Baghdad, Iraq ? Faced with a ballooning prison population, U.S. commanders in Iraq are building new detention facilities at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and Camp Bucca near the Kuwaiti border and are developing a third major prison, in northern Iraq.

The burgeoning number of detainees has also resulted in a lengthy delay in plans for the United States to leave Abu Ghraib fully in the hands of the Iraqi government.

Maj. Gen. William Brandenburg, who oversees U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, had originally planned to be out of Abu Ghraib by early spring. “I believed it until mid-December, but the numbers just weren’t going that way,” he said. “Business is booming.”

The new timeline calls for the United States to stop using Abu Ghraib by February 2006, at which point the entire prison would be turned over to the Iraqi Ministry of Justice.

In the wake of the 2003 scandal over abuse and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers, President Bush had advocated demolishing Abu Ghraib “as a fitting symbol of Iraq’s new beginning.”

But the Iraqi government has since begun using the prison, which previously was infamous as a torture center under Saddam Hussein, to house its own prisoners convicted under its nascent criminal justice system. The prison, just west of Baghdad, is currently a joint facility, with the U.S. Army and Iraqi government housing detainees in separate compounds.

Aggressive operations against insurgents over the past six months have brought a flood of new prisoners to U.S.-run facilities – including many believed to be hard-line rebels who have launched bloody attacks on American troops.

The number of prisoners held by the United States in Iraq reached all-time record levels earlier in the month of June, and has since gone down slightly. Through Saturday the average prisoner total in June stood at 10,783, up from 7,837 in January and 5,435 in June 2004.

The two main U.S. Army-run prisons, Abu Ghraib outside Baghdad and Camp Bucca, are both operating near their maximum or “surge” emergency limits. As of Saturday, the two prisons held 10,178 inmates, with another 1,630 awaiting processing in different Army divisional and brigade headquarters.