The Washington Post

MALONE, N.Y. -- Mayor Joyce Tavernier and Police Chief Gerald Moll can't recite chapter and verse about the crime that rages far, far away, down in New York City. But the perpetrators of big-city crime have sparked a rural growth industry here. If crime doesn't pay, punishment certainly does, at least for isolated small towns like Malone.

"We've benefited from somebody else's mistakes," Moll says with a shrug.

• He is referring to the "mistakes" of about 5,000 convicted criminals. That's the population of the three state prisons here, built over the past 14 years during the national prison construction boom.
• [T]he prisons have brought new and expanded businesses, created jobs, broadened the tax base and bolstered the real estate market. Based on a U.S. Census count made dramatically higher because of the men behind bars, Malone stands to gain more in state and federal dollars than it otherwise would, with one-third of this town's population of 15,000 being inmates.
• 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 that ultimately was awarded to the town of Licking. 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.
• "Prison expansion has been "a major source of growth, of jobs, of economic development, ... Roughly speaking, you'll have 10 jobs for every 30 or so prisoners, ... 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." said Calvin Beale, senior demographer of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.

Mandatory Sentencing
 

Towns such as Malone are the latest link in the chain of factors that influence criminal justice policies, experts say. Here in New York, advocates for reforming what they call disproportionately harsh sentencing laws said their efforts are being thwarted by some lawmakers whose small-town constituents don't want to stop the flow of inmates.

The debate over prison sentences is especially pointed now in New York, as the push to reform the state's so-called Rockefeller drug laws gathers steam. Under those laws, in place since the 1970s, even first-time, nonviolent drug offenders are subject to 15-year sentences. Some newspapers have editorialized in favor of reforming drug sentences, and advocates have pushed the issue. But the state legislature has not acted.
 

Reform of mandatory sentencing statutes has been impeded by "the vested interests that Republican state senators have in keeping the spigot flowing and keeping the prisoners flowing into the system," said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, which co-sponsored a report released earlier this year on prison placement and spending in New York.

New York prison commitments have tripled under the Rockefeller laws; 62.5 percent of those cases were nonviolent drug offenders. New York has built 36 prisons since 1980 and now has 69, most of them in rural areas.

The boom came to Malone in 1986, after years of decline in the local economy. ...

• Franklin Correctional opened here in 1986, followed two years later by Barehill Correctional. Both are medium security and both, today, have more than 1,700 beds each. Last year, Upstate Correctional opened just down the road. It is a "supermax" prison that houses about 1,450 of the state's worst disciplinary problems in double-bunk cells.
• The three prisons brought 1,600 well-paying jobs to Malone. A third of those prison workers live in the town, the rest in nearby towns in the same county.
• With a total annual payroll of about $67 million, "it attracts people who think they're gonna get a piece," Dutton said, reciting a few small firms that have moved to town, mostly from Canada, including a furniture assembly plant and a textile firm. And there are new and expanded pharmacies, discount stores and fast-food outlets. Moll, Tavernier and McKee think the general prison-inspired upswing has spurred the expansion of the local hospital, which now has a dialysis unit and a cancer treatment center, and the golf course, which has doubled in size to 36 holes.
• Taken together, the prisons and the new businesses in Malone in particular and Franklin County in general have dropped the county unemployment rate to about 7 percent, nearly its lowest level since 1975.