When Cell Doors Won’t Close
By JIM DWYER
As of Tuesday afternoon, New York State had about 5,000 empty beds in its 67 prisons. Even if the state weren’t flat broke, this would be an expensive proposition. Just turning on the lights in the morning costs money. Correction officers must be on duty 24 hours a day, year round, even when there are only a handful of inmates to watch.
Take, for example, three prisons in the northern reaches of the state, near the Canadian border. In a count taken Dec. 31, a prison in Lyon Mountain had 91 employees and 135 inmates. The Ogdensburg Correctional Facility had 287 employees and 474 inmates. The minimum security portion of a complex in Red Creek had a staff of 67 for a grand total of 71 inmates.
It’s not that the prisons are overstaffed, it’s just that they’re under-prisonered.
New York has 13,000 fewer inmates today than it did in 1999, when the prison population was at its peak. The state projects that a year from now, the number will go down by an additional 1,000. Crime has been dropping, and nonviolent offenders are spending less time behind bars.
But closing prisons is even harder than closing hospitals. (About a quarter of the state’s hospital beds were chronically empty when a special commission on health care issued a report in 2006.)
The prison industry is the foundation of local economies in many parts of the state. And for years, the correctional facilities spread throughout the vast rural stretches of the state helped protect Republican legislative districts from dwindling populations — the inmates are counted as permanent residents when maps are drawn for the Senate and the Assembly.
Yet the prisons survive changes in the political weather.
A little more than two years ago, the governor announced that he would close four unnecessary prisons. But that governor’s name was Eliot Spitzer.
At the time, Republicans controlled the State Senate, and their majority leader was hailed in a rally outside the Capitol by correction officers who chanted, “Joe Bruno! Joe Bruno!”
Mr. Bruno has since moved on, resigning suddenly one day, and then slowly being turned on a prosecutor’s spit for using his Senate powers to stoke his private business interests. Mr. Spitzer left even more quickly in a prostitution scandal.
With his departure, the state effectively suspended its efforts to shutter prisons. Right after David A. Paterson became governor, he agreed with the Legislature to spend $34 million to keep open the four prisons that Mr. Spitzer had wanted to close. The Paterson administration did close three prison camps, but spared one in a district represented by a Democrat.
Now the Democrats control the Senate by a single vote, giving every Democratic senator tremendous negotiating power. As a way to save $46 million, the governor has proposed closing four prisons, including the one in Ogdensburg, which is represented by a Democratic senator, Darrel J. Aubertine.
On his Web site, Mr. Aubertine made it clear that he did not think any of the four should be closed, especially the one in Ogdensburg.
“The devastating negative economic impact to these communities will outweigh any proposed savings,” Mr. Aubertine said.
BOTH Mr. Aubertine and the president of the union representing the state correction officers dispute the counts taken by the Department of Correctional Services, saying that there are not enough beds in the system now to accommodate all the inmates without “double bunking.” The union has made television and radio ads that warn of dire consequences to public safety if prisons are closed and claim that the department’s administration is bloated. But Brian Fischer, the correction commissioner, said that most inmates are in single cells or dormitories, and that there is plenty of room.
Even though the state expects that no one will lose a job if some prisons are closed — there’s enough attrition so that it would be possible for any employee to find a job through a transfer — there will be major upheavals in the prison towns. The families of prison employees go to the schools, pay taxes and keep their communities humming.
But for a state facing billions in deficits for years to come, even the considerable power of the prison industry might not outweigh these stark numbers. In the four prisons that the governor has proposed closing, there are 547 employees and 851 inmates. That’s one state employee for every 1.5 prisoners.
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