Pubdate: Wed, 01 Aug 2001 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298 Author: Peter T. Kilborn RURAL TOWNS TURN TO PRISONS TO REIGNITE THEIR ECONOMIES For a town of 4,114 in western Oklahoma, Sayre has an impressive landfill. The scales to weigh the bales of crushed scrap are new. A machine for shredding trees is new. So, too, is the 60-unit apartment complex going up on the side of the road leading to the dump, the asphalt that covers that road, and the sprawling Flying J Truck Plaza nearby. The wording on a trash-hauling bin parked near the landfill gives a hint of what is behind the revival of this withered, century-old city. It reads "North Fork Correctional Facility." As in many other small towns around the country, a three-year-old, $37 million, 1,440-inmate, 270-employee, all-male prison is responsible for lifting Sayre's spirits and reigniting its economy. "In my mind there's no more recession-proof form of economic development," said Jack McKennon, 52, the city manager who persuaded the Corrections Corporation of America to put its prison in Sayre. "Nothing's going to stop crime." Sayre is not alone in its economic strategy. According to the 2000 census, prisons have been helping to revive large stretches of rural America. More than a Wal-Mart or a meat-packing plant, state, federal and private prisons, typically housing 1,000 inmates and providing 300 jobs, can put a town on solid economic footing. As communities become more and more familiar with the benefits that prisons bring, they are also becoming increasingly adept at maximizing their windfall through collecting taxes and healthy public service fees. In the last decade, 245 prisons sprouted in 212 of the nation's 2,290 rural counties, many in Great Plains towns of Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas that had been stripped of family farms and upended by the collapse of the 1980's oil boom, said Calvin L. Beale, senior demographer at the Economic Research Service of the Agriculture Department. Mr. Beale said an average of 25 new rural prisons opened each year in the 1990's, up from 16 in the 1980's and 4 in the 1970's. Growth followed. In the 212 prison counties, the population rose 12 percent in the 90's, far more than rate of 1.5 percent in the preceding decade. Three small Oklahoma cities with new prisons -- Hinton, Sayre and Watonga -- grew more than 40 percent. Opening a prison is a natural option for down-and-out towns, said Thomas F. Pogue, economics professor at the University of Iowa. "It's a more stable industry for a town than a manufacturing plant," Professor Pogue said. "The wage level is a problem, but these prisons are being located where people don't have much of a choice." The North Fork Correctional Facility, a mile and a half from downtown Sayre, is surrounded by buffalo grass and cottonwood trees. With light gray concrete walls and red metal roofs, it could pass for an immense new Comfort Inn were it not for double coils of razor wire and slotted windows. The access road for the buses that bring in new inmates is called Delivery Avenue. The prison's economic value to Sayre is immediately apparent. The Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison management company based in Nashville, is the largest taxpayer in Beckham County, of which Sayre is the seat. The county collects $411,000 in property taxes from the prison, more than four times the amount it gets from the next largest taxpayer, the Bar-S Foods Company, a meat-processing plant. Eighty percent of the property taxes support county schools. Jody Bradley, the prison's warden, said the prison spent $2.5 million a year for goods and services in Oklahoma, largely around Sayre, and disbursed about $7 million in wages. The prisoners are themselves cogs in Sayre's economic engine. They pay the city's 3.5 percent sales tax for the snacks and sodas they buy in the commissary. They also pay a 35 percent to 45 percent tax for the telephone calls, roughly 100 a day, all collect, all long distance. Local calls are forbidden for security reasons, not that it is much of an issue: the inmates all come from Wisconsin, which, because of a space shortage, farms out more than 4,000 prisoners to other states. The prisoners help in other ways, too. The city has torn down the old high school and salvaged the bricks and stone work for a new City Hall. The bricks stand in stacks in the prison yard, where for no charge to the city, the inmates are cleaning them. By any measure, Sayre, 120 miles west of Oklahoma City, was in perilous shape before the prison opened. Shattered by the oil and gas industry bust of the 1980's, it was surviving largely on federal crop support payments to its dwindling farm population, said Jack W. Ivester, the town's mayor. At one point, officials turned off every other street light on the main commercial thoroughfare to save money. In the center of town stood a reminder of better times, a stately court house, which had been featured as a backdrop in the 1940 film "Grapes of Wrath," starring Henry Fonda. Now Sayre can set aside 15 percent of its revenues for capital improvements. The money brought in from the telephone calls, sales taxes, water and sewer fees and landfill charges accounts for nearly all the increase