Prisons as a Growth Industry in Rural America: An Exploratory Discussion of the Effects on Young African American Men in the Inner Cities

by Tracy L. Huling
April 15-16, 1999
Washington, D.C.

The Crisis of The Young African American Male in the Inner Cities

A Consultation of the United States Commission on Civil Rights

• Introduction
• Prisons: A Rural Growth Industry
  • Rural Decline as the Context for Prison Industries
  • Prisons and Their "Host" Communities
• Prisons as Economic Development: Consequences for Young African American Men in the Inner Cities
  • "Race-ing" Justice
  • Impacts of High Incarceration Rates of African American Males on Inner-City Communities: Transferring "Wealth" from Inner Cities to Rural Communities
  • Prisoner Labor
  • Population Impacts and Implications: Are Inner City Communities Losing Dollars and Political Power to Rural Communities?
  • Prisons Versus Social Programs
  • Losing Family and Community Ties
• Implications and Suggestions for the Future
• Bibliography
• Additional Statement to Supplement the Record
• Endnotes

Introduction

In 1995, The Sentencing Project released a report with a central finding that made headlines across our nation: On any given day in the United States, one out of every three young black men 20 to 29 years old is under the control of the criminal justice system--in prison, or jail, or on probation or parole.[1] In 1997, the Bureau of Justice Statistics published a study telling us that at current levels of imprisonment, a black boy born today has a 28 percent chance of serving a federal or state prison term at some point in his lifetime.[2]

The dimensions of this American crisis are broad and still unfolding. Most recently, our attention has been drawn by reform groups and the media to two profoundly disturbing facts: 1) There are more African American males in our prisons and jails than in our universities,[3] and 2) Three in 10 of the next generation of black men will lose the right to vote at some point in their lifetime if current rates of incarceration continue.[4]

My purpose in this paper is to explore the potential intersections between this crisis of young African American males under criminal justice control and another major trend that has been the subject of less national media attention and little reliable research: the use of prisons as a conscious economic development strategy for depressed communities. This is taking place first and foremost in "non-metro" rural communities and small towns in the United States, forging a fateful, symbiotic bond between depressed communities in urban and rural America.

In 1996, I began research for a documentary film, Yes, In My Backyard, profiling one farming-community-turned-prison-town in upstate New York.[5] This first documentary portrait of a prison town examines the small town of Coxsackie, New York, in rural Greene County. Once a thriving farm community with a solid base of small manufacturing and a busy main street on the banks of the Hudson River, today, the community of Coxsackie and Greene County in general are struggling to recover from the effects of the economic restructuring that devastated rural America in the 1980s. Coxsackie is now host to state prisons which are the largest employers in the county.

Coxsackie Correctional Facility, built on part of the old Bronck farm during the Depression, opened up in 1935 as the New York State Vocational Institution--a reform school for wayward youth. Now a maximum security prison, Coxsackie Correctional Facility houses over 1,000 mostly black and Hispanic males under the age of 21 from New York City. Coxsackie Correctional Facility employs almost 600 people, the majority of whom are drawn from Greene and surrounding counties. Nearly 400 of Coxsackie's employees are security staff, including approximately 340 correctional officers. The vast majority are white.

In 1983, a second medium-security state prison was built in the community of Coxsackie-Greene Correctional Facility--on land adjacent to the first prison. The first of the new 11 campus-style" prisons with "dormitories" in New York, Greene Correctional Facility was originally built for 500 inmates. While it was being built, it was decided to add 250 more beds. About 4 years later, a second compound was opened, which brought capacity up to 1,630. Close to 1,000 of the 1,630 male inmates are under 21. In 1997, a 200-bed special housing unit was added. Today, the two prisons employ about 1,200 people and house approximately 3,000 mostly young, mostly minority, men from New York City. These young men make up nearly half of the population (approximately 7,000) of the town and village of Coxsackie.

Making Yes, In My Backyard provided me with an in-depth and unusually personal introduction to a national and underexamined phenomenon with potentially far-reaching consequences for young African American men, for inner-city and rural communities, and for our nation. In this paper I will review existing information documenting the increasing use of prisons as economic development for depressed rural communities across the United States. I will discuss the nature and evolution of problems in rural America which I believe are fueling the transformation of heartland communities into penal colonies, and I will consider the potential consequences of this for young African American men in the inner city and their communities.

Prisons: A Rural Growth Industry

"Before I even started the job, they was always telling me, the worse things get out in the world, the better things get in jail. You'll always have a job. "

Ted Flegel, farmer and retired prison guard, in Yes, In My Backyard

For many years, prison officials faced the NIMBY problem: when communities heard about plans for a new prison, the outcry was "Not In My Backyard!" Times have changed. Communities suffering from declines in farming, mining, timber-work, and manufacturing are now begging for prisons to be built in their backyards. The acquisition of prisons as a conscious economic development strategy for depressed rural communities and small towns has become widespread.

Since 1980, the majority of new prisons built to accommodate the expanding U.S. prison population have been placed in non-metro areas with the result that the majority of federal and state inmates are now housed in rural America.[6] By contrast, prior to 1980, only 38 percent of prisoners were in prisons in rural communities and small towns.[7] Between 1990 and 1997, 203 correctional facilities (20 federal) were built in rural and small town communities. The leading states for new non-metro prisons--public and private--are Texas (41), Georgia (20), Florida (17), and North Carolina (15). There are about 177,000 inmates in these new facilities, and according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in at least 60 rural U.S. counties the shift from population loss in the 1980s to population gain in the 1990s can be fully or partly explained by increases in prisoner populations. The new non-metro prisons have about 55,000 employees, a major addition to the overall rural economy. The commuting field for employees typically extends to several surrounding counties. Thus, there may be as many as a third of all non-metro counties sharing in the direct job growth just from the facilities built during this decade.[8] Non-metro prisons have about 275 employees on average, or 31 for each 100 new inmates. These ratios vary considerably by state and type of prison. For example, New York's post-1980 non-metro prisons average 49 employees per 100 inmates, whereas California's average only 29 per 100. Minimum-security facilities tend to be more lightly staffed.[9]

