By Martha T. Moore
USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — States trying to fight recession by closing prisons are finding a Catch-22: What saves scarce money costs precious jobs.
New Hampshire, Tennessee and Kansas are among states that have closed prisons this year as they struggle to balance budgets. In 2008, states spent about $47 billion from general funds on corrections, four times as much as in 1988, according to the Pew Center on the States. Nearly 90% of corrections budgets were spent on prisons, as opposed to probation, parole or other programs.
States are closing prisons by moving inmates, reducing their numbers through increased use of electronic monitoring, boosting support for offenders on probation and declining to return them to prison for every probation violation.
That’s been controversial: “Inmates are getting released that wouldn’t have been released in good budget times,” says Tom Tylutki, president of the corrections officers union in Michigan, where eight facilities are scheduled to close. “We believe (public safety) is being compromised.”
Towns that have relied on prison jobs for years now find the local economy jeopardized.
*In Michigan, plans to close three prisons and five prison camps will cost 1,000 jobs, including in the tiny town of Standish, where a 19-year-old maximum-security prison is the county’s largest employer.
If Standish shuts down on Oct. 1 as scheduled, “it will be catastrophic, there is no doubt,” for the town of about 1,800 people, says the Rev. James Fitzpatrick, who organized a rally and prayer vigil to protest the prison’s closing.
*In Vermont, cost-cutting plans to close a 122-bed prison in St. Johnsbury, in the thinly populated northeastern corner of the state, were shelved by the Legislature over concerns about the loss of jobs. The state had planned to send prisoners out of state at a savings of $2 million.
*In New York, three prison camps and seven prison annexes, all located in the northern part of the state, are to close this year, saving the state an estimated $52 million over two years. About 550 jobs will be lost in a region that has long relied on prisons as a major employer.
Camp Gabriels, in Franklin, N.Y., provided jobs for three of Mary Ellen Keith’s sons, a daughter and granddaughter until it closed this year. Inmates also cleared the rural town’s roadsides of brush, something the town can’t afford to do.
“Up here, there’s absolutely no industry or anything,” says Keith, Franklin’s town supervisor. Without the prisons as employers, her family “probably would never have been able to remain in this area,” she says. “It’s a hardship.”
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