WEB POSTED 10-10-2000

CRIME PAYS----SOMEBODY!

An article in a recent WASHINGTON POST newspaper contained the observation that "If crime doesn�t pay, punishment certainly does..." The reference was to the towns throughout America which profit from the fact that prisons are located nearby, and products are produced through unpaid labor, filling the pockets of all who are involved, except, of course, those who are performing the labor � the prison inmates. The article focused primarily on towns in the State of New York which were profiting from the free labor of inmates in nearby prisons, but the story is the same all over America � wherever prisons exist or are being built.

The past 14 years has seen a boom in the construction of prisons, as nearby towns discovered the large profit margin products yield when there is no labor cost.

"Call it," says POST staff writer Lynne Duke, "salvation through incarceration � a prison-based development strategy that small towns all over America are pursuing, and changing economically and culturally because of it."

"Prisons," Duke writes, "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 ....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."

A Department of Agriculture demographer describes prison expansion as "a major source of growth, of jobs, of economic development." He estimates that for every 30 prisoners housed, about 10 jobs are created. "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."

The only downside that the yokels are wary of is the fact that, rather than being content to visit, many of the inmates� family members have a tendency to want to move into the towns to be near their loved ones, and the "overwhelming majority" of them are Black and Latino, while the little towns are almost always lily-white.

"Here in New York," the article states, "advocates for reforming what they call disproportionately harsh sentencing laws say their efforts are being thwarted by some lawmakers where small-town constituents don�t want to stop the flow of inmates."

New York alone has built 36 prisons since 1980. This construction boom was kicked off by then-Governor Mario M. Cuomo, who regularly carried the Black vote.

�NUFF SAID!