A/C bills one more reason to close Dawson state jail

There are quite a few reasons to close the Dawson State Jail in Dallas. One we haven't discussed is to reduce TDCJ's A/C bill. A drawback of having a prison in an urban highrise instead of a more traditional design is that it requires A/C, which otherwise is mostly only available at a handful of medical units. Air conditioning went out recently at Dawson and repairs are reportedly underway - bad for the prisoners, certainly, but also for employees. We're talking about a 10-story high-rise situated in the Trinity River bottoms. What's more, the building is standing in the way of a proposed redevelopment project being pushed by the Dallas City Council, which wants the facility removed. Dawson is a private facility operated by Corrections Corporation of America housing more than 2,000 Texas state jail inmates.

Dawson isn't air conditioned because anybody's soft on state jail inmates there, it's because its placement was political, putting an inappropriately designed and located facility in South Dallas on the misguided premise that prisons were going to bring jobs to rural communities and South Dallas could use jobs, too. Just a few years later, the prison has become an impediment to job creation. Its contract is up for renewal in January.