New York Sends Inmates to Country to Ease Crowding

Thieves, drug pushers and other hoodlums from New York City arrive in this scenic vacation land aboard chartered jets. They stay in brand new accommodations, savoring the bucolic charm of the shore of the St. Lawrence River, more than 300 miles from the Big Apple.

They come to go to jail.

They are men like 37-year-old Alan Foster, who says he has been in and out of New York City’s Riker’s Island jail so many times he has lost count.

“I’m not pleased about being so far away from home, but compared to Riker’s Island, this place is all right,” says Foster, who was sentenced this time to one year in jail for illegal possession of stolen credit cards.

Cape Vincent in Upstate New York is now the home of Riverview Correctional Facility, a 700-bed jail that was built in less than a year to house criminals from this country’s largest city.

An identical jail was also built by New York City in Ogdensburg, about 40 miles to the north. Both opened in August and were filled in a month.

“I don’t know what we would have done without the Upstate jails. They opened up just in time,” says Tom Antenan, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Correction.

New York City’s jail population has surged to more than 17,000 inmates, largely because of beefed-up drug enforcement, Antenan says.

He says the city is building more jails in lower Manhattan, on Staten Island and is considering buying more barges to board prisoners and adding more cells at Riker’s Island.

The city spent $110 million to build the jails and will pay $40 million a year to operate them under a 10-year contract with the state Department of Correctional Services.

H. Otis Radley, a town supervisor in this community of 1,800, says the jail is providing jobs and should lead to more development, maybe even a drug store or another gas station.

Critics of the jail, which is located on a main road near a high school and a state park, included Radley’s brother, Jerry, who runs a trailer park. He and others were afraid it would hurt business.

“I wasn’t too happy with the idea when it started,” says Elmer Gleason, manager of Cedar Point State Park and six other state parks along the river. “But now I just hope, once they put some trees in and do some landscaping, that it will just be a forgotten thing.”

He says that judging from reactions during the construction of the prison this summer, the fears that a prison would drive away tourists probably were unfounded.

“People see it as an attraction, just another thing to come and look at when they’re tired of sitting by the river,” Gleason says.

Some worry that the prison will change the homey atmosphere of the community, where car keys are left in ignitions, bicycles are not locked in garages and people are friendly.

“This is really hometown America,” says Donald Brennan, principal of Thousand Islands High School.

Brennan says there has been little reaction among the high school students, even though students pass the facility’s fences on the bus twice a day.

Inside those fences, guards proudly show off the new washing machines, the gleaming wood floor in the gymnasium and the walk-in freezers in the cafeteria.

Inmate Foster says that when he stepped off the plane and looked around he forgot about the whispers on board of the trip being a bluff, especially when he saw the shotgun-armed guards greeting him as he stepped through the doorway.

That’s the first signal to the prisoners that this jail is not Riker’s Island North.

“Most of them are pretty scared when they first look out,” says prison guard Pat Leconey. “Especially when they see us standing with the shotguns. Usually it takes a few weeks before they get the New York City attitude back in them.”