Calvin Beale, a senior demographer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, describes rural prisons as a "classic export industry," providing a service for the outside community. Unlike some other rural services, such as recreation, the employment is year-round. The salaries vary but are at minimum adequate, and employee insurance and other benefits are typically good compared to other rural and small town work.[10]

Rural Decline as the Context for Prison Industries

Many rural and small town communities actively bid for prisons, but not all are eager to acquire them or to add to them. The primary reason for acceptance is economic need.[11] To understand the context of prison development in rural America it is useful to go back in time. In the mid-80s, the farm crisis rose to the forefront of national attention, featured in the nightly news, television documentaries, commercial films, and print journalism. It was a gripping story, with homicides in the heartland and grim prophecies of "death of the family farm." In fact, the deep and pervasive impact of the decade of the 1980s on rural America goes far beyond the farm crisis and is not well understood by most Americans. The impact of the farm crisis was financially devastating to some communities in the Midwest and broadly assaulted rural identity and self-image because of the importance of farming to the culture and social life of rural America. The loss of factories, however, had a much more pervasive and deeper impact on the economies of rural communities in the 1980s than the loss of farms.[12]

The downsizing and loss of rural manufacturing facilities was responsible for much greater losses in employment, retail trade, and real estate values and produced a much greater strain on community service capacities. Unlike the farm situation, where the demise of a few farms may be balanced by the expansion of those remaining, when a rural factory cuts back or closes down, other plants in the community, subject to the same forces of international competition and external ownership, may not be in a position to expand, even though extra trained labor may be available. Even where a factory closing was followed by an opening of another manufacturing firm, laid-off workers who found new factory jobs suffered a substantial cut in pay not only because they were starting over, shorn of the seniority and raises they'd earned over the years and with little bargaining power in an employer's market, but also because the entire pay scale in the new manufacturing jobs may be significantly lower than in the old firms. From management's point of view, cutting labor costs has been the essential strategy for meeting foreign competition. The high wages that rural factories had been paying were what they sought to escape in moving overseas. The few plants that now move into rural areas from, or instead of, urban locations, have done so because they anticipate lower operating costs, particularly labor costs. Displaced rural workers have thus been over a barrel in that they have had to accept--indeed to entice--new smaller manufacturing firms with reduced wage rates and inadequate benefit packages because, for both the worker and the rural community, there was nothing else available.[13]

Retaining or attracting the better paying, stable manufacturing firms is, for many rural communities, no longer an option. The great transformation in manufacturing employment in rural communities was hardly different in nature than what was happening in major urban areas of the nation, but its consequences were often different because many rural areas were more dependent on manufacturing than were urban communities and were less able to compensate for manufacturing losses by moving into the service sector. Also, the consequences are more serious in rural areas because of the scale factor: The loss of a few mid-sized plants in a county of 50,000 people, or just one plant in a community of 1,500, is far more devastating on workers and a community than the same closures would have in a metropolitan area.[14]

While many new jobs have been created in rural areas, the numbers of these jobs are not nearly important as the types of jobs. Of the new jobs created, a large fraction are low-paying, part time, provide no health benefits, and are temporary or insecure. Pick up a local paper in a rural community: the ads are mostly for part-time jobs or for jobs with wages that are inadequate. Even if a worker were to take two halftime service sector jobs, such as those at local fast-food restaurants or supermarkets, both together do not equal a single, full-time job that was lost from the local manufacturing plant, as each of the part-time jobs offers lower hourly wages than the full-time job, neither offers benefits, and both may be temporary or insecure. This shortfall in wages, benefits, and security between "old employment" and "new employment" is not of course a uniquely rural phenomenon. However, as with plant closings, it hits rural people harder because the differential between the jobs they have lost and the substitutes they can find is particularly large and because there is a restricted pool of jobs for rural workers.[15] The consequences are such that in rural areas, even families with one or more members in the work force are more likely than urban families to fall below the poverty line, and the poverty rate among rural families who work increased in the 1980s.[16]

Another important effect on rural communities of economic downturn is the loss of young people though out-migration. This is a serious concern of rural communities across the country. In 1988, the Wall Street Journal published a story on the out-migration problem, covering rural America from Maine to Montana.[17]

The cumulative impact of the changes that hit rural America in the 1980s left deep economic, social, and psychic wounds. This impact was summed up by former Secretary of Agriculture, Bob Bergland, as follows: "At the end of the decade, it is clear that the troubles of rural America have deeper roots than comparatively short-term crises such as drought and farm foreclosures. The economic restructuring occurring in rural America in the 1980s has had dramatic social and economic consequences that are contributing to the decline of the quality of family and community life in rural areas."[18]

Prisons and Their "Host" Communities

Most of the research assessing prison impacts on communities is exploratory.[19] As well, existing studies examining prison impacts on communities have been criticized for lack of methodological rigor.[20] Nevertheless, review of those included in a 1992 volume of the journal Crime & Delinquency[21] suggests agreement on some issues important to this paper.

Community opposition to prison sitings used to be more widespread than it is today and based on three factors: fear, concerns over economic consequences, and "civic pride." The fear factor, revolving around potential escapees, higher community crime rates as a result of releasing prisoners into the host community, the migration of prisoner families into the host communities, and, more recently, the spread of diseases like HIV-AIDS beyond prison walls, has been shown to be grossly exaggerated. An occurrence of any one of these phenomena is rare, although disproportionate media coverage of such unusual occurrences has contributed to community misperceptions. The economic consequences raised by some citizens opposing prison sitings typically include: decline in property values; an increase in the community's tax burden as prisons do not pay property taxes; and inadequate reimbursement levels for locally provided services such as water, garbage disposal, sewage disposal, education, and law enforcement and court services. Research findings on such economic impacts is mixed, and many prison systems have now instituted ongoing reimbursement programs for locally provided services or one-time "impact funds" for prison expansion. "Civic pride" concerns include a variety of quality-of-life issues that reflect a community's conception of what an ideal community is or should be. Rural citizens have voiced a variety of doubts about the compatibility of "prison industries" with the rustic character, quiet lifestyle, and pristine landscape of many rural communities.[22] As well, "status and prestige" issues are often raised by people afraid that prisons or other industries identified as LULUs (locally unwanted land uses) such as toxic waste dumps, garbage incinerators, power plants, and airports will stigmatize a community, negatively affecting a community's identity in the eyes of the rest of the world as well as a community's perceptions of itself.[23]

"I'm advocating right now another prison, or at least additions to the existing prison ... Because the more beds we have over there, the more inmate population, the more water they're going to use, and the more of our sewer services they're going to use and the more jobs are going to be needed ... you politic for it--that's what you do."

