By C1 Staff
More and more prisons are closing throughout the U.S., partially due to budget cuts but also may be because there are less people to lock up.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, 35 adult correctional facilities in 15 states have closed in the past two years. Governors in Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois are pushing for more closures this year. From 1982 through 2001, state corrections budgets more than tripled to a peak of $53.5 billion, but now spending is 9 percent below that level.
Opposition to the closures from corrections unions and community leaders worry about job losses and say a result could be overcrowding in the prisons that remain. Some states are consolidating old facilities into new ones rather than eliminating capacity, and in recent years many private-prison operators have built new facilities, according to the report. However, analysts say the pace of construction has slowed.
Declines in the prison population have been uneven; roughly 70 percent of the decline in 2011 was due to a massive drop in California’s inmate population owing to a Supreme Court order that the state reduce overcrowding. Many of those inmates are now in county jails or other facilities, while other states like Tennessee and Kentucky saw their prison populations rise during the same year.
Other states, like Florida, Texas, New York, and Michigan, each shed more than 1,000 prisoners in 2011, and each closed prisons in the past two years, according to WSJ. Policy experts attribute the declines partly to measures aimed at reducing the number of nonviolent offenders behind bars.
“You’ve got to distinguish who you’re afraid of and who you’re mad at,” said State Sen. John Whitmire, who has helped lead an overhaul of the Texas prison system. “You’re afraid of child molesters, murderers and rapists. People like low-level offenders, you’re not afraid of them.”
Corrections officers unions say the closures are premature and would lead to more dangerous prison conditions, according to WSJ.
“The loss of bed space as a result of these closures will make the remaining facilities that much more overcrowded, volatile, and dangerous,” said Anders Lindall, spokesman for the Illinois branch of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents corrections workers.
The report also says rural areas will be bracing for the impact of prison closures.
“It’s going to hurt the restaurants, the hardware store, every business place here is going to be affected,” Patrick Mulhern, the longtime mayor of Cresson, told WSJ.
Pennsylvania officials said they planned to shut down prisons in Cresson and Greensburg and replace them with a single facility near State College. “Five hundred employees in one fell swoop – that’s an awful lot.”