Gov. Phil Murphy participates in a groundbreaking for a new Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Chesterfield on Oct. 15, 2025. Beside him are Myrna Diaz, who was incarcerated for 14 years at Edna Mahan before Murphy commuted her sentence in December 2024, Department of Corrections Commissioner Victoria Kuhn, and Pamela Boykin Jones, founder and CEO of Communities in Cooperation Inc. (Dana DiFilippo | New Jersey Monitor)
New Jersey lawmakers officially kicked off construction of a new 420-bed, $310 million state prison for women Wednesday with a groundbreaking ceremony beside a sprawling, grassy field in Chesterfield, where the troubled Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women will relocate.
The new mixed-custody prison will replace a decaying 112-year-old facility in Clinton that Gov. Phil Murphy in 2021 ordered closed after more than a dozen correctional officers were arrested for brutally assaulting incarcerated women during a violent night of forced cell extractions.
The first phase of the project is expected to open in 2027, with construction scheduled to be fully completed in 2028.
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Just before officials shoveled dirt Wednesday to mark the coming construction, Murphy alluded to the prison’s longstanding troubles, which include widespread sexual misconduct that prompted federal authorities to intervene and declare oversight.
“For decades, Edna Mahan has stood as a shameful symbol of a deeply flawed status quo,” Murphy said.
Replacing the “woefully outdated” prison will better protect incarcerated women while improving working conditions for officers, he added. And relocating it from the western reaches of Hunterdon County to a 33-acre state plot in centrally located Burlington County will make it more accessible for families who want to visit their incarcerated loved ones, officials said.
“By closing Edna Mahan once and for all, we will save our state’s taxpayers more than $160 million in what would have been much-needed capital projects that would have been the ultimate good-money-after-bad story,” Murphy said. “So today, we’re beginning a new chapter for criminal justice in New Jersey.”
Since the 2021 arrests, state Department of Corrections officials have made changes to ensure a “cultural reformation” too, including requiring officers to wear body cameras and implementing trauma- and gender-informed training, said Victoria Kuhn, the department’s commissioner. The new prison will also have expanded vocational and educational programs, social services, and addiction treatment, officials said.
“When the doors of this new facility open, the foundation for its success will have already been poured with the reforms that we have implemented,” Kuhn said.
The groundbreaking came less than two weeks after a state judge dismissed the criminal indictment of 14 correctional officers arrested in the 2021 beatdown at Edna Mahan. The judge declared the indictment unconstitutionally vague and said a four-year delay in preparing the case for trial constituted “negligence” by prosecutors in the public integrity and accountability office overseen by the state attorney general.
The dismissal prompted complaints that incarcerated women were denied justice and bipartisan calls for an independent investigation and oversight of the office.
But the indictment and its dismissal got nary a peep at Wednesday’s groundbreaking, with Murphy telling reporters after the ceremony that he was “extremely bitter, disappointed, and angry” but otherwise couldn’t comment because the Attorney General’s Office is appealing.
Advocates and Kuhn, though, did talk up legislation now in the Statehouse pipeline that would codify protections for incarcerated women in New Jersey by beefing up oversight, officer training, sexual misconduct safeguards, and rehabilitation and reentry programs and services. Kuhn said she expects the bill will advance after lawmakers return to Trenton in November.
“We want to ensure that all of those protections continue in perpetuity, so that there is never a dialing back to where we were decades ago,” Kuhn told the New Jersey Monitor.
Terry Schuster, the state corrections ombudsperson, seconded support for the bill and called on legislators to act quickly, with the current legislative session set to end and a new governor taking office in January. Republican Jack Ciattarelli, who’s running against Democrat Mikie Sherrill in the race to replace term-limited Murphy, is expected to backtrack some criminal justice reforms implemented during the Murphy and Christie administrations and has often vowed on the campaign trail to “uncuff law enforcement.”
“We don’t know what’s going to happen with the election. We don’t know what’s going to happen with the leadership of the department,” Schuster told the New Jersey Monitor. “We want to make sure that the policy changes that have happened in the last few years really become harder to roll back.”
The new Edna Mahan prison will be a short stroll from the Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility, an unused prison that closed in 2017, as well as the Garden State Youth Center, which replaced Wagner and now incarcerates about 1,000 young men.
Prison conditions have been a grievance for years for criminal justice reformers, with many lockups in varying stages of disrepair.
Kuhn and Murphy told reporters Wednesday that updates to other facilities are stalled because of funding.
“With a limited budget, a limited amount of money, you’ve got to prioritize, like anything else in life,” Murphy said. “And I feel very confident and comfortable that this was our top priority. And this is a big day, in that respect.”
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