Henry Rausch, mayor, Village of Coxsackie, New York, in Yes, In My Backyard

In the past, citizen opposition to prisons based on concerns sometimes referred to collectively as NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) was sufficient to block many proposed sitings, often after bitter conflicts expensive to both sides. However, public resistance is no longer so predictable, and it is now common for rural communities to compete for new prisons. Two major reasons for this change have been discussed in the existing research literature. First, as previously discussed, declining prosperity in rural communities and small towns has been such that many local officials now lobby state and federal officials for prisons. Second, prison officials have changed their siting practices in significant ways. Many prison systems now rely on a competitive bidding process for identifying potential prison locales.[24] For example, in 1996, 16 rural communities in upstate New York appeared on a list of towns asking for prisons maintained by the NYS Department of Corrections. In a statement which typifies those coming from local rural leadership across America, Robert Van Slyke, president of the Rome (New York) Area Chamber of Commerce, said, "We've had a substantial loss of various kinds of jobs. When we heard the governor had proposed three new maximum-security prisons, we asked whether Rome could be considered. With the current state of the economy, you have to look very seriously at something like this. I think we have a compelling economic care to make."[25]

In order to be considered "competitive" in the bidding wars for prisons, rural communities and small towns often offer financial assistance and concessions such as donated land, upgraded sewer and water systems, and housing subsidies. For example, in the all-out contest spurred by New York Governor George Pataki' s 1996 proposal to build three new maximum-security prisons, Altamont, a small Adirondack town, set aside 100 acres of land to entice the state to put a prison there.[26] Antwerp, another small community in northern New York, applied for a $600,000 federal grant to rebuild their water-supply system to increase their chances of winning a state prison.[27]

With the rapid privatization of prisons, some local communities are getting into the prison business themselves, seeking private financing to build "spec" prisons in their backyards. Appleton, Minnesota, and Hinton, Oklahoma, were among the first towns taking matters into their own hands by building and operating prisons as economic development in the early '90s.[28] Others have followed. Jack Barrett, the mayor of Holdenville, a small town in Oklahoma which had lost both population and jobs as a result of the oil-bust in the 1980s, made the Oklahoma Department of Corrections an offer: We'll build you a prison, Barrett said. You give us the prisoners. True to his word, Barrett hooked up with Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in America, to manage his proposed prison, and investors forked over the $34 million the town needed for construction. In 1996, Holdenville opened a new 960-bed private prison and not only is it chock full of Oklahoma inmates but Steve Kaiser--the Oklahoma Department of Correction's chief of operations at the time of Barrett's original offer--is its warden.[29]

Despite a lack of research documenting long-term economic impacts of prisons on communities, residents representing business interests are most likely to give positive assessments of prison effects, and rural officials often rely on business leadership for guidance on prison development. In the upstate New York town of Romulus, Glen Cooke, the county's economic development director, was quoted as saying that economic development experts throughout the state consider correctional facilities to be positive contributors to local economies, providing good-paying jobs and benefits in communities where employment is scarce.[30]

Ordinary citizens however often take a different view. They are the most likely to view prisons and their community effects as more negative or neutral than positive.[31] Recognizing this, prison officials repeatedly take steps to alter these views through a wide variety of public information and community relations efforts. It is common for local officials to sponsor town meetings where prison officials and their supporters are invited to extol the benefits of prisons to communities. When proposed prisons are on the table, local newspapers are filled with articles reporting grand claims for economic salvation and flyers flood into local coffeeshops, general stores, and mini-marts. The following statement by Tip Kindel, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections, is typical of a now widespread tendency among prison officials to defend prison expansion as an economic boon. "Prisons not only stabilize a local economy but can in fact rejuvenate it," he said. "There are no seasonal fluctuations, it is a nonpolluting industry, and in many circumstances it is virtually invisible . . . You've got people that are working there and spending their money there, so now these communities are able to have a Little League and all the kinds of activities that people want."[32]

Some recent accounts of prison-siting efforts suggest that prison "public relations" may be moving into a whole new arena. After losing a protracted battle in 1997 to locate a prison in the Adirondack Park, the New York State Department of Correctional Services (NYSDOCS) had to look elsewhere for a place to build a new 750-cell, double occupancy, maximum-security prison. Malone, a small town in Franklin County, took it and $10.8 million from NYSDOCS to expand and extend the local water and sewer system. Additional negotiations are ongoing regarding more monies for the town for other infrastructure improvements.[33] In Southeast, Washington, D.C., where a new federal prison has been proposed and met with both strong support and strong opposition, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the private prison company vying for the contract has reportedly offered to underwrite a $1 million loan fund for local minority business and make contributions to local youth programs. An offer by CCA to pay for the costs of keeping a now-closed Safeway grocery store open in the community was declined by Safeway. It is also reported that the prison company has offered contracts to several local entrepreneurs to supply prison-related goods and services. The list of other amenities offered to the community in exchange for its support of the prison includes the opening of a vocational training institute next to the prison; home price guarantees (should the price of surrounding homes be deflated because of the prison); and criminal justice scholarships to the University of the District of Columbia.[34] CCA's reported offers in Washington echo reports of CCA tactics in other places: Judith Greene notes in a 1999 paper on the privatization of correctional services that in seeking a contract with the U.S. Virgin Islands, CCA offered the governor a $1 million revolving line of credit to assist local businesses and entrepreneurs in establishing contract opportunities with the company.[35]

Prisons as Economic Development: Consequences for Young African American Men in the Inner Cities

