As one drives north on I-15 from Point of the Mountain, it's hard to miss the lockup fanning out below. It lies in Draper near a proposed interchange of I-15 and other major highways. It's got location, location, location.

If the market values the land as highly as some people think it should, then the state could sell it and use the proceeds to build a newer, better facility somewhere else.

As a business plan, then, Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. is onto something. During the 2004 campaign, he suggested studying the idea of moving the prison, and the Legislature has kicked in $140,000 to crunch some feasibility numbers.

But a prison is more than real estate. It's a social service agency, a place to turn the lives of people around. And that's where moving the prison may run into problems.

Now, it lies near the center of Utah's urban population. That means it is relatively close to courts, to hospitals, to the 1,200 employees who work at the prison, to the families of 3,350 inmates housed there who visit, to the 1,500 volunteers who give their time and concern to a group of people that most of the rest of us would rather not think about.

A new prison outside Salt Lake County would be a major inconvenience for many of these people, and that might increase operating costs and decrease the effectiveness of rehabilitation. There may be alternative sites inside the county, but as building rapidly eats up open land, there aren't many.

The feasibility study also will consider privatization. Utah has flirted with private prisons in the past, but rejected them, wisely, in our view. Squeezing costs to maximize profit is not likely to serve Utah's efforts to reform criminals. A federal study of private prisons in 1996 was unable to conclude that they were more efficient or more effective than government joints.

Four rural Utah communities desperate for jobs competed for a private lockup before the state abandoned a plan for one in Grantsville in 2000. When Utah sent 100 of its inmates to private jails in Texas in 1995, eight inmates, including four killers, escaped. Others rioted.

Prisons are not shopping malls. The highest and best commercial use of real estate is only one issue in relocating a prison, and not the most important one.