By Bob Auth
There was no shortage of meaningful Memorial Day events throughout our New Jersey villages, towns, and cities that our governor, Mikie Sherrill, could have attended to honor the men and women, and their families, who paid the ultimate price for the freedoms we enjoy in this great Republic. Instead, she chose to spend her time, as our governor, creating photo ops at the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark.
At what has been appropriately labeled “a political stunt,” she stood alongside Democrat federal representatives and masked agitators blocking the private facility and demanding its closure over rumors of a hunger strike by detainees and inhumane conditions inside, accusations denied by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
Unlike federal lawmakers, our governor has no right to tour Delaney Hall unannounced. That right is reserved for members of Congress and certain other federal officials with oversight responsibilities and has been repeatedly upheld by the courts. The Virginia born-and-bred former congresswoman has been in the governor’s office only a few months, but seems to have forgotten that she, willingly one assumes, traded Capitol Hill for the golden dome on West State Street in Trenton.
As governor of the great Garden State, Sherrill has influence and executive power to fix the plethora of problems created here after decades of majority Democrat (mis)governance. New Jersey’s 1947 Constitution makes the governor chief executive of all State departments. Since she has demonstrated great concern and compassion for the incarcerated, she might look to the state’s own crumbling prison infrastructure. There is plenty of work here to keep her busy.
New Jersey operates five adult male prisons and one women’s facility, currently housing about 11,000 inmates. In 1798, when John Adams was President, the State’s oldest prison broke ground in Trenton. Most of that original structure is gone, replaced in the 1830s with a then-modern, larger prison called the Fortress Penitentiary. But as with so many things, modernity fades into obsolescence; today it’s called the New Jersey State Prison, and its west compound—along with its north and south counterparts that are amenitized modern structures—houses the state’s most dangerous prisoners as its only maximum-security prison.
The New Jersey Corrections Ombudsperson Terry Schuster said that the prison is well-run and that the corrections staff is “professional” and “have gone to great lengths to make the West Compound safe and livable.” Even so, he reports that “[p]rison cells in the compound have no hot water and, with the exception of 4-wing, all of the cells are very small. The cells in 7-Wing are shockingly small, measuring just four feet by seven feet. Housing units in the West Compound have no air conditioning, no day room, and no recreation space, and toilets and showers leave people exposed without adequate privacy.” Sherrill’s hypocrisy is incomprehensible!
The State has recognized the deficiencies of the west compound since 1918 during The Great War. Even in 1952, it was considered “one of the most archaic [prisons] in the United States.” Today, the state spends an average of $85,000 per year per incarcerated person: that’s about $123 million annually to operate a prison with little to show for these exorbitant costs.
N.J. Department of Corrections Commissioner Victoria Kuhn told the Assembly Budget Committee earlier this month that a state-of-the-art maximum-security facility would exceed $1 billion. Unfortunately, out-of-control spending under Sherrill’s predecessor, with the help of a Democrat-controlled Legislature, has left the State with a structural deficit of $1.5 billion for the coming fiscal year. Ineffective policies have left schools and nursing homes underfunded, roads and bridges in disrepair and pothole ridden, and prisoners living in suboptimal conditions, all while property and other taxes skyrocket.
This is fact, not rumor, recognized by my fellow New Jersians every day.
Sherrill talked in Newark about the people in New Jersey deserving dignity, but at the New Jersey State Prison, she would find no protesters, no cameras, and no known connections to President Trump to pass the buck to and attempt to score political points on the national stage. Why did Congresswoman Sherrill want to become Gov. Sherrill, when she has neglected to take significant steps to fulfill her campaign promises to make life more affordable and to lower costs for all New Jersians, who are forces to fork over those ever-increasing taxes?
If her priorities on Memorial Day are any indication, New Jersey citizens and residents, including its prison population and legal immigrants, can expect Democrat elected officials to participate in lawless protests and political stunts, for issues she has no jurisdiction over, that supplant good governance and meaningful change where she could actually make a difference.
