<nettime> Building a Boom Behind Bars (fwd)

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

http://www.washingtonpost.com

Washington Post

September 8, 2000

Building a Boom Behind Bars

By Lynne Duke, Staff Writer

MALONE, N.Y. -- Mayor Joyce Tavernier and Police Chief Gerald Moll can't
recite chapter and verse about the crime that rages far, far away, down in
New York City. But the perpetrators of big-city crime have sparked a rural
growth industry here. If crime doesn't pay, punishment certainly does, at
least for isolated small towns like Malone.

"We've benefited from somebody else's mistakes," Moll says with a shrug.

He is referring to the "mistakes" of about 5,000 convicted criminals.
That's the population of the three state prisons here, built over the past
14 years during the national prison construction boom. Fifteen miles from
the Canadian border, in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains,
Malone's prisons have sparked new economic life in this once-withering
Salmon River hamlet that had spent decades on the skids.

Call it salvation through incarceration -- a prison-based development
strategy that small towns all over America are pursuing, and changing
economically and culturally because of it.

Nestled out of sight on a pine-covered plateau that has become a penal
colony just north of the Malone village center, the prisons have brought
new and expanded businesses, created jobs, broadened the tax base and
bolstered the real estate market. Based on a U.S. Census count made
dramatically higher because of the men behind bars, Malone stands to gain
more in state and federal dollars than it otherwise would, with one-third
of this town's population of 15,000 being inmates.

Prisons have transformed American small towns from New York's North
Country around Malone to the Colorado plains and from the Texas panhandle
to south Georgia, from the massive penal colonies of California to the
southern coal fields of eastern Kentucky and the Virginias, where new
prisons are being planned.

It's an old phenomenon that has surged in recent years: About 200 state
and federal prisons have been built in small towns across the United
States since 1980, and fierce competition breaks out when a new prison
project is announced. In Missouri recently, 31 towns competed for one
prison that ultimately was awarded to the town of Licking. In Arizona,
Biga and Buckeye fought in court over which town had the right to annex a
nearby prison and harvest the federal dollars it would bring.

Prison expansion has been "a major source of growth, of jobs, of economic
development, yet it's almost sort of a symbiotic relationship," said
Calvin Beale, senior demographer of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's
Economic Research Service. Beale began researching the small-town prison
phenomenon a decade ago when he and a colleague saw how dramatically some
rural populations had grown because of the prison inmate influx.

"Roughly speaking, you'll have 10 jobs for every 30 or so prisoners,"
Beale said. "So if you have a prison come in with 1,400 prisoners, you're
probably going to get 400 jobs out of that, and in a rural setting that's
a lot of jobs... So they welcome these jobs, and they bid for them."

That's what happened in Malone.

"This town has the opportunity, if not to recapture its past, it has the
opportunity to reshape its future," said Stephen T. Dutton, executive
director of the Franklin County Industrial Development Agency.

But people who are not converts to the salvation of incarceration speak
privately and anecdotally of the high-stress subculture of the prison
guards that has begun to infuse the town, including an increase in
domestic troubles. Folks with an appreciation for Malone's 200-year
history of timber, farming, manufacturing and a spell as a regional rail
hub find it difficult to watch the advent of Malone's new service economy,
based on fast-food shops and discount stores that arrived with or after
the prisons.

Others in this virtually all-white town speak of their fear that prison
inmate families -- most of whom are black and Latino, like an overwhelming
majority of the inmates -- will begin moving into town, not just coming to
visit. That possibility has some locals on alert when they see a new,
nonwhite face. Independent of one another, three middle- aged residents
volunteered to a reporter that the only black person they'd ever known
growing up was a local deaf-mute named "Snowball."

"When you have a small community and suddenly you have that infiltration
from outside, issues of diversity come," said Moll, who also said there
had been no reports of trouble associated with inmate families. No such
families live in the town, he said.


Mandatory Sentencing

Towns such as Malone are the latest link in the chain of factors that
influence criminal justice policies, experts say. Here in New York,
advocates for reforming what they call disproportionately harsh sentencing
laws said their efforts are being thwarted by some lawmakers whose small-
town constituents don't want to stop the flow of inmates.

The debate over prison sentences is especially pointed now in New York, as
the push to reform the state's so-called Rockefeller drug laws gathers
steam. Under those laws, in place since the 1970s, even first-time,
nonviolent drug offenders are subject to 15-year sentences. Some
newspapers have editorialized in favor of reforming drug sentences, and
advocates have pushed the issue. But the state legislature has not acted.

Reform of mandatory sentencing statutes has been impeded by "the vested
interests that Republican state senators have in keeping the spigot
flowing and keeping the prisoners flowing into the system," said Robert
Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York,
which co-sponsored a report released earlier this year on prison placement
and spending in New York. State Sen. Ronald B. Stafford, the Republican
chairman of the Senate Finance Committee whose district hosts more prisons
-- 12 -- than any other in the state, did not respond to a request for
comment.