Prisons as a growth industry are dependent upon ever-increasing numbers of prisoners, and the United States provides ideal market conditions. Our nation spends more on prisons and incarcerates more people than any other industrialized country in the world. In the early 1970s, there were about 200,000 people locked up in correctional facilities in the United States. Now, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are almost 2 million. Well over half of these people--1,158,956--are in state prisons. California, Texas, New York, and Florida have the largest state prisoner populations and Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and South Carolina have the highest rates of incarceration.[36]

Despite a decrease in crime rates, criminal justice spending has nearly doubled in real terms since the mid-1980s and today well over a third of that spending--$35.9 billion in 1995--is for the funding and administering of correctional facilities. Most of these costs are borne by state governments and go to build and maintain state prisons. Looking at criminal justice spending relative to the U.S. population, national per capita spending was $366 in 1995, a 69 percent real increase over 1983 per capita spending of $217. Texas had the largest per capita growth--112 percent--during this period. The top 15 state spenders on a per capita basis were the District of Columbia, Alaska, New York, California, Nevada, New Jersey, Florida, Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut, Arizona, Hawaii, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Texas. State forecasts of prison spending remain high into the new millennium as the numbers of prisoners continue to grow.[37]

Unprecedented increases in the U.S. adult prison population have also spurred explosive growth in the number of beds contracted from the private sector. While the total number of sentenced prisoners has doubled in 10 years, the number of private beds under contract grew by over 700 percent. With many states worried that increasing prison populations will result in runaway costs, the private sector is viewed as a viable option to help provide correctional services. Also, since well-capitalized private corrections companies are able to form mutually advantageous partnerships with community officials interested in the expanded employment and commercial opportunities that prison facilities promise, it is likely that such partnerships are proliferating and will continue to proliferate in rural communities.[38]

Private prisons in the United States accepted their first inmates in the mid-1980s. As of December 1998, at least 27 states make use of private prisons, and approximately 90,000 inmates are being held in prisons run for profit. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest U.S. private prison company, was founded in 1983 and began accepting its first Texas inmates before it had completed a facility in that state. The inmates were housed in rented motel rooms. A year later CCA approached the State of Tennessee with an astounding offer: CCA would buy the state's entire prison system for $250 million. Though the governor of Tennessee (whose wife was an early investor in CCA) was supportive, the plan was blocked by the Democratic majority in the state's legislature. Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (WCC) is the second largest U.S. prison company and its parent company, the Wackenhut Corporation, has for many years worked closely with the federal government guarding nuclear weapons facilities and overseas embassies. In the December 1998 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Eric Schlosser wrote that the company has long been accused of being a CIA front, an accusation that George Wackenhut, a former FBI employee, denies. Schlosser also says that Wackenhut Corporation provides strikebreaking and antiterrorism services, and when it decided to enter the private business it hired Norman Carlson, the former head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In 1997, Wackenhut became the first private prison company ever hired by the Federal Bureau of Prisons to manage a large correctional facility.[39]

UC-Davis professor Angela Davis wrote in the November 1998 issue of ColorLines Magazine that the stocks of both CCA and WCC were recently doing well: Between 1996 and 1997, CCA's revenues increased by 58 percent, from 293 million to $462 million. Its net profit grew from $30.9 million to $53.9 million. WCC raised its revenues from $138 million in 1996 to $210 million in 1997.[40] Greene, in a 1999 paper delivered to the RAND Corporation on prison privatization in the U.S., states that financial analysts who closely track the private prison industry anticipate continued robust growth. The revenue-generating potential of the industry has been projected to triple by 2002.[41]

"Race-ing" Justice

African American, Latino, and Native peoples are incarcerated in numbers vastly disproportionate to their numbers in our overall population. Today, nearly 70 percent of the prison and jail population in the U.S. are people of color. Nearly all are poor. In 1995, 47 percent of federal and state inmates were black, the largest group behind bars. Latinos are the fastest growing group behind bars. Between 1985 and 1995, Latinos jumped from 10 percent to 18 percent of all state and federal inmates. In 1995, 45 percent of state prison inmates were unemployed at the time of their arrest. The rest reported an income of less than $10,000.[42] Evidence from one state--New York--suggests the possibility that a majority of all state prisoners may come from a relatively small number of communities in the nation's inner cities. Data published in the early '90s showed that 75 percent of all New York's state prisoners came from seven predominantly African American and Latino communities in New York City.[43]

The so-called war on drugs is primarily responsible for the tremendous increase in the number of people going to prison and for the increasing racial disparities in prison populations. Since 1980, the number of drug offenders behind bars has gone from approximately 50,000 to about 400,000--representing more people than are in prison for all crimes in England, France, Germany, and Japan combined.[44] Between 1985 and 1994, drug offenders constituted more than a third (36 percent) of the increase in the state prison population and more than two-thirds (71 percent) of the increase in the federal prison population.[45] Many people point to the drug war as the single most important reason for the increasing rates of imprisonment for young black men. In 1992, blacks made up about 12 percent of the U.S. population and, according to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, about 13 percent of those reporting using any illicit drug on a monthly basis. Yet more than a third of all drug possession arrests, more than half of all possession convictions, and three-quarters of state prison sentences for possession involved blacks. In 1996, black inmates were nearly twice as likely as white inmates to be admitted to state prison for a drug offense. Nearly 40 percent of all black state prison admissions were drug offenders.[46]

Recent data on these offenders suggest that few convicted drug offenders are dangerous criminals. In New York, for example, nearly 80 percent of the drug offenders who received prison sentences in 1997 had never been convicted of a violent felony. One in four drug offenders in prison in New York was convicted of simple possession, primarily of minute quantities.[47] While 74 percent of the drug-using population in New York is white, African Americans and Latinos comprised 94 percent of the drug offenders in New York State prisons at the end of 1997.[48] In the words of Professor David Courtwright, the drug war has functioned "as a kind of giant vacuum cleaner, hovering over the nation's inner cities, sucking young black men off the street and into prison."[49]

Impacts of High Incarceration Rates of African American Males on Inner-City Communities: Transferring "Wealth" from Inner Cities to Rural Communities

