TO BE EQUAL COLUMN 35 Build Lives; Not More Prisons By Hugh B. Price President National Urban League You might think that since the purpose of state prisons is to lock up a large number of very bad people, no community in its right mind would want one of those unsightly, large, turreted and barbed-wire fortresses in their backyard. But, when it comes to many rural communities across the country, that kind of thinking couldn't be more wrong. For these communities, whose job-base and other sources of economic viability have withered, the twenty-year boom in the building of state prisons has been a godsend. California is the great example. Since 1980, the state has spent more than $5 billion on prison construction, its need for more prison beds fueled by draconian drug and repeat-offender laws. Those get-tough policies have helped produce 23 new prisons there in twenty years; and now California officials want to build a mammoth, 5,000-bed penitentiary in the small Central Valley city of Delano. It would cost $355 million-and sprawl right across the road from a huge state prison that was built there just ten years ago. The state's hard-sell for it has included the supposed employment and tax-and-revenue benefits it would bring to Delano. It's an argument many small communities these days hunger to hear. Just ask the folks in Romulus, New York, a town of 3,200 in the predominantly rural Finger Lakes region, in the central part of the state. Romulus-which lost a state psychiatric hospital in 1995 and also that year saw the 11,000-acre Army Depot it had lived with for decades begin closing down-is being blessed with a $180-million maximum-security state penitentiary. Not only is the 1,500-bed facility expected to provide nearly 800 full-time and ancillary jobs, it'll also provide water and sewage services for the town and pay the local sewer district about $2 million a year. The prison, to be called the Five Points Correctional Facility, is the largest construction project ever undertaken in the region. No doubt about it, the town's supervisor told the New York Times recently, "It's a salvation to us." At another point, he added "[New York City] is subsidizing us by producing these criminals. It's not a nice thing to say, but it's true." The Times' report noted that Romulus' good fortune stems significantly from the fact that that its state senator is the chairman of the New York State Senate's corrections committee. His legislative district is home to six of the state's 70 prisons. In fact, more than twenty of the state's prisons are in the districts of this senator and two of his colleagues. Romulus and Delano fit the profile of the great number of state-penitentiary locations, not only in New York and California, but across the country: small and rural or on the fringes of metropolitan areas' suburban rings, and more than likely desperately in need of economic rescue. That's always been the case with state prisons, of course. But, as the nation's prison population has soared to nearly 2 million people since the early 1980s, the resulting huge boom in prison construction, one could say generally, has meant that these favored communities have made out like bandits-figuratively speaking, of course. But behind the play on words is the serious and disturbing reality of a wrong-headed and lopsided allocation of effort and government dollars, by the society at large, and by agencies and officers of local, state and federal governments. It does not speak well of American society that the only significant engines of economic development state officials can seem to come up with for such areas are prisons. That is especially so given that a significant proportion of the prison-population growth stems from improperly harsh sentences for the possession and sale of small amounts of drugs-even for first-time offenders. It does not speak well of American society-nor make economic sense-that the get-tough talk about locking people up hasn't been accompanied by an equally-vigorous effort to institute significant job-training and education programs for prison inmates. That would do more to cut the repeat-offender rate than the threat of more imprisonment. It does not speak well of American society that there's been a considerable growth in the number of individuals, private companies (both "private" prison companies and construction companies), correctional guards' unions, and village, town, county and state governments with vested financial interests in building more prisons-and, therefore, filling more prisons. That is especially so given the growing pile of reports and studies which show that institutional and individual racial and ethnic biases continue to distort the consideration and application of justice at every stage of both the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. Of course, we need prisons. But we need even more programs-government-funded programs-that prevent people from getting on the "treadmill" to prison in the first place, and give them a viable chance to step off that treadmill once they've paid their debt to society. Let's hear some "tough talk" about the need for those kinds of government expenditures for a change. 35 TBE 8/28/2000 TO BE EQUAL 120 Wall Street, NY, NY 10005