This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 4, 2011 - WASHINGTON - Clearing the way for the sale of Thomson correctional center to the federal government, President Barack Obama's administration pledged Monday not to send any detainees from Guantanamo Bay to the now-vacant Illinois prison.
"The Thomson facility would only house federal inmates and would be operated solely by the Bureau of Prisons," said U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in a letter to U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., assuming the sale of Thomson to the federal government.
Last year, Congress barred such a transfer to any U.S. facility, but Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and several U.S. House members from Illinois had still threatened to hold up Thomson's sale without a future guarantee against Guantanamo detainees.
Reiterating that the Justice Department had opposed a blanket ban on the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to U.S. prisons, Holder wrote Monday that "consistent with current law, we will not transfer detainees from Guantanamo to Thomson, or otherwise house Guantanamo detainees at Thomson."
Holder was responding to Durbin's February letter supporting Thomson's sale, as well as a followup letter from Durbin and Kirk, sent last month, to clarify that the bipartisan support of the state's congressional delegation for Thomson's sale required a guarantee that no Gitmo detainees would be transferred there.
Durbin, who originally had supported closing Guantanamo and moving some detainees to maximum-security prisons in this country, said Monday that such a transfer was "not politically possible."
"This assurance clears the way for Congress to focus its efforts on funding the acquisition and operation of Thomson as a maximum-security federal prison," said Durbin.
The Bureau of Prisons has told state officials that buying Thomson and converting it to a maximum-security federal facility will help alleviate overcrowding in federal prisons, some of which have about 50 percent more prisoners than their listed capacity.
Last month, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn told reporters that a no-Guantanamo guarantee from the Justice Department "would allow us to sell the prison to the Feds. They need it desperately [to relieve overcrowded federal prisons] and it would create a couple of thousand jobs" in northwestern Illinois.
Quinn said Illinois would use about $60 million of the estimated $180 million that the Bureau of Prisons is expected to pay for Thomson to settle the state's debt for building the prison, which was vacated last April in anticipation of a sale to the federal government.
Durbin said Monday that Quinn "has assured me that both the state and federal government have made significant progress in their negotiations and a purchase agreement is imminent. I look forward to working on a bipartisan basis to open this facility and create more than 1,100 jobs in Illinois."
The White House budget request included nearly $67 million for second-year activation costs for Thomson and its 1,600 cells; last year's budget requested $237 million for the acquisition, upgrade and operation of Thomson in the federal prison system. Congress has yet to approve either budget.
In his letter, Holder said, "The purchase of an existing state facility such as Thomson would be substantially less expensive than the construction of an equivalent high-security facility in the current market and would expand federal prison capacity much sooner than the three to four years it would take to construct a new prison."