that one is perfectly fine. I really hardly notice it.
No one ever considered that prime land until recently. Need a time machine to show you areas of downtown as late as the 90’s. This topic getting way off now. I’m done .
Central Prison was built in 1884. At the time, it was well, well beyond the urban core that then existed. There is a reason why the prison, the school for the blind, and the former “insane asylum” are all right next to each other. These institutions were all placed far away from town so that they could be out of sight.
I would say that by the late 2000s, doubling down on using this land for a prison was a shortsighted move. There were people who raised that very argument at the time. But I can certainly understand the simplistic appeal of just building the new prison hospital where the central prison was. But I’m at an absolute loss to fathom how this decision, good or bad, could be construed as racist, and it’s both lazy and rude to blithely characterize decisions you happen to disagree with as being somehow racist.
Did the reviews say anything about showers and soap there, too?