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  • 21 Aug, 2019

  • By, Wikipedia

SCI Phoenix
The State Correctional Institution – Phoenix is a state prison in Skippack Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, with a Collegeville postal address, in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Operated by Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, it was named after the phoenix bird.

It cost $400 million to build, making it the most expensive state prison to be constructed in Pennsylvania history. It has a capacity of 3,830 prisoners, and as of September 2018, its full time workforce numbered 1,200. Heery International designed the facility. It replaced SCI Graterford. Most prisoners are male, located in the East and West sub units, while it has a re-entry unit for female prisoners with a capacity of 192.

The female unit is not in the main prison perimeter. SCI Phoenix is one of two prisons that share Pennsylvania's death row. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections anticipated that most of the prisoners would be from the area of Philadelphia, and currently SCI Phoenix is the state prison closest to Philadelphia.

History

The SCI Phoenix buildings were built on the SCI Graterford land area, and the Phoenix and Graterford buildings are about 0.25 mi (0.40 km) apart, with SCI Phoenix fencing beginning about 1,100 feet east of SCI Graterford's fencing.

The first bidding for construction of this prison occurred in the decade of the 2000s. The prison, originally to open in November 2014, opened late since Walsh Heery Joint Venture, the construction company, and Hill International, a Philadelphia company representing the State of Pennsylvania, had a dispute over whether the prison was ready to open. As of July 2018, the prison's final cost was still not finalized.

On June 1, 2018, its dedication ceremony was held, and the prison began operations on July 9, 2018. The state began moving Graterford prisoners there on July 11, 2018, and Graterford ended operations on July 15. Graterford's employees now were employees of Phoenix. Some inmates disliked the move as they feared they would be sharing cells with other inmates, while at Graterford they had single cells.

The population of Graterford was to reduce to 2,588 inmates by June 2018, so that the transfer of inmates to Phoenix would not involve as many people, and Phoenix eventually opened, with 2,633 prisoners. Initially, prisoners with life sentences who had single cells at Graterford would continue to have single cells at Phoenix.

Composition

Many prisoners are two to a cell, and most cells have the dimensions 12 ft (3.7 m) by 6 ft (1.8 m). Phoenix has 3,422 beds.

It has inmates convicted of capital murder, many from the Philadelphia area and most of whom were sentenced to life imprisonment but with some under death sentences, housed in a dedicated section of the prison, called the "Capital Unit." That section is larger than the previous capital case section that was in Graterford.

The PADOC stated that the prison hoped to move inmates with death sentences from SCI Greene, where most death row and capital murder inmates in Pennsylvania reside, to SCI Phoenix so that the prison system can more easily transport them to court proceedings.

Notable inmates

Inmate Name Register Number Status Details
George Emil Banks AY6066 Originally sentenced to death, sentence commuted to life in prison on May 12, 2010 after he was declared incompetent to be executed. Perpetrator of the 1982 Wilkes-Barre shootings in which he murdered 13 people, including 5 of his own children.
Cosmo DiNardo NK0995 Serving 4 life sentences without parole. One of the perpetrators of the July 2017 Pennsylvania murders in which DiNardo and another person, Sean Michael Kratz, killed 4 individuals during deals involving marijuana.
Anthony Joyner AY5659 Serving a life sentence. Raped and murdered at least 6 women at a nursing home in the 1980s.
Ronald Taylor EX2412 Sentenced to death. Perpetrator of the 2000 Wilkinsburg shooting.