New Jersey Breaks Ground on New $330 Million Women’s Prison After Raid at Old Facility
In October 2025, New Jersey broke ground on the construction of a new 420-bed, $330 million prison for women that will replace a crumbling 112-year-old facility that shuttered in 2021. The Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women will retain the same name as the prison it is being built to replace. Gov. Phil Murphy (D) closed the facility’s precursor after a violent night of forced cell extractions that left several prisoners with broken bones and other injuries. As PLN reported at the time, the raid—allegedly sparked by a prisoner throwing bodily fluids at a guard—resulted in the arrest of more than a dozen guards [See: PLN, Dec. 2021, p. 56.]
Beyond that night, the prison had a history of physical and sexual abuse that stretched back decades. In just the two years between 2016 and 2018, six guards and one civilian staff member were charged with crimes related to prisoner abuse. In 2022, New Jersey agreed to pay $21 million to a class of about 1,000 prisoners and former prisoners who had filed a suit over allegations of sexual harassment and abuse at the lockup, as well as retaliation for reporting it [See: PLN, Dec. 2022, p. 32.]
The settlement also gave officials a year to outfit guards with body-worn cameras and to hire new staff to provide prisoners with trauma counseling, among other changes. Victoria Kuhn, the state DOC commissioner, claimed in a speech at the prison’s groundbreaking that these reforms would carry forward at the new facility, which would also include expanded educational programs, social services, and addiction treatment.
At the same event, according to The New Jersey Monitor, there was little mention of the fact that, less than two weeks before, a state judge had thrown out the criminal indictment of the 14 guards arrested during the 2021 beatings. The judge ruled against the indictment based on his assessment of it being “unconstitutionally vague” by not describing which of the guards did what that night. He also criticized the “negligence” of prosecutors for taking four years to prepare the case. In addition to a denial of justice on behalf of the guard’s victims, the ruling provoked calls for an outside probe into the state attorney general’s public integrity and accountability office, the anti-corruption unit that led the prosecution.
While the future iteration of the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility is expected to be fully completed in 2028, there is at least one other decrepit and troubled prison in New Jersey that has not yet been approved to be demolished. The New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, considered the oldest operating prison in the United States, has been in use for nearly 200 years. Many prisoners at the facility’s West Compound are jammed in cells measuring as little as 28 square feet, with a low ceiling and only enough floor space to walk in and out. At that same compound, there is no air conditioning nor day room or recreation space.
In September of this year, investigators with the state DOC released an inspection report calling for portions of the prison—which locks up more than 1,300 people in total—to be demolished and replaced, although there are currently no official plans to do so. [See: PLN, Oct. 2025, p. 11.]
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