Pubdate: Tue, 21 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
Section: New York Region
Author: David Rohde

A GROWTH INDUSTRY COOLS AS NEW YORK PRISONS THIN

With the number of inmates in state prisons across the country either 
stabilizing or dropping after decades of explosive growth, New York is 
taking early steps to reduce its prison staffing significantly.

The Department of Correctional Services has frozen hiring at 36 prisons 
across the state, and hopes to eliminate 614 prison jobs through attrition 
by March, forcing corrections officers to begin to grapple with something 
they never imagined possible. New York City's plummeting crime rate might 
cost them their jobs if the goal is not met through attrition and might 
deliver a further blow to communities already braving a slowing economy.

The change in New York, where officials project the decrease in the inmate 
population to be about 9 percent, is threatening the livelihoods of people 
like Alan Ada.

In the mid-1980's, he surveyed his options in Cape Vincent, N.Y., a tiny 
resort town on the Canadian border, and decided to follow the calling of 
thousands of other young people upstate. Children of laid-off paper-mill 
workers and struggling dairy farmers, they chose a booming field that most 
never dreamed of, but that offered a steady salary, a pension and health 
insurance. Like them, he became a corrections officer.

New York City quickly proved him wise. Desperate to ease overcrowding in 
its jails, the city built a $90 million jail in Cape Vincent in 1988 near 
the banks of the St. Lawrence River and began flying inmates north on 
twice-weekly jet shuttles nicknamed "Con Air."

The new prison allowed Mr. Ada to get a steady job in the place where he 
was born and raised, a rare feat in Cape Vincent, a town of 2,400 in the 
Thousand Islands wilderness that falls silent when the leaves turn and the 
summer tourists depart.

As the number of inmates in New York soared in the 1990's, the state took 
over the prison, doubling its population and work force. Across upstate New 
York, shrinking rural communities and their legislators clamored and 
competed for prisons, a seemingly recession-proof industry. But the boom 
times are coming to a jarring end.

"Who ever thought crime would go down?" asked Tim Munroe, a corrections 
officer who has worked in the Cape Vincent Correctional Facility for 12 
years. "Who ever thought we would run out of inmates?"

Officials in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Texas — states also experiencing 
declines in their prison population — said they had no plans to reduce 
their prison work forces. Experts caution that it is not yet known whether 
the nationwide prison population is dropping or simply stabilizing. But if 
the decline becomes a clear trend, hundreds of small, rural prison towns 
across the country could find themselves confronted by the same unnerving 
news as Cape Vincent.

"Regions and towns that have based their whole economies on prisons are 
going to be confronted with some really serious problems," said Michael 
Jacobson, a professor of criminology at John Jay College of Criminal 
Justice. "This is going to be a problem for the governor and Legislature. 
In the same way towns lobbied to open prisons, they are going to lobby 
against closing them."

In New York, a continued drop would bring a halt to what has served as a de 
facto economic development program in the state's isolated corners — prison 
growth. Assailed by critics as a shortsighted use of state resources and 
defended by supporters as necessary for public safety, New York's sprawling 
70-facility, $2.4-billion-a-year prison system pours hundreds of millions 
of dollars into the upstate economy each year.

The dependence bred by nearly 30 years of unchecked prison growth is 
evident in isolated Cape Vincent, where deer nibble on grass near the 
prison, wild turkeys wander the roads and Canadian radio stations dot the 
airwaves. Prison employees expressed fear, anger and suspicion about the 
state's plan and complained of low morale and management problems. A group 
of corrections officers met with H. Carl McCall, the state comptroller and 
a candidate for governor, this month to express concerns about cutbacks.

The vast majority of officers interviewed asked not to have their names 
published because they feared losing their jobs. Corrections officers' 
salaries start at $33,000 and rise to $48,000 in 20 years.

"When they say the crime rate is down, it's just a political thing," 
scoffed Mr. Ada, one of several officers who questioned whether the rates 
are actually dropping. "I think it's just something for the politicians to 
make them look good."

