This ought to be cause for celebration: New York state is closing some low- and medium-security prisons because it doesn't have enough felons:
On Jan. 11, the Spitzer administration announced plans to close Camp Gabriels, two other corrections camps and a medium-security prison, all of which have been operating below capacity since 1996 because of a decline in the number of nonviolent felons, the state’s corrections commissioner, Brian Fischer, said.
Closing those prisons, Mr. Fischer said, would save the state millions of dollars, free up money for the treatment of sex offenders and mentally ill inmates, and finance programs like anger management and vocational training, meant to prepare prisoners for their release.
But New York has used prisons as a kind of rural subsidy (as has Texas), which has left some little towns hooked on prison jobs and prison labor. For example, "Camp" Gabriels, one of the prisons slated to close, employs 136 people in sparsely populated Franklin. Predictably:
[s]mall businesses have staked their survival on the prison workers who patronize their stores. Local governments and charities, meanwhile, have come to depend on inmate work crews to clear snow from fire hydrants, maintain parks and hiking trails, mow the lawns at cemeteries and unload trucks at food pantries. . . .
“All those services, when you put that into dollars, there’s no way we’d be able to hire people to perform them,” said Mary Ellen Keith, supervisor of the town of Franklin, which relies on the crews to cut overgrown brush from the sides of 67 miles of local roads, among other tasks.
The locals, prison workers and unions are organizing a campaign to save the prisons. It's only a matter of time before they figure out that the solution is to increase the demand for what they're selling. Mete out stiffer sentences for recreational drug users, for example. Jail parking ticket scofflaws. Or just criminalize can-kicking.
I shouldn't make fun of them. This will be a wrenching change for these little towns. Had they not landed the prisons in the first place, they likely would have experienced a gradual decline stretched out over a couple of decades. Now that decline will be compressed into a few months.
But if it is possible to muster indignity over a prison closure, just think how it will be when the government eventually realizes that ethanol subsidies are just an environment-wrecking, food-price-spiking, corporate-welfare boondoggle.
Ethanol plants are being built like crazy all over the mid-west. Each little town, I'm sure, is touting its ethanol plant as the way out of oblivion. And each little town is staking its future on the intricate web of price supports, tax credits and loan guarantees that makes ethanol plants economically viable.
Some of these little towns have little future to stake, I suppose. Without the ethanol plants, they would simply dry up and blow away. That's sad. We should be leery of getting them hooked on ethanol, though. A gradual decline is not as bad as the catastophic disruption they will suffer when their ethanol economies are suddenly cut off from their ethanol-enabling subsidies.
My big fear is that we won't cut them off; we will stick ourselves with these monumentally wasteful subsidies forever in order to sustain their ethanol-dependent economies. New York is again a good lesson: Governor Pataki tried to close prisons in upstate New York four years in a row. He failed each time.