New York prison commitments have tripled under the Rockefeller laws; 62.5
percent of those cases were nonviolent drug offenders. New York has built
36 prisons since 1980 and now has 69, most of them in rural areas.

Gangi emphasizes that most of New York's prison expansion has occurred in
Republican districts. But Democrats also approved the new prisons, and
then-Gov. Mario M. Cuomo (D) kicked off the prison construction boom.


Catch a Falling Star

The boom came to Malone in 1986, after years of decline in the local
economy. Once known as the "Star of the North" because it was a rail
junction and a regional shopping magnet, the town had lost its Sears,
Roebuck and Co.  store and its J.J. Newberry. Factories were shut or had
been downsized. Local dairy farms had collapsed.

Mired in hard times on Main Street was the grand old Flanagan Hotel of
regional legend. Mobster "Dutch" Schultz stayed in the hotel during his
1933 tax evasion trial (moved to Malone because it was remote), lavishing
locals with such quantities of gifts and liquor that jurors acquitted him
and tried to hoist him on their shoulders. Of Main Street's many shuttered
premises, the Flanagan is the largest.

When prisons emerged as an option for Malone, Molly McKee, then president
of the local Chamber of Commerce, was dismayed.

"If they said we'd get a four-year college campus, I would have loved
that," said McKee, now head of the local prison advisory board. "I
thought: a prison. Ugh."

But soon, realizing the town's desperation, she came to see it as a "great
idea."

McKee and others were concerned that Malone not become another Dannemora.
That town about 40 miles away grew up around the Clinton Correctional
Facility. And there, towering over Dannemora's main street, are prison
walls with shotgun-toting guards standing sentry.

However prison development played out in Malone, said McKee, "We didn't
want it to define the town."

Franklin Correctional opened here in 1986, followed two years later by
Barehill Correctional. Both are medium security and both, today, have more
than 1,700 beds each. Last year, Upstate Correctional opened just down the
road. It is a "supermax" prison that houses about 1,450 of the state's
worst disciplinary problems in double-bunk cells.

The three prisons brought 1,600 well-paying jobs to Malone. A third of
those prison workers live in the town, the rest in nearby towns in the
same county.

With a total annual payroll of about $67 million, "it attracts people who
think they're gonna get a piece," Dutton said, reciting a few small firms
that have moved to town, mostly from Canada, including a furniture
assembly plant and a textile firm. And there are new and expanded
pharmacies, discount stores and fast-food outlets. Moll, Tavernier and
McKee think the general prison-inspired upswing has spurred the expansion
of the local hospital, which now has a dialysis unit and a cancer
treatment center, and the golf course, which has doubled in size to 36
holes.

Taken together, the prisons and the new businesses in Malone in particular
and Franklin County in general have dropped the county unemployment rate
to about 7 percent, nearly its lowest level since 1975.

But while desperate small-town officials tout the obvious and proven
benefits that prison development can bring, others bemoan what is being
lost: the small-town life, the possibility for other kinds of development
and local autonomy. While the town lobbied to get its first two prisons,
the state decided unexpectedly to place the third one here. It was not
altogether welcome, even by staunch advocates of prison development.

"People feel they can't fight it because they feel it's a done deal,"
Cindy Durant McNickle, a local activist, said of prison development in
general. "But we do have to stand up and look very carefully at the
institutions that are running the community." By that she means the state.

Malone Village, which provides water and sewage services for the new
Upstate prison, had to unexpectedly raise water and sewer rates this year
to cover debt service on an expansion project undertaken to accommodate
the prison. The state was supposed to pay for the project, but had not
done so by the time the town needed to decide on its water and sewer
rates.

A village official who criticized some aspects of the prison expansion
here nearly lost his job earlier this year for speaking out. Boyce
Sherwin, Malone's director of community development, spoke critically in
the newspaper Newsday of the water-sewer rate hike, the pollution of the
Salmon River because of the prison expansion and the general tenor of life
in a town with three prisons.

Outraged residents accused Sherwin of smearing the town and Mayor
Tavernier mounted an investigation. Sherwin kept his job only through the
intervention of other angry citizens who spoke in his defense. He refused
to be quoted for this article.

Indeed, a variety of people interviewed here spoke only guardedly about
the prisons. Experts on rural America say it is common for prison towns to
experience more domestic violence and alcohol problems because of the
stress experienced by prison guards. But Moll, the village police chief,
said the slight upswing in domestic abuse and alcohol-related driving
offenses that occurred after the first prison opened couldn't necessarily
be attributed to prison stresses.

On a visit to the Pines, a bar between the Franklin and Barehill prisons,
an off-duty prison guard chatted briefly over a beer about the stresses of
the job and its unpredictability. He stopped talking, however, when a
higher-ranking corrections official glared at him disapprovingly. The
officer left a short time later, telling a reporter, "Watch yourself."

Asked why, he said, "You just have to watch yourself."

Copyright (c) 2000 The Washington Post Company.


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