Mr. Ada, who is also the local fire chief, complained that proposed changes 
in the so-called Rockefeller drug laws would further reduce the prison 
population, and he was convinced that crime continues unabated downstate. 
"All you have to do is look at the New York City news," he said.

The supervisor in Cape Vincent, Tom Rienbeck, said that the prison is the 
community's second-largest employer after its public schools, and that the 
state's goal of cutting 168 of the prison's 528 jobs through attrition 
would hurt.

"Anytime you lose that many jobs, it's something to worry about," Mr. 
Rienbeck said, adding that he, too, never dreamed the prison population 
would drop. "You always figure you're going to have criminals. It's like 
being a doctor, you figure there are always going to be sick people."

Mr. Rienbeck and corrections officers expressed worry that the state would 
not reach its goal through attrition and that layoffs would be necessary. 
"There are maybe a handful of people close to retirement," Mr. Ada said.

James B. Flateau, a spokesman for the Department of Correctional Services, 
said the Cape Vincent's prison has lost 26 officers, for example, through 
attrition since April 2000. The state's goal is to lose 117 officers and 51 
civilian employees by next March, but Mr. Flateau emphasized that the 
figures are only targets. He said that the department expects to meet its 
goal statewide and that higher attrition in other prisons could make up for 
less in an area like Cape Vincent.

Groups that criticized explosive prison growth in the past are using the 
slowdown to again call for change. Jennifer Wynn, director of the Prison 
Visiting Project for the Correctional Association of New York, questioned 
the wisdom of making prisons such a large economic force in upstate New York.

"Since 1982, New York has opened 38 new prisons, every one of them in a 
rural upstate community that relies on prisoners — mostly poor people of 
color from New York City — to fuel the local economy," she said. "Maybe 
it's time to invest in more positive and sustainable industries than 
warehousing people."

Several upstate county governments may also have miscalculated. For the 
last decade, state prison overcrowding resulted in thousands of inmates 
serving their sentences in county jails instead of state prisons. After 
years of legal battles, the state now reimburses the counties for housing 
the inmates.

Some rural counties, seeking to make the arrangement profitable, built 
large jails with excess capacity. But with the prison population dropping, 
some sheriff's departments that run county jails are stuck with oversized 
centers with empty bunks.

"There are jails that overbuilt in anticipation of needing additional space 
for themselves and in anticipation of taking advantage of some extra 
dollars from the state," said Peter Kehoe, executive director of the New 
York State Sheriffs' Association. "Those people are beginning to worry."

The worry is palpable in Jefferson County, home to Cape Vincent, and 
neighboring St. Lawrence County. Hiring freezes are in effect in four of 
the five prisons, some of which are known as "cookie cutters," a reference 
to the speed and identical designs desperate corrections officials used as 
they scrambled to build them in the 1980's and 1990's.

Besides the hiring halt, 350 officers temporarily assigned to prisons in 
the two counties fear being moved to downstate prisons where their jobs are 
permanently assigned, according to Mr. Munroe, a former union leader in 
Cape Vincent who believes the drop in crime is real and good for society 
over all. He added that he did not believe anyone considered what would 
happen if the crime rate dropped. "There wasn't much forethought," he said.

Dozens of local men are already making the commute to downstate prisons. 
One corrections officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the 
hiring freeze put off his hopes of being able to work in a nearby prison. 
"Cape Vincent is my No. 1 jail," he said. "It's two miles from my house."

He drives two hours to a maximum security prison in central New York. 
There, he works double shifts for two to four days, sleeping in an 
apartment he shares with 12 other officers. He returns to Cape Vincent and 
works odd construction jobs during his days off.

But he and other local prison employees all enthusiastically endorsed 
theirs as a "clean industry" that produced steady employment and little 
pollution. No guards have been seriously injured since Cape Vincent's 
prison opened, they said, and no inmates have escaped.

With mills and other area businesses continuing to close, Mr. Ada regrets 
that his town did not agree to house more prisons in the boom times, 
saying, "It's supposed to be one of the more secure state jobs."
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens