‘A beacon for Wilmington’: Former prisoners, politicians urge state to reconsider plan to shutter Plummer work-release center

What are journalists missing from the state of Delaware? What would you most like WHYY News to cover? Let us know.

When Tony Dunn was freed from a Delaware prison in the late 1990s, he didn’t go straight home.

Instead, he transitioned at the Plummer Community Corrections Center, a work-release and skills training facility near where he lived in Wilmington.

For Dunn, that placement made all the difference in his return to society.

“There were a lot of basic skills that I didn’t know that I didn’t have,” Dunn said. “And the staff there — the counselors, the guards and some of the inmates that ran certain programs — actually helped me to understand a little bit more of myself, growing up into a mature man.”

“They put me on the right track, showed me what it meant not to be out selling drugs but to go out and find a legal job, maintain a job. And also showed me the value of being a parent and what it meant to take care of my children. There’s all kinds of things that the Plummer center instilled in me that I didn’t have the opportunity to get at home and once I left, I maintained that ability and that knowledge.”

More than a quarter-century later, the now 65-year-old Dunn, who remodels homes and does mechanical work, still relishes what he learned at Plummer, calling it a pivotal period in his life.

“It’s not just a correctional facility that was housing inmates,” Dunn said, who is also a civic leader and hosts a podcast geared toward helping incarcerated people and their families.

“It’s also a beacon of the city of Wilmington. It worked with the community. And for you to take something that’s been working all these years, taking it from a community of poor people, you’re doing more damage than you are good.”

Dunn used the past tense because the state is planning to close the center off North Market Street early next year.

Department of Correction Commissioner Terra Taylor said Plummer isn’t needed anymore, mostly because fewer people are being incarcerated and fewer prisoners are being sent to work-release centers after finishing their time in full incarceration.

Those slated for work release could be sent to two other centers in Smyrna or Georgetown, far from Wilmington. Some could also be put on electronic monitoring or home confinement instead, Taylor said.

But the state’s decision to shutter Plummer has led Dunn and others in Wilmington to join forces in urging Taylor and Gov. Matt Meyer to keep the center open.

Wilmington City Councilwoman Shané Darby, who held a news conference with former prisoners and other council members outside Plummer last month to protest the planned closure, said it would impair the reentry process for prisoners who come from Wilmington or nearby.

She said moving through Plummer lets the formerly incarcerated from Wilmington “be close to their family. That’s the community they’re going to be released to, so they need to be building connections.”

Darby also said it doesn’t make sense for work-release prisoners with jobs in the Wilmington area to be held in Georgetown, and then transported for nearly two hours each way, five days a week.

“That alone is crazy,” she said. “It goes against any best practices of what it means to reenter someone into the community, to put them far away from their family and social connections.”

John Reynolds, of the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware, said Plummer’s demise “could have a significant impact on people returning after a conviction and their families, especially those who live in northern New Castle County.”

Reynolds, the ACLU branch’s deputy policy and advocacy director, said the state’s announcement on Sept. 30 that Plummer was closing caught many by surprise.

He wants DOC leaders and Meyer to take steps to gather community feedback before deciding what happens next, saying “reentry and rehabilitation should be evidence-based and driven by what’s best for the community and the people who are returning from incarceration.”

Reynolds said research has shown that community support systems play a major role in a former prisoner’s chances of success.

He said closing Plummer, “the largest and most significant facility in the most populous part of our state, is going to result in some people being transferred to faraway facilities that are great distances from the communities that they will return to after they complete their full sentence.”

Despite pleas, DOC leader says closure decision is final

Meyer wouldn’t agree to an interview, but Commissioner Taylor told WHYY News on Tuesday that the governor intends to visit Plummer, perhaps this week, and speak with staff and people sentenced to work release.

Taylor stressed, however, that the decision to close the 125-year-old Plummer center is final, and was made after three other community corrections facilities downstate already closed.

Taylor said there are only 55 to 60 formerly incarcerated prisoners currently at Plummer, barely one-fourth of its capacity of 250. The center has about 60 direct employees, plus other contracted health care workers, she said.

Statewide, the number of people sentenced to what the state calls Level IV “quasi-incarceration” in a community corrections facility has dropped from 1,300 in 2008 to 369 in 2025. That’s less than half of the state’s capacity of 845.

Taylor said she decided for several reasons, primarily Meyer’s mandate to use state resources efficiently, as well as to save money and reduce DOC vacancies and reliance on overtime. She added that today, reentry begins when a prisoner enters prison.

“Because of all of those factors, we had to make that tough decision,” Taylor said. “The need to have that stepdown work-release kind of unit is not as needed as it was in the 1980s and the 1990s.”

Taylor said the move would also save the state nearly $4 million in maintenance projects planned for Plummer over the next two years, and allow DOC to make other investments at other facilities.

She said people who aren’t sent home on electronic monitoring would go to community corrections facilities in Smyrna, located about 40 miles from Plummer in the southernmost New Castle County, or in Georgetown, 85 miles away in Sussex County.

Taylor said that rather than protest Plummer’s closing, now is the time to begin to “reimagine’’ the future of the state-owned facility.

She said people have already floated ideas like converting it into a homeless shelter, a skills-training center for former prisoners who are no longer under state supervision or housing for survivors of domestic violence.

“There have been a lot of recommendations, and I don’t think it’s fair for me to sit in my seat and make that final determination,” Taylor said. “I really feel like this is an opportunity for everyone to pull together and work together.”

Concerns over racial bias at Georgetown

Dunn said that, beyond not having Plummer to use as a transitional center, Wilmington-area residents, many of whom are Black, might be subjected to racial and geographical prejudice if they are sent to Georgetown, which is in predominantly white Sussex.

Dunn, who is Black, said that’s what he experienced when he spent several months in the Georgetown center after violating his probation.

“Once they found out that I was upstate, I got some bad verbal abuse down there from the guards, from the staff,” he said, including being called the N-word.

“We used to go through that down there, and that’s what’s going to happen down there,” Dunn said. “Our behaviors and conduct from downstate and upstate are totally different. And to take Wilmington people and put them in that environment, you’re doing more bad than you are good because they’re not going to be able to adjust to downstate.”

Darby said she has received similar reports about bias against Black men held at the prison and work-release center in Georgetown.

She noted that Wilmington is heavily Democratic, but Sussex County is the only one of Delaware’s three counties where Republicans are in the majority.

“Sussex County is very red,” Darby said. “And there’s a lot of stereotypes and bias about Wilmington people, specifically Wilmington people who are Black. The reports that I get are that it’s worse for Black and brown people who are incarcerated and/or are in the work-release program down in Sussex County. They experience a lot more racism there.”

Taylor, a nearly three-decade employee of DOC who has been commissioner for nearly two years, said it’s news to her that some people believe Black prisoners are sometimes mistreated in Georgetown.

“I am not aware of that,” she said. “That might be somebody’s opinion.”

Taylor pledged, nonetheless, to hold all DOC employees to professional and humane standards.

“We have values that we strongly enforce, regardless of what facility you are employed at,” Taylor said. “The expectation is everyone — employees, the community, inmates, or those under probation or parole supervision — are treated fairly and equally.”

“And if there are any concerns of anyone being mistreated, we take every one of those concerns or complaints extremely serious, and they will be thoroughly investigated,” she said.