If one accepts the assumptions and claims that prisons bring to their host communities a panoply of "benefits," it makes sense to explore the following question: If rural communities experience a net gain in becoming prison hosts, do inner-city communities experience a net loss as a result of providing a disproportionate share of the "raw material" which makes the gains claimed for rural prison host communities possible? In exploring this question, I will borrow and add to a phrase and concept--the transfer of wealth--from Dina Rose and Todd Clear of the University of Florida.[50]

According to Rose and Clear (1998), while there is little direct empirical evidence of the social impacts of high incarceration rates, there is a substantial body of indirect evidence that high incarceration rates of African American males in the U.S. have profound impacts on inner-city communities. Rose and Clear challenge the assumption that arresting and removing large numbers of offenders from their communities will always make these communities safer or stronger. Citing research indicating that offenders represent assets as well as liabilities to their communities, Rose and Clear posit that the removal of large numbers of young men from inner-city neighborhoods may negatively affect their socioeconomic composition. For example, while studies of inner-city youth gangs document the violent criminal lifestyles of gang members, they also document the connections of these young men to children, families, and others in their neighborhoods. In one study, a majority of active gang members were fathers, and a minority were employed in legitimate jobs though most worked sporadically.[51]

In addition, because the growth in imprisonment in recent years has been increasingly made up of nonviolent drug offenders, Rose and Clear suggest that the removal of potential assets may be increasing. That is these men may be offenders who leave their communities for prisons and take with them the support they have been providing to networks that sustain family and community structures. Several studies point to the conclusion that some active offenders whose crimes make them eligible for incarceration are financial assets to their families and communities. They contribute directly to the welfare of their families and other intimates in the same way non-criminal males do, although perhaps they provide fewer total dollars.[52]

Rose and Clear (1998) also cite evidence suggesting that incarceration of criminally active fathers does not necessarily improve the environment for remaining sons. One study[53] of a male jail intake sample finds preliminary evidence for the existence of substantial positive parenting prior to incarceration. After the male's imprisonment, the responses of the jailed inmate's family to his incarceration includes address changes because the remaining family moved into more cramped quarters and new school districts; family disruption, including the arrival of new male roles into the family replacing the inmate; reduced time for maternal parenting due to taking secondary employment; and so on. All of these factors are potentially disrupting forces for the family, and each tends to disturb family cohesiveness, which studies show would predict serious delinquency.[54]

Rose and Clear state that research shows that many, if not most, criminals also have legal employment so that their removal from the neighborhood removes a worker from the local economy. While removal of a single offender may free a legitimate job for a noncriminal worker, in local areas where a high proportion of residents engage in both legal and nonlegal work, removing many individuals may devastate the local economy. Family members earning money contribute to the welfare of their families and this is true regardless of whether those earnings are from legal or nonlegal activities. In an effort to sustain their families, mothers rely upon regular, substantial financial help from people in their personal networks because neither welfare nor low-paying jobs provide sufficient income to cover expenses. Incarceration removes from the neighborhood many of the men who provide some type of support to these women.

Rose and Clear (1998) clearly suggest that prior to incarceration, most prisoners are an economic resource to their neighborhoods and immediate families. They also argue that once arrested and incarcerated, this economic value is transformed and transferred. It is transformed into penal capital--the demand for salaried correctional employees to provide security. It is also transferred to the locality of the prison where the penal system's employees reside and live.

Prisoner Labor

"Today we're just clearing some brush along the property lines for the water treatment plant. We've done a lot of painting this year, painting a community center building in Athens, painted the inside of a church parish hall, put a roof on the town of New Baltimore town hall, had them sealing blacktop ... just about everything. They get an industrial rate which amounts to 42 cents an hour."

Prison guard coordinator of inmate work crew, Greene Correctional Facility, in Yes, In My Backyard

"We try to accommodate whatever we can . . . schools are another area where we get involved. Like basic tasks: reupholstering, furniture, examination tables that may in the school. We have the wherewithal to do that . . . I don't recall any school in the local area, any church, any nonprofit organization that's come to us with a project that we can't handle inside the facility where we've turned them away."

Dominic Mantello, warden, Coxsackie Correctional Facility[55]

In addition to the transformation of a young black man's economic value into the demand for salaried prison employees through his incarceration, it is also important to consider the benefits that accrue to rural communities as a result of the exploitation of his labor once he is imprisoned. In her article assessing the impacts of prisons on host communities, Carlson (1991) states: "Overall the findings on prison impacts show that prisons provide considerable economic benefits to their host communities and surrounding areas through direct employment, local purchasing, and inmate labor" (emphasis added). She goes on to say that while in small towns prisons operate much like any other industry in terms of their potential benefits, "Prisons as industries do have the added plus of a captive workforce available for community projects."[56]

Community work projects performed by prisoners are very common in prisons located in rural communities and small towns, and prison officials see them as good "community relations." There can be a lot of competition within the community for the services of inmates working both inside and outside the prison. While maximum-security inmates may not participate in outdoor crews in some areas of the country, it is common for all prisoners to work on projects benefiting the host community as part of their indoor programming.

Concern over the exploitation of prisoner labor by public and private prisons is growing. Since 1990, 30 states have made it legal to contract out prison labor to private companies where the workers have virtually no rights and get paid a fraction of outside wages-much of which they often don't get to keep. Private prison companies using inmate labor pay no overtime, no vacation, no sick pay, no unemployment insurance, and no workers' compensation. Prison workers don't have the right to organize, strike, file a grievance, or talk to the press. They can be "hired," "fired," and replaced at will. A recent report from the Washington office of the United Auto Workers provides the following examples:

• Spaulding golf balls are packed by prisoners in Hawaii. Inmates test blood for medical firms and raise hogs in Arizona. New Mexico prisoners take hotel reservations.
• Konica has its copiers repaired by prisoners who get between 35 to 47 cents per hour.
• TWA reservations clerks make up to $18/hour in the union. The company pays the prison $5/hour for the same work. The prisoners themselves get less than 50 cents/hour out of this.
• Oregon inmates are "leased" to outside employers for $3 per day.
• In Texas, Lockhart Technologies closed its plant in Austin, where it assembled and repaired circuit boards for corporations like IBM and Texas Instruments. The work is now done by inmates in a private prison run by Wackenhut which expropriates 80 percent of the minimum wage paid.
• The California Department of Corrections has been seeking a market niche in Japan's jeans market for its convict-made "Gangsta Blues."[57]

Population Impacts and Implications: Are Inner City Communities Losing Dollars and Political Power to Rural Communities?

