So when Kansas officials decided to replace the 2,400-bed Lansing facility because of overcrowding, rising operating costs and its age, they opted for a novel solution: hire a private company to build a replacement, and have the state staff it with their workers and lease it for 20 years, when it would then own it.

Such a lease-to-purchase plan is now under consideration in Nebraska, which is second in prison overcrowding in the U.S., behind only Alabama. That state is under federal court order to address its overcrowding problem.

Scott Frakes, director of the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services, last week threw out the possibility of a new, medium- to maximum-security, 1,600-bed prison — which would be 500 beds bigger than Nebraska’s current largest prison — and talked about locating it somewhere between Omaha and Lincoln. Prison officials, though, emphasize that is not set in stone.

How much would such a prison cost? If you use Kansas’ costs as an example, Nebraska would pay about $241 million for a 1,600-bed facility.

In Kansas, though, the decision to have CoreCivic, the nation’s largest private prison company, build the new facility is still stirring a debate.

A leading state representative in Kansas — a former judge and former head of the state’s juvenile justice system — said the deal made a lot of sense to him.

Kansas State Rep. Russ Jennings said that while he’d never support housing inmates permanently at a privately run prison — like those operated by CoreCivic that have stirred controversy — having the firm build the new Lansing prison allows more flexibility in choosing contractors and in construction.

“If they can find more economical ways to get something done, they can do that,” Jennings said. “That’s something that government is not quite as adept at.”

But Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly — as well as a Kansas state audit — disagrees that the project is saving money.

Shortly after Kelly took office a year ago, she said the state had been “hoodwinked” into hiring CoreCivic through overly optimistic projections of cost savings, which included that a modern prison could operate with 46% less personnel and that the project would be “revenue neutral.”

“I doubted at the time that they could really safely reduce staff at the numbers that they were talking about,” said Kelly, a former Kansas state senator. That the project won’t cover the cost of the lease payments, as projected, was not a surprise, she said.

Then there’s a Kansas state audit from July 2017 that concluded that Kansas could save nearly $30 million over 20 years by financing the new prison by issuing bonds and contracting out the maintenance, instead of hiring a private company to build and maintain it. The administration of then-Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, however, signed the deal with CoreCivic.

CoreCivic, which has also built prisons for the states of California and Oklahoma and just signed an agreement in Kentucky, is expected to be one of the leading bidders for the proposed project in Nebraska.

The prospect of a new prison is already raising questions among state lawmakers.

Two key Nebraska state senators, Steve Lathrop of Omaha, who heads the legislative committee that oversees corrections, and John Stinner of Gering, who heads the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee, said that while some prison construction is needed, so are sentencing reforms that could reduce the need for new prison beds.

Stinner noted that since he took office in 2014, the construction of more than 700 new prison beds has been authorized, yet Nebraska’s prison overcrowding is worse than ever. He’s said that the state has many other priorities.

Lathrop, who proposed this year that a 300-bed work-release facility be built in Omaha, said it would be impossible for the state to keep building enough prisons to keep up with the projected growth of inmates, which is about 200 a year.

He said he’s worried that a “request for information” will just delay new construction and allow the state to “kick the can down the road” and avoid needed expansion.

“There’s no commitment (right now),” Lathrop said.

When asked for comment about the debate in Kansas, a spokesman for Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts said that state hasn’t yet launched its request for information to determine the wisdom of the lease-to-purchase idea.

“As the RFI process moves forward, the state will continue to examine and learn from other states who are pursuing similar approaches,” said the spokesman, Taylor Gage.

Unlike Kansas, Nebraska doesn’t have the ability to issue bonds to build a new prison. But the state, mostly the university system, has used another lease-purchase approach to spread out the costs of expensive new structures, like the Sapp Arena and a new cancer center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. It involves setting up private corporations to build, own and lease the structures.

For the new prison, corrections will produce an RFI that will project how big and expensive a new prison should be, and what kind of prisoners should be sent there.

The prison would be located, prison officials say, where adequate population exists to staff it, which suggests Omaha, Lincoln and Sarpy County as prime locations. Right now, the department has to bus corrections officers from Omaha to help staff prisons in rural Tecumseh and Lincoln, which have struggled with high turnover rates and the inability to fill vacant posts.

The announcement of a proposed new prison was an about-face for the state. Just six years ago, state leaders were doing everything possible to avoid such a project.

But a series of prison reforms and a series of small prison expansions have failed to sufficiently reduce overcrowding. One issue has been an unanticipated rise in felony crimes, which translates into new prison inmates. While prison populations nationwide dropped nearly 7% over the past decade, Nebraska’s inmate count rose by 21%.

The overcrowding prompted the ACLU of Nebraska to sue Nebraska, alleging inhumane conditions behind bars, and led Frakes to acknowledge last fall that state prisons — already holding about 2,000 more inmates than they were designed to hold — could hold only about 150 more.

With new projections in January estimating that overcrowding would rise to 3,300 inmates over capacity by 2030, the state announced that it was time to get serious.

The advantage of a lease-purchase plan, according to Kansas and Nebraska officials, is that payments could be spread out for several years, rather than taking a huge bite out of the state budget.

In Kansas, lease payments were to begin at $14.9 million per year, with the payments rising about 2% each year after that. At the end of the 20-year lease, the state could own its new prison at no additional cost. Stinner said that the costs of staffing the prison with state employees also must be added in, which is usually about 10% of a project’s cost, or $24 million a year.

But state prison officials emphasize that a prison can be built much more quickly through a lease-to-purchase approach.

Corrections spokeswoman Laura Strimple said a prison could be built and opened within three years because some state procurement rules can be avoided. If traditional state funding was used, it could take 4½ years, she said.

A spokeswoman for CoreCivic declined to comment on whether its Kansas project delivered the promised cost savings, referring questions to Kansas officials.

But Jennings, the Kansas representative, insisted it was the right move for his state, in replacing an aging prison that was becoming a “money pit.”

He did, however, offer a cautionary note for Nebraska: “If you’re building a prison to expand capacity (as Nebraska is), my analysis might be quite different.”