in the city's budget from about $755,000 in 1996, before the prison construction began, to about $1,250,000 this year. The money flowing into city coffers made it possible for Sayre to hire nine new employees, bringing the total to 30. Last year the city granted them $100,000 in raises. Mr. McKennon's salary has doubled to $48,000 in nine years. The police force has grown to eight officers from four, and for three years in a row, the city has been able to buy a new patrol car. Sayre has erected three new water towers, making five. "We build two miles of improved streets each year now," Mr. McKennon said. To lure the Flying J, Sayre bought 28 acres along Interstate 40 for a bargain price of $2,700 an acre and then sold the land to a developer at cost. The truck stop, which has been open less than a year, employs 117 people and is expected to pay $150,000 a year in sales taxes, said Chris Christian, the city treasurer. "We wouldn't have gotten the Flying J without the prison," Mr. McKennon said. As a result, Beckham County's unemployment rate is a rock-bottom 1.7 percent, from 3.2 percent in 1998 when the prison was built, even as the nation's unemployment rate rises. "The ones that want to work, they can go out there and get a job," said Leroy Hagerman, who operates an auto-repair shop downtown. Mr. Hagerman's daughter got one of the best jobs, as one of six captains at the prison. "Not many places where a single woman can make $30,000 a year," he said. While the prison's immediate economic value is clear, it remains an open question as to how deep or wide ranging its benefits will be. The city's core population, excluding the 1,440 inmates, dropped in the 1990's to 2,644. from 2,881. Housing permits have more than doubled since the prison was built, though the market remains tight for the prison's 270 employees, most of whom earn $17,000 to $19,000 a year. "The prison is a super positive for us," Mayor Ivester said. "But it's a life raft, an inner tube. We're still on the ocean. We're not going down, but we're not really going up either." The prison can take a toll on local services, too. Linda Brown, the clerk of the Beckham County Court, said inmates began flooding her office with five or six complaints and other filings a week. Some were legitimate, like several who sent in divorce papers, Ms. Brown said, "but most seemed frivolous." One inmate tried to change his name to Poison Jonathon Love. Among the reasons he listed was a desire to further his "modeling and acting career." Serious or not, Ms. Brown said, few inmates followed standard filing procedures. "They wouldn't send the correct papers," she said, "so we would have to send them back." She said the requests subsided after the warden posted a notice spelling out the procedures required. Before the prison came, townspeople worried about indigent visitors and families of prisoners moving to town, possibly swelling the welfare rolls. But because they must travel from Wisconsin, only a few show up each day. Residents say they went along with the prison, though there was never a vote for it. Many signed pro-prison petitions, which were circulated in banks and grocery stores around town. "We all took a tour out there, a before-they-opened-type-thing," Clydene Manning, the county clerk, said of efforts to reassure residents. "I'd just never been inside a prison before. It looked like a safe and secure place to me." Some residents said they would have preferred a more inclusive process. "My only complaint was it was kind of a done deal before the town really knew about it," said Belinda Wilkinson, the cashier at the Texaco station, about 100 yards from the prison and the closest business. Sales are now brisk, Ms. Wilkinson added, though she also gets more bad checks, mostly from guards. Residents' initial concerns for their safety have subsided. No prisoner has escaped; the inmate who came closest became ensnared on the prison's razor wire. But about 20 guards, residents of Sayre and surrounding communities, have been injured in fights and assaults. As many as 70 percent of all guards quit within a year, some for better-paying jobs in the recovering oil fields, and the prison is now 19 guards short, Mr. Bradley said. Sayre faces a larger problem. The nation may be on the verge of a prison glut, bad news for towns that have come to rely so heavily on them. Only 11 rural prisons have opened or are scheduled to open this year, compared with 38 in 1998, the peak building year, Mr. Beale of the Agriculture Department said. In Wisconsin, the growth of the inmate population has halted, and the Department of Corrections has set as an informal goal to stop exporting inmates within 10 years. Oklahoma sent some prisoners to Sayre three years ago but took them away because of a contract dispute with the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest operator of private prisons. For now, the prison money is flowing, and Sayre is trying to build the foundation of an economy that might eventually get along without it. Mr. McKennon wants a Wal-Mart distribution center, an Alco department store and above all a motel. "I'll give you the land," he said, smiling in the 104-degree heat. "No way you can keep from getting rich." - --- MAP posted-by: Derek