Decarcerating America

by Ernest Drucker

  Just as programs are needed to help people returning from prison or addicted to drugs, programs are needed to help former prison communities make the transition. Reformers talk about closing prisons and moving the savings into drug treatment or community development in incarcerated neighborhoods. Those are good goals, of course, but it’s equally important to pose different questions: Can some of the savings stay in the host community? How? Who has ideas when the mayor wonders what will happen if the prison closes?

  The new goal is, in epidemiological terms, to change the environment. The “plague of prisons” is spreading in an environment in which prison towns benefit from prison growth. A medical way to thwart a plague is to make the environment more “inhospitable to the agent’s survival or spread.”12 Giving prison towns more economic alternatives would strengthen the prison prevention program.

  Here I outline some steps and flirt with solutions. I suggest ways to think about the problems and steps toward solving them, at the level of both individual communities and national policies. I also provide examples of successful experiments. This is early and preliminary research, intended to provoke questions as much as provide answers.13

  The first step for reform is to recognize that every place is different. Some prisons are near urban areas with diverse economies and expensive land; many prisons are in remote areas where land is cheap and work scarce. Some prison towns might have once been or could again become manufacturing centers, as they were before the factory left and the prison arrived. Other prison towns are naturally agricultural, with a climate for farming. Still other regions can attract tourists or could benefit from a hospital or community college. There are 1,821 individual state and federal prisons in America.14 Each has its own strengths and faces its own unique challenges.

  Every prison is different, too. Construction can be recent and modern or dilapidated and old. Prisons may have interesting architecture or historical designations. Prison sites can contain flowering fields or toxic contamination. Architect Raphael Sperry points out that “a large state prison isn’t just a series of cellblocks—it typically has many other buildings that are easier to reuse, like central kitchens, vocational training buildings, and administration buildings.”15 Prison sites also contain unused acreage that was once the firing range or simply the exposed distance between the last building and the perimeter fence. Sperry is disappointed when jurisdictions simply put rural prison sites up for auction and act surprised when nobody bids. He compares those to a Canadian province that planned the reuse of a prison site by preparing a detailed study of the property conditions and by researching the market for prospective buyers.

  Architect Michael McMillen adds that prison shops and warehouses can easily become industrial spaces, that school spaces can easily be converted to civilian classrooms or meeting rooms, and that former administrative offices can serve comparable professional functions.16 Recreational facilities such as gyms or outdoor fields are often fit for new users, and even secure housing units can be used for residential purposes such as mental health care, drug treatment, or transitional housing for special populations.

  Crises can bring people together. A prison closure creates an opportunity for local stakeholders to come together and collectively plan their response. The natural first step is to meet, discuss, and daydream about alternative uses for the prison site. Closure or downsizing is a time for communities to examine their natural gifts, histories, geographies, and interests. They can seek transitional funding sources and commercial partnerships. The community successes described below generally started with lengthy, wide-ranging discussions among diverse stakeholders, leading eventually to an agreed plan of action. Because no two places are the same, no two solutions are the same. Here I describe several examples to illustrate the breadth of possibility.

  One option is to provide services to the same people who are (too often) incarcerated, but to serve them differently. When the Fulton Correctional Facility closed in New York City’s Bronx in 2013, the nonprofit Osborne Association converted it into a reentry center for people being released, taking advantage of the metropolitan location to help people transition from prison to civilian life.17 Osborne organized a combination of state and city grants to finance the capital restoration and transitional costs (more on such grant programs later).18

  In Gainesville, Florida, the Alachua Coalition for the Homeless and Hungry converted the Gainesville Correctional Institution into a one-stop center for services for homeless people—including meals, bus passes, job assistance, and housing benefits.19 When the prison closed in 2012, the city purchased the land from the state for $900,000. In addition to the homeless center, the city set aside ninety-eight acres to expand the nearby Morningside Nature Center.

  The Fort Lyon Correctional Facility in eastern Colorado started as an army fort in the late 1800s, then spent nearly seventy years as a Veterans Administration hospital, and finally became a prison. When the prison closed in 2011, a committee of local stakeholders convened in search of ways to mitigate the loss of two hundred jobs.20 The winning idea was housing for the homeless, and county leaders fought for it in the state legislature. James Ginsburg of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless described it as “an opportunity to sit down and sort of articulate what would be my ideal program.”21 The program will run on a combination of state funds, Medicaid funds, federal grants, and residents’ payments.

  In many cases, however, the new use is entirely different. The sampling below illustrates the diversity and potential.

  The Arthur Kill Correctional Facility in Staten Island, New York, is being converted into a state-of-the-art film and television studio.22

  The Brushy Mountain State Prison, a maximum-security facility in rural Tennessee, closed in 2009 after 113 years of operation. Private entrepreneurs are converting the site into a moonshine distillery tourist attraction, including an RV park, restaurant, gift shop, and riding stables.23

  Camp Georgetown in central New York was a thirty-one-acre minimum security prison with 262 beds, three dormitories, and seventy-five bathrooms. A private investor bought it in 2013 for $241,000, planning to turn it into a summer camp for teenagers interested in science and technology—though he ultimately decided to turn it into a year-round yoga retreat center.24

  Mid-Orange Correctional Facility in comparatively affluent southern New York closed in 2014. A private investor purchased it for $1.8 million to convert into an indoor and outdoor sports training facility and overnight summer camp.25

  The Dwight Correctional Center in Illinois closed in 2012, at the same time as the notorious Tamms.26 Tamms stayed closed, but the state repurposed Dwight into a facility for paper file storage for the Department of Human Services.

