Nearly 300 more medium-security inmates will be incarcerated in Montgomery County as the Alabama Department of Corrections shifts prisoners across the state to free up beds.

What was a minimum-security work release center on Wares Ferry Road is becoming a medium-security lockup for inmates who are within 90 days of release.

Now called the Montgomery Pre-Release Center, the prison, largely empty late last week, is ready to receive inmates, although officials have requested $120,000 for security lighting along the fence. The cost of the conversion has been about $500,000.

"It's an acceptable risk," said DOC Commissioner Richard Allen, under pressure from Montgomery County Circuit Court to create space for > about 565 state prisoners backlogged in county jails. "Everything in this business is risk management."

The prison is a stone's throw from the maximum-security Kilby Correctional Facility, a 1,400-bed prison and inmate processing center.

Inmates moved to Montgomery Pre-Release will be 90 days from receiving $10 and a bus ticket back to their county of conviction, the standard release package for people who serve all of their time behind bars.

"We have to be reasonably sure of the risk that we're taking," said Warden Leeposey Daniels, describing the screening process for inmates. "We wouldn't want to put a high-risk inmate here."

The center will offer classes in "life skills," such as obtaining a driver's license or applying for a job. "Some of these guys have done an extended period of time, and they > have to be reminded (how to live on the outside)," Daniels said.

DOC chose the Montgomery center to create a medium-security prison largely because it already has fences topped with razor wire. Montgomery Pre-Release has 17 corrections officers and will retain about 13 inmates to cook meals and do other chores around the prison.

Since medium-security inmates can't leave the prison, the Montgomery Pre-Release kitchen staff will be busier than ever making hundreds of meals a week that the work release inmates didn't need because they were eating away from the campus.

"I'm delighted that there's progress being made," Montgomery County Commission Chairman Todd Strange said. "I just trust that they'll provide the appropriate security."

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