"When the U.S. census counts people every ten years, they count prisoners as well. They're considered residents. And, what ends up happening is the population is skewed, is increased by the number of people who are residing in the prisons. So, race, age, ethnicity, income--basically any factor you could put your finger on that describes a community is skewed in the case of Coxsackie, town and village of Coxsackie, and the county in general ... There are federal programs and state programs that base their assistance to the community on population, so that gets altered. . ."

Ronald Roth, director, Greene County Planning Department, New York[58]

Another item of potential wealth that is transferred out of inner cities along with inmate labor is that prisoner's residential status as recorded in the census. Inmates of prison facilities are counted for census purposes in the communities where the institutions are located. In contrast, inmates of local jails are allocated to their home addresses--unless they have no fixed address--on the premise that they are short-term residents of the jail compared with the longer confinement of prison inmates. This policy has many implications. Beale (1998) reports that in at least 60 rural U.S. counties the shift from population loss in the 1980s to population gain in the 1990s can be fully or partly explained by increases in prisoner populations.

Non-metro counties that obtained new prisons during 1980-1989 had an overall population increase of 8.8 percent from 1980 to 1990, well above the 4.2 percent average and amounting to nearly half of all 1980-1990 population growth in those counties.[59] Some states and the federal government put multiple prisons in the same county or are building large prisons (especially in California). As a result, a number of non-metro counties now have very substantial prison populations. In 1994, there were 28 counties in which at least 3,000 inmates were being held. Walker and Anderson Counties in Texas and Kings County in California, housed a total of 36,000 prisoners, with 10,000 inmates or more in each county.[60] In the North, where the rural population is heavily white, the large increase in rural prison inmates of primarily urban origin explains many cases of unusually high growth of non-metro black and Hispanic population counts. In upstate New York, three counties that acquired prisons saw their total black population rise from 529 in 1980 to 4,413 in 1990. Most of this increase was prison related. The most extreme example is that of Browne County, Illinois, a small Corn Belt farm county where the black population rose in between 1980 and 1990 from 1 person to 547 after a prison opened.[61]

Because a variety of federal and state funding allocations are based, in some fashion, on the census, it may be that rural communities hosting prisons are gaining government funding as a result of high incarceration rates while inner-city communities are losing funding. To my knowledge, such prisoner-related transfers of wealth as a result of census policies have not been the subject of published research or public discussion. However, in states where a significant percentage of the prisoner population is drawn from a relatively small number of inner-city communities (e.g., New York) or where prisons are particularly large (e.g., California) or clustered in one region (e.g., New York and Michigan), one can posit that census-driven economic impacts may be profound. Additionally, and in particular in the North, where predominantly minority prisoner populations are counted in the census of predominantly white communities, there may be additional implications in terms of funding formulas which weigh race and ethnicity as factors.

In states like New York where several of these situations exist, one could conceivably track the flow of dollars directly out of a few identifiable inner-city communities and into a few rural counties. According to analyses published in the early '90s, the vast majority of New York's state prisoners (75 percent) come from seven predominantly African American and Latino neighborhoods in New York City,[62] while an even greater percentage (89 percent) are housed in correctional facilities in rural areas.[63]

Another potential consequence for communities of prisoner-related population shifts are changes in political representation and power. Political districts are based on population size and determine the number of congressional, state, and local representatives. Population groups may "win" or "lose" based on demographic shifts. From census to census, shifts within and without states may result in the gain or loss of representatives for communities. Again, in the case of prisoner-driven population gain or loss, the implications for resulting gain or loss in political representation and power are likely to be most significant for communities losing a large percentage of their populations to prisons and for communities and counties experiencing significant population growth as a result of their roles as prison hosts.

Finally, as prison privatization adds fuel to an already increasing tendency for states to house their prisoners out-of-state, the potential for interstate as well as intrastate consequences of prisoner-driven population shifts also grows.

Prisons Versus Social Programs

As prison development has surged over the last two decades, social programs benefiting the poor in rural and urban America have receded dramatically. As recently as 1993, the states collectively spent more on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) than they did on corrections. By 1996, these priorities were reversed. Government expenditures on corrections grew by nearly $8 billion nationwide while AFDC outlays were cut by almost 2 billion. As a result, states began channeling 42 percent more of their resources toward imprisonment than income support for poor families. Federal welfare reform has led to even further cuts.[64]

Beginning in the '80s, the shift in government funding priorities toward penal institutions providing jobs and other economic supports to rural communities and away from programs benefiting inner-city communities is perhaps nowhere so starkly illustrated as in the case of the use of low-income housing funds by New York's former governor, Mario Cuomo, to build prisons. In 1981, New York's voters defeated a $500 million bond issue for new prison construction. Cuomo decided to use the state's Urban Development Corporation (UDC) as an alternative means of financing prisons. Created in 1968 to build housing for the inner-city poor, the UDC was legislatively birthed on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, funeral, to honor his legacy. Using the UDC's authority to issue state bonds without voter approval, Cuomo added more prison beds than all the previous governors in the state's history combined. The total cost to New York taxpayers including interest eventually reached about $7 billion.[65]

Though the UDC strategy failed to stem the tide of prison overcrowding in New York, it did manage to turn the Urban Development Corporation into a rural development corporation that invested billions of dollars in rural upstate New York. While thousands of young black men (and black women) were swept from the streets of inner cities in police "drug sweeps" and into the state's prison system by New York's Rockefeller drug laws, 28 of the 29 correctional facilities built during the Cuomo years were built in rural upstate New York.[66]

"It is now clear, throughout the country, not just New York, that the only pot of state dollars big enough and discretionary enough to support or to be stolen to pay for more prisons is higher education . . . The higher education community gets fooled, in a way, every year because they're told, "Don't worry, this prison expansion comes out of capital money, it's just borrowed money so it doesn't affect your annual support." But of course that's foolish, because once the prison is built, each inmate costs $30,000 a year. You're now hitting operating money. And we now say to the higher education people, "Gee folks, we're giving you every dollar we possibly can but we just don't have that money any more. Fixed costs are eating it up." What are these fixed costs? The fixed costs result from the prison expansion!"