  Michigan’s Jackson State Prison was more than 150 years old when it closed, shuttering classic prison buildings and a striking twenty-five-foot-high turreted stone wall.27 The Enterprise Group bought the decaying facility and turned it into an artists’ community, where every apartment retains original architectural elements, ranging from window bars to cell numbers painted on exposed brick walls.

  In other cases the land simply becomes available for traditional or mixed-use redevelopment. Michigan’s Robert Scott Correctional Facility was located in Northville Township, midway between Detroit and Ann Arbor. The state of Michigan closed the prison in 2009 and sold the property to Northville for $1.27. A demolition company demolished it for free, earning only the value of materials it could salvage, estimated at $400,000 including the generator. Five years and many negotiations later, a developer bought the land and plans to spend $150 million on mixed-use retail, residential, and hotel space.28

  The Tryon Youth Detention Facility in Perth, New York, an hour north of Albany, closed in 2011. The state transferred ownership of the 515 acres at no cost to the Fulton County Industrial Development Agency, which considered it “the centerpiece of Fulton County’s economic development efforts.”29 Newly renamed the Tryon Technology Park and In
cubator Center, the center itself is a complex of finished office and professional spaces, including parking lots, a gymnasium, and an auditorium, as well as separate “shovel-ready” plots of sixteen to seventy-two acres each.

  In more interesting or visionary cases, prison closures can be conceived as regional transformation. When prisons started to close in upstate New York, the nonprofit Milk Not Jails started a cooperative with dairy farms to help market and distribute their products to consumers in New York City. Cofounder Lauren Melodia describes the goal as creating closer ties between upstate and downstate economies.30 Many criminal justice policies affecting city dwellers lack support in rural areas, she observes, even as laws affecting farmers lack support in the cities. The goal of Milk Not Jail is to restore the upstate region to an economy that “depends on bringing city residents local, healthy food, not locking them up.”31

  Similarly, Noran Sanford and Growing Change in North Carolina are working with youth in the juvenile justice system to “flip” former rural prison sites. They are transforming “jail cells into aquaponics tanks, guard towers into climbing walls, the prison bus into a traveling museum, [and] the old ‘hot box’ into a recording studio.”32 The former administrative building will host returning veterans obtaining four-year college degrees in a residential internship program. With combined funding from universities, foundations, state agencies, and private business, they aim to flip six sites within a fifty-mile radius—even as they transform disaffected youth into experienced experts.

  Communities, however, did not build the prisons on their own, and they cannot make this transition on their own. Mass incarceration reflects policy choices and public financial commitments far beyond any particular prison town.

  The war on crime more than tripled state expenditures on corrections, rising from $15 billion in 1982 to $54 billion in 2001, and hovering in that range ever since.33 In the late 1990s the federal government awarded roughly half a billion dollars every year for prison construction to states that agreed to enact tough new truth-in-sentencing laws.34 Including required state matches, the federal law unleashed roughly $4 billion in prison construction, or roughly $5.8 billion in today’s dollars.

  Unwinding the carceral state will require similarly purposeful choices and similar levels of expenditure. Again we need to think not only in terms of money saved but also about money spent for other purposes—specifically, helping rural communities that are losing a mainstay of their economy. Last time it was for prison construction; this time it is for prison replacement.

  Transitional assistance is a routine government function. Hillary Clinton, running for president, proposed a $30 billion plan to help communities dependent on coal adjust to a new clean energy economy.35 This was only campaign talk, not a budgetary commitment or congressional appropriation—but it was an indication of real money being promised to fill a gap.

  Post-prison America needs a similar economic program. State and federal agencies need to create grant programs to help prison towns make the necessary changes. Corrections professionals need help transitioning to new careers. At the same time, academic researchers and philanthropic foundations need to study successful alternative uses of former prison sites. A literature needs to be developed, studies conducted and best practices imitated.36 The ultimate question is how communities can be reenvisioned to be less dependent on government funding, or how the government can help a locality transition to an economy that is healthy, adds value, and is sustainable over time.

  New York is leading the way. First, New York showed that it is possible to reduce prison populations while also reducing crime.37 Reforming the drug laws alone reduced the number of people in New York state prisons for drug crimes from 24,000 in 1996 to 6,700 in 2013.38 To offset the impact, the state created a fund specifically designed to help communities affected by the closure of corrections or juvenile justice facilities.39 The Economic Transformation Program provides tax credits and $50 million in capital funding for projects that create jobs and economic development in communities that lost their prisons. The fund is designed as a match to leverage investments from other sources, providing seed funding but far below the total funds needed for any particular project.

