WHEELWRIGHT – With a new warden and now a house nearly full to capacity of male inmates, administrators at Otter Creek Correctional Complex in Wheelwright are looking to put behind them the black eyes endured over the past year and move forward.

Greg Compton, chief of unit management at the prison, said yesterday that the facility is now home to 649 male inmates, inmates brought in over the past three weeks after Hawaii pulled its female inmate population in the wake of numerous allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of guards there.

Full capacity at the prison is 653, Compton said, adding that the staff is in the process of getting settled in to the new setup.

That setup, though, has an old hat at the helm in warden Randy Stovall, who served as warden at the prison in the facility’s early years in the 1990s. Stovall was appointed by the prison’s parent company Corrections Corporation of America after the removal of then-warden Jeff Little.

Now that the inmates are nearly in place, Compton said the past several weeks have been a process of expanding existing programs and initiating new ones.

“We have developed a couple inmate committees with staff to expand on our programs and jobs for the inmate population,” Compton said. “It was a collective effort in getting these in place.”

Among those new and expanded programs, according to Compton, are more fully realized GED programs, which has since resulted in a 100 percent graduation rate during the last round of testing consisting of 11 inmates. Also, there are vocational programs for Microsoft Office and carpentry, as well as horticulture.

New programs just getting underway are those such as a cognitive skills program, “Thinking for a Change,” aimed at helping inmates think through situations before acting and the program, “Prison to the Street,” which helps inmates in making the transition from incarceration back into society by preparing them for job market searches and other aspects of society they will face after leaving the prison.

“We’re running a level-three therapeutic community residential drug and alcohol program and [Alcoholics Anonymous] and [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings in a more expanded way,” continued Compton. “And these programs are loaded down right now. There is a lot of interest and participation.”

Compton said this was part of an overall restructuring, which is how Floyd County Judge-Executive R.D. “Doc” Marshall said Stovall referred to his hopes for his second gig at the prison in recent conversations.

“When we talked a few weeks ago, he (Stovall) said he was looking forward to the restructuring process up there,” Marshall said. “He says it’s going to be a challenge with everything that has went on, but he’s happy to be here.”

Compton touched on the past year and the host of problems experienced at the facility, much of which eventually gained statewide attention and resulted in some legislators, such as House Speaker Greg Stumbo, calling for a state takeover of the private institution.

“We’re trying to get back into the positive side of things,” Compton said.