Daniel Feldman, former chair, Corrections Committee, New York State Assembly, in Yes, In My Backyard

Another stark illustration of the trade-offs for young minorities in government policies that prioritize funding for incarceration is the stealing of higher education dollars for the building of prisons. Public concern over this has recently surfaced in many states. In California, the state prison budget has already surpassed that of the state's once stellar university system. In Michigan, Governor John Engler proposed a 1999-2000 budget with an $80.4 million increase in spending for prisons and an overall increase for corrections that was double the proposed percentage increase for higher education.[67] In New York, despite a $2 billion state surplus, Governor George Pataki proposed deep cuts in education, including a sharp reduction in tuition aid to poor college students, for the millennium year. Combined with his veto last year of $500 million in school construction, Pataki's proposals to spend $180 million for construction of a new maximum security prison, another $180 million already appropriated for a maximum security prison to be built in rural Seneca county by the summer of 2000, and $21 million to operate a third maximum-security prison nearly completed in the small town of Malone in northern New York,[68] met with unusually strong criticism. Noting that crime rates have decreased in New York by 29 percent since 1995, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, testifying at a state budget hearing, said that New York's Republican governor was "using our children as political trade-offs," by under-financing schools while building prisons in depressed upstate communities to mollify voters who need jobs. "These poor schools serve as feeder systems for the prison-industrial complex," he said to reporters after the hearing.[69]

Since fiscal year 1988, New York's public universities have seen their state's support for their operating budgets plummet by 29 percent while funding for prisons has increased by 76 percent. In actual dollars, there has been a nearly equal trade-off, with the NYS Department of Correctional Services receiving a $761 million increase during that time while state funding for New York's city and state university systems has declined by $615 million. Young people of color have been hit the hardest by these shifts in funding priorities. There are now more blacks and Hispanics locked up in prison than there are attending the state universities. And since 1989, there have been more blacks entering the state prison system for drug offenses each year than there were graduating from the state university system with undergraduate, master's and doctoral degrees combined. In 1988, SUNY administrators estimated "total undergraduate student cost" (including tuition and incidental fees, room, board, books, transportation, and other costs) to be $6,303. At that time, those costs represented 13.5 percent of the national white median family income, 20 percent of the Latino family income and 24 percent of the African American family income. The disproportionate burden experienced by families of color has since intensified, as the total cost of attending SUNY rose to $11,478 by 1997. Today, these costs represent 25 percent of the white median family income and 42 percent of the national median income for both blacks and Hispanics.[70]

The education vs. prisons trade-offs are particularly tragic for young people and for the society at large because research shows that quality education is one of the most effective forms of crime prevention.[71]

Losing Family and Community Ties

On January 17, 1996, the American Correctional Association's Delegate Assembly unanimously ratified a new Public Correctional Policy statement regarding crime prevention. A section of this policy statement reads: "Correctional practitioners should become involved in the search for and development of policies and programs that will be effective in both the prevention of crime and the lowering of recidivism rates. Correctional agencies and organizations should ... consider the offender's family as an integral partner in the offender's treatment program, and as an essential element in crime prevention among families at risk. Using this approach, we assist not only the offender, but another high-risk group: the children of offenders."[72]

This statement recognizes that persons under criminal justice control, their families, and society at large benefit when prisoners are able to maintain or establish positive relationships with their families. Studies examining the impact of the family on recidivism have consistently found that prisoners who are able to maintain strong family ties while in prison have significantly greater success on parole.[73] The most extensive and often-quoted study on family impacts on prisoner recidivism points to the significance of visitation as the crucial mechanism whereby families maintain strong ties. In their study, Holt and Miller[74] show a significant difference in the recidivism rate of prisoners who have had regular, continuing visits from family members as compared to those who did not have visitors or had sporadic visits. The recidivism rate among those prisoners with regular family visitors was significantly lower than that of any other group. Another important finding of this study is that even the most highly regarded parole success indicators (e.g., "having a job waiting") were not found to affect parole success as much as having a family to go home to.

Similarly, there is wide agreement in child welfare literature concerning the importance to children of parent-child visitation following a separation, and particularly for children who suffer a forced separation from a parent as in the case of fathers who are incarcerated. Visitation dispels common fears about their parent's well-being and common feelings of rejection and guilt. In addition, according to Denise Johnston, M.D., director of the Center for Children of Incarcerated Parents at Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, "visitation is the first and perhaps most important step toward family reunification." While some adults who work with children of incarcerated parents and some family members express concerns about the "appropriateness" of children visiting prisons or jails, there is no evidence in the literature, either from empirical studies or statements of expert opinion, that parent-child visitation in a jail or prison setting has any significant or long-term negative consequences for participating children.[75]

While there has been little study of the impact of incarceration on wives and other prisoner intimates, existing studies find that prisoners' wives report that such hardships as increased parenting responsibilities, providing their incarcerated husbands with material goods, the financial costs of communicating with their incarcerated husbands, and loneliness created a socio-emotional impoverishment directly related to familial structural change that occurred after their husbands' imprisonment. While prison visiting can be a grim experience insofar as the constraints placed upon visiting can undermine emotionally satisfying interactions, the extent of visitation by the women in spite of such constraints speaks to the importance placed by women on visiting. In a recent ethnographic study of 30 prisoners' wives (defined to include women living consensually with prisoners for at least 6 months prior to their arrest), Laura Fishman comments, "Given the constraints upon visiting, the extent to which the women in the study population visited their husbands was startling. Twenty wives averaged two visits every week when the prison was within easy commuting distance from their homes ... Many of them believed it was absolutely necessary to visit their husbands although it was very difficult at times to make the trip. However, when the prison was located at considerable distance from wives' homes, the frequency of visits decreased."[76]

