Steve DiCastri is the warden of the Okanagan Correctional Centre, which is tentatively scheduled to open officially on Friday, Oct. 21. (Photo supplied)
Five years after it was announced that the South Okanagan would be the home to a new jail, opening day for the $265-million facility is less than a month away.
A tentative grand opening date of Friday, Oct. 21 has been slated as the official opening of the Okanagan Correctional Centre and its commanders will be handed the keys before the end of this week or early next week.
“Everything’s on time and on target,” warden Steve DiCastri said in an address about the status of the new prison during a South Okanagan Chamber of Commerce event on Sept. 16.
The facility will add about 300 new jobs to the community, said DiCastri, with 230-240 permanent and 50-60 contract positions. The new state-of-the-art correctional facility has just a dozen positions left unfilled.
“We have one more recruit class to hire in January, but we have to see where our numbers land,” he said.
Contract positions will be needed for the health care and culinary staff.
Chiron Health Services will begin its hiring process in October or November and kitchen staffers will be recruited in October.
New employees – the vast majority who will be correctional officers – are coming to Oliver from across the country, but mostly from the Okanagan corridor and Alberta, and a few from the United States, said DiCastri, adding that only a very small percentage of applicants declined job offers.
After their fall start date, employees will undergo training until mid-January, when inmates will begin arriving.
DiCastri noticed that the Okanagan Correctional Centre attracted a more mature workforce than prisons closer to urban centres like Vancouver and Victoria.
“We have four or five retired RCMP officers and we’re seeing more of an older population,” he said. “Down in the Lower Mainland, I would see mostly 22-35 year olds. Here it’s more 35-45 year-old’s being hired. We think they’ll probably stay with us longer and stay in the community longer.”
Late in December or early in January the prison will launch a program department that gives inmates a chance to be productive members of the community.
“So we’ll see inmates in the community doing volunteer stuff,” he said. “There will be two crews out in the communities.”
Part of the programming includes greenhouse work. Inmates will have the opportunity to grow vegetables and the food produced will sustain the prison’s kitchen and leftovers will be donated to the food banks in Oliver and Osoyoos.
“We get out to give back to the community,” DiCastri said. “Our work programs consist of volunteering in old age homes, cleaning sidewalks, horse trails – those kinds of things.”
While working in the Fraser Valley, DiCastri said inmates donated around 600,000 man hours to the community each year and the new facility will generate about 350,000 man hours of volunteering in the South Okanagan, he said.
“We do not compete against taking jobs from the city or anyone else.”
Shortly after the grand opening, tours will be offered to the public in the afternoon and then throughout the weekend.
“We’re inviting communities and their families to come and staff will be on hand to take them on a tour through the entire centre,” he said.
Oliver Mayor Ron Hovanes spoke after DiCastri and said the new prison helped accelerate local property development at a rate that hasn’t been seen in decades.
“I have to second-guess myself if I need to drive to Penticton for something because you can probably get it right here,” he said. “I think we’re going to see less and less bleed out to larger centres over the next year or two.”
DAN WALTON
Regional Reporter
