A D.C. Council member is trying to save a three-member government panel created 12 years ago to ensure the well-being of D.C. felons serving time in federal prisons.
Mayor Adrian Fenty wants to dissolve the Corrections Information Council (CIC). Last month he proposed shifting the panel’s meager $25,000 budget — all but a penny of it — to the Office of Justice Grants Administration to cover an outstanding balance related to youth programs.
But D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson, who has oversight of the information council, has filed notice that he will move to disapprove that shift of money during the legislative meeting Tuesday.
“It’s the only mechanism for helping D.C. prisoners who are in the federal system,” Mendelson told The Examiner on Friday.
Without the body in place, Mendelson said, there will be no one to look out for the youth held in North Dakota, or to track the treatment of prisoners at the Rivers Correctional Institution in Winton, N.C., or to review “substandard teaching” at the Youngstown Prison in Ohio.
The CIC was created in response to the closure of the Lorton Prison in Fairfax County, which housed D.C. felons until the late 1990s.
It is required by law to inspect both the D.C. Jail and Federal Bureau of Prison facilities, where the District’s convicted felons are currently serving time. But the council hasn’t issued a report since 2002, and even then it was not successful in inspecting federally contracted facilities.
The panel, two members of which are supposed to be appointed by the mayor, has had no functioning membership since 2006. Fenty sought to dissolve the CIC through the 2010 budget, but the council provided it $25,000.
The revenue for the council should be returned to the general fund “while executive and legislative branches develop a viable strategy for restructuring the agency,” according to the mayor’s budget proposal.
Mendelson said he would introduce legislation Tuesday to reconstitute the CIC under a different model, one with an executive director at the helm. There is an anti-boards and commissions attitude in the Fenty administration, the councilman said, but “I just don’t want to zero out their budget.”