As prisoner populations are increasingly made up of inner-city men placed in rural prisons, opportunities for visitation important to maintaining family ties are dramatically diminished. Moreover, the practice by states of shipping their prisoners out-of-state, a practice fueled and likely to be increased by prison privatization, may significantly increase the incidence and speed of prisoner family breakdown. For example, almost 3,000 Wisconsin prisoners are now housed outside the state, primarily in private prison facilities, and the Wisconsin Department of Corrections has requested money for 4,500 new rental beds.[77] While it is true that some prisoner families are already "broken" prior to incarceration by other forces, including the prisoner's lifestyle and lack of material and emotional resources to invest in families, it is also true that families and children are often cited by male prisoners as a major source of motivation and support. It is indeed ironic that for some men in some prisons, incarceration affords the first opportunity they have had to begin the process of gaining the human capital (e.g., education, occupational skills, and good physical and mental health) necessary to view themselves as having something important to give to others.[78]

Implications and Suggestions for the Future

Despite decreasing crime rates, an overall drop in admissions to state prisons, and a decrease in new court commitments for drug offenders, between 1990 and 1997 the number of people in state prisons increased 7 percent annually. Truth in Sentencing Laws and tightening of parole are expected to increase the state prison population in coming years through the incarceration of more people for longer periods of time.[79] In addition, population trends are likely to spur even greater growth among young adults.

From 1995 to 2010, the Census Bureau projects that the population aged 18-24 years--ages at which incarceration starts to accelerate--will grow by 21 percent. Growing prison populations and rising health care costs for prisoners will continue to put pressure on state budgets. As a result, more prison capacity will be built and more jobs in those prisons will be created at rates unlikely to be drastically lower than current ones. A combination of states' concerns over out-of-control corrections spending and the political strength of the private prison sector is likely to significantly increase the private share of state corrections well into the new millennium. It should not come as a surprise that financial analysts forecast astounding growth in revenues for the private prison industry into the foreseeable future.

I can find no evidence in these trends to indicate that the grossly disproportionate incarceration of young black men will lessen in the near future. Indeed, the recent and continuing public hysteria over "super-predator" youth combined with these trends suggest the opposite. For the coming decade, I do not foresee a change major enough in the fortunes of either inner cities or depressed rural communities to significantly alter the symbiotic dynamic that has developed between them over the past two decades: Inner cities will continue to lose vast numbers of their young men--and much of their "wealth" as I have discussed--to the penal system and to communities which are far away from their own. And, given the predicted growth in the share of the "prison market" that will become privatized in the near future, I predict a concomitant growth in the share of young black men who will be serving time in rural communities in states other than their own. In fact, at this point I believe we can only hope that prisons for profit will be constrained from shipping prisoners out of the country where labor costs are cheaper and accountability even less of a problem than it is here. The impact of this on prisoner families and on recidivism rates can only be negative from all points of view excepting those that support the further destabilization of inner-city families and communities and criminalization of blacks to support the prison-industrial complex.

While there is some anecdotal evidence (in the form of newspaper accounts, postings on the Internet from local anti-prison citizen groups, and the like) to suggest that, among average citizens, rural and small town community opposition to the siting of prisons--and in particular to the siting of private prisons--may be growing, there is, to my knowledge, no research confirming this. Also, the same anecdotal reports indicate no change in the publicly expressed support for prison development among local, county, and state officials as well as community business interests.

The recent attempt to site a privately managed federal prison in Southeast, Washington, D.C., is an interesting deviation in the pattern of rural prison sitings. Community reactions to the proposal are mixed with proponents predicting the usual economic benefits and opponents --particularly in the surrounding suburbs--expressing NIMBY-like concerns. However, there are additional features in this local battle that are largely absent from rural debates. Proponents are making the argument that an inner-city prison would keep prisoners close to their families. Dissenters are expressing opposition to the prison as a symbol of a racist criminal justice system and an unsatisfactory response to the needs of the community for sustainable economic development support. Because inner-city communities fit the economic profile of an attractive prison locale as defined by public and private prison officials (e.g., economic need is great enough to overcome other community concerns about having a prison in their backyard) and inner-city prisons would have the added advantage of keeping prisoners close to home it may be that other such sitings will be attempted and successful in the future.

In sum, I believe that over the last two decades a prison-industrial complex has indeed been created which, at this point and into the near future, is dependent on the continuing economic decline of communities in rural and inner-city America.

I am pessimistic both about the potential for any major reversals in the trends I have discussed and the development of sufficient will among this country's political and business leadership to instigate major change "from the top." If major change is to occur, I believe it will begin "at the bottom" among concerned, ordinary citizens of all races and ethnic backgrounds. That said, I do believe there are actions that concerned leadership could take to help facilitate citizen efforts toward changing these trends over the long-run and mitigating their impact on young African American men, their families, and communities in the near future. These actions include:

1. Use the mechanisms and forums available to concerned leadership to extend the framework for public, policymaker, and professional discussion of sentencing and corrections policies and practices to include a significant new emphasis on community impacts.
2. Fund applied research to determine the actual economic effects on inner-city and rural communities of prisoner-driven population shifts and census policies; exploitation of prisoner labor; and increased state spending for corrections.
3. Fund research to determine the extent to which prisoner-family ties and recidivism have been affected by prison-siting practices over the past two decades.
4. Fund interdisciplinary and longitudinal research examining the economic, social, political, and cultural impacts on communities--particularly inner-city and rural communities--of prison expansion and siting trends.
5. Make existing and new research findings on prison/community impacts widely available to the public in formats that are accessible to average citizens.
6. Provide opportunities for citizen leaders in inner-city and rural communities to come together to discuss the relationship that has been forged between their communities by criminal justice policy and practice.
7. Provide opportunities for "experts" in a variety of fields, including criminal justice, rural policy, economic development, racial justice, social welfare, labor, business, and so on, to share knowledge and perspectives on the prison-industrial complex across discipline, geography, and practice.
8. Fund efforts by organizations outside government to research and mount legal challenges to prison-siting practices that make it impossible to maintain or nurture prisoner-family ties; exploitative prison labor practices; and other government and corporate practices discussed in this paper that can be shown to disproportionately damage communities and people of color.
9. Fund efforts by independent media organizations, journalists, and producers to document and disseminate media examinations of the problems discussed.