  The conversion of the Fulton Correctional Facility in the Bronx, described above, used funds from the Economic Transformation Program.40 Elizabeth Gaynes, director of the Osborne Association, described the program like this:

  We advocated with the Governor’s office and the local elected officials to get the state to turn over the facility at no cost to us, and we applied for funding from ESDC for the redevelopment of the site as a community reentry center. We received a letter of support for our proposed plan signed by every elected official in the Bronx, including City Council, State Senate, and the Assembly.

  We submitted tentative plans for the reuse, to include transitional residential capacity, and workforce development services. Since the Governor’s goal was, to the extent possible, to replace jobs lost when a prison is closed, we are focused on programs that would create as many new jobs as possible. In order to access the ESDC funding of $6 million, we needed to raise a 10 percent match; the Bronx Borough President agreed to capital funding of $657,000.

  Although the New York Economic Transformation Program and the redevelopment of Fulton are very good news, they are also a very small story. The scale of transitional assistance is nowhere near the size of the problem. Funds for decarceration look nothing like the funds dedicated to incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s. Far more will be needed, in New York and everywhere else.41

  Resources are not unavailable for rural economic development. The USDA’s Rural Business Cooperative Service offers programs to support business development and job training opportunities for rural residents.42 The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Rural Health Information Hub helps rural communities find and access available programs, funding, and research.43 States offer similar resources, such as the Center for Rural Pennsylvania and the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs.44 The Citizens Institute on Rural Design helps communities develop local solutions for job growth and the local economy.45

  But while it is all good, it is not nearly enough. Current rural development programs lack both specific knowledge about decarceration and funds on the same scale as those that were used to build the prisons and are needed to unbuild them. A crucial goal for reform is to increase this capacity.

  There will be obstacles, of course—prison interests are well entrenched. Rebecca Thorpe, political science professor at the University of Washington, has documented the unsurprising conclusion that politicians in prison districts tend to support legislation that sends people to prison: “Political representatives in more rural areas with prison infrastructure support punitive criminal justice policies more than their partisan allies and their rural counterparts without any prison sites.”46 The Prison Policy Initiative has documented how the Census Bureau’s practice of counting people in prison where they’re incarcerated—not where they come from—pads the legislative districts of representatives with prisons, giving those politicians even more heft in the legislature.47

  Here I list a few of the problems that lie in this direction, the better to understand and solve them.

  Transitional problems are familiar to justice policy reformers. Drug treatment may cost less than prison; it may work better and save money. But changing the regime usually requires funding drug treatment up front and reducing prison populations later. In the meantime, the state is funding both the treatment and the prison, resulting in a short-term fiscal crunch.

  In this case, the goal is to close prisons and redirect some of the savings back to the host community. Say a $30 million prison is closed, with $10 million redirected for treatment and investment in the neighborhoods the prisoners came from, $10 million returned to taxpayers as savings, and $10 million designated for reinvestment in the prison town. The money may sound like it breaks even, but the timing doesn’t. The money can’
t go to both prison operations and investment at the same time. Something has to start first or end first, and additional money is needed during the transition. Bridge funding can be key to a successful transition.

  A dirty secret of modern America is that there aren’t enough jobs to go around. This hidden background problem haunts rural transition, just as it haunts prison reentry and “ban the box” proposals. There aren’t enough jobs. There aren’t enough jobs for people even without criminal records, there aren’t enough jobs for rural areas without prisons, and there aren’t enough jobs when the prison closes. There weren’t jobs when the factory closed, and there still aren’t.

  Obviously the solution to that problem is beyond the scope of this chapter. America needs an industrial policy, needs to rebuild its economic infrastructure, and needs big thinking about how to grow the economy. We need manufacturing and trade policies to restore the productive part of our economy.48 But the era of paying rural America to lock up urban America seems to be winding down. Perhaps when we get around to solving those larger problems, former or soon-to-be former prison towns can become laboratories for that democracy. In the meantime, let us not use our inability to solve that problem as an excuse to continue our failed experiment in mass incarceration.

  Labor unions are often at the center of economic fights. Strongly on the positive side, unions bring working people together to advance their collective interests. Unions are associated with higher wages, better benefits, and upward mobility.49 But on matters of mass incarceration, unions can be a retrograde force. Unions too often use their clout to fight for new prison space or keep old prisons open. Of course, they are doing the right thing by their members who pay their dues—but in this case that interest may not line up with the greater good. Indeed, it can even create conflict between members in corrections and members in other professions. One vivid example is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a part of the AFL-CIO, with 1.4 million members. AFSCME has 80,000 members who are corrections officers, with the obvious personal interest in prison jobs and prison conditions.50 But plenty of AFSCME’s members are not correctional officers and have reason to be skeptical of mass incarceration, and they too pay their dues. And as a member union of the AFL-CIO, AFSCME is navigating the tensions of mass incarceration on a larger scale. At the AFL-CIO’s national convention in 2013 it voted in favor of a resolution critical of mass incarceration.51 The resolution focuses on private for-profit prisons, but it goes further. It resolves to support sentencing policies that are “fair” and “commensurate with the crime,” and to manage “drug use as a public health issue,” focusing on treatment rather than incarceration.