Main Street Finds Gold in Urban Crime Wave

At a topping-off party for Cameron’s nearly completed new industrial plant--over a long buffet table loaded with ribs, cured ham and smoked turkey--more than 400 people celebrated the return of bright times the other day.

Granted, local officials agreed, this was not a prestigious deal like landing IBM or AT&T;, but the plant was another sign that rural America was recovering from the economic downturn that struck in the 1980s. When the facility opens, it will bring 250 jobs and increase Cameron’s population by 1,000. Best of all, it is part of one of the nation’s fastest-growing, most recession-proof industries: prisons.

“We went fishing for perch and came up with catfish,” said Shelby Hendee, the town’s development chief. “But I’ll tell you this: We’re not going to throw it back.”

Cameron’s prison, its second, will open in February, tucked out of sight, just off the main road to town, near a Wal-Mart. With its cluster of rambling, green-roofed buildings, it resembles a junior college more than the maximum-security prison that it is. Gone are the traditional fortress-like stone walls and guard towers. In their place will be a lethal electric fence and motion detectors.

A generation ago, rural America found the notion of accepting a prison so repellent that many communities sued their state governments to keep them out. But then recession hit the Farm Belt and towns began casting about for a growth industry that could stabilize their economies. What dozens came up with was the criminal-justice system.

Soon the urban crime wave had become a rural bonanza.

With the United States building prisons at a rate never before seen--123 state and federal prisons opened or were under construction in 1996--small towns from California to Florida are battling to get a penitentiary in their backyard. In many cases they are offering free land, utilities and cash incentives for the chance to get a slice of what is turning out to be the public works mega-project of the 1990s.

In jobs and job security, prisons are doing for Main Street U.S.A. what military bases did during the Cold War.

In Washington State, 19 communities are campaigning for a juvenile-rehabilitation center now on the drawing board. In Florida, 15 towns have offered free land for a new state prison. In Missouri, 12 towns are vying for three prisons. In New York state--where 71% of prisoners come from New York City--four small towns are lobbying their legislators in the wake of Gov. George Pataki’s proposal to build three maximum-security prisons at a total cost of $476 million.

The 2,976 residents of Bowling Green, Mo., approved an $11-million bond issue for road and utility work and sent civic leaders to the capital with local apples, candy and buttons to tout the town as the site for a prison. The $67-million facility they won will bring $150,000 a year in taxes and has stimulated additional development: a housing subdivision, a fast-food restaurant and a 48-bed motel.

“We worked hard to get it, competing against a lot of other towns, and we’re really proud,” said Joe Smith, administrator of Bowling Green, where the prison’s roof will be painted red to match the color of the high school sports teams.

A Prime Catch

Until recently, small towns like Bowling Green and Cameron had viewed prisons, with their wall-to-wall populations of undesirable characters, as orphans of economic development. But now that crime-fighting has become a $100-billion-a-year growth industry, prisons are considered a prime catch, equal to a major department store or a light-manufacturing plant. They don’t pollute, they don’t go out of business, they don’t get downsized.

Cameron, 50 miles north of Kansas City, had seen its fortunes decline in the 1980s, despite a choice location off Interstate 35, which runs from Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minn. Stores were going out of business on Main Street. No homes had been built in years. The population was slipping away.

“We tried to attract industry, but not much happened,” said Craig Watkins, publisher of the weekly Cameron Citizen Observer.

Then Watkins heard that Missouri was looking for a site for a minimum-medium-security prison. He and several community leaders began rallying support to lure the 2,000-bed facility.

Initial opposition, though from a minority, was fierce. Many residents did not like being part of the image that goes with a prison town. They worried about out-of-towners taking up positions as guards. What if there were a riot and a mass escape? What if the prison staff came to dominate Cameron’s affairs. And what if inmates’ families started moving here to be close to loved ones?

But town officials went ahead. They beat out 30 other rural communities. The Western Missouri Correctional Center opened on the outskirts of town in 1989.

None of the potential problems developed. Opposition dissipated as the prison payroll grew to 700--about a quarter of which is local residents. Three motels opened and Wal-Mart built a “superstore” on a 12-acre site. Main Street caught a second wind and construction surged, with 27 single-family homes built last year alone.

So enamored did Cameron become of being a prison town that City Manager Phillip Lammers proposed annexing the land where the facility stood. “We tried to come up with reasons why we shouldn’t do it and couldn’t hit on a single one,” he said.

Cameron annexed the land two years ago, adding 2,000 felons to its population of 4,782--an overnight boost of more than 40%.

Gas Tax Windfall

Most important, the annexation increased to about $50,000 a year, Cameron’s share of the 17-cent-a-gallon gas tax that Missouri distributes to towns on a population basis. With its windfall, the town built a headquarters for the police and fire departments.

Except for the trusty who occasionally directs traffic around a construction site on Walnut Street--usually doing a miserable job that results in long backups--Cameron is hardly aware that it even has a prison.

“Everything that happens in the prison happens behind the fence,” said Mayor Steven Snook. When Missouri proposed building a maximum-security penitentiary next to the existing prison and told Snook he had to make an immediate decision, the mayor didn’t think twice.

“I said OK,” Snook said, “even though I knew we didn’t have the capacity in city services to accommodate a new prison. But we could figure that out later.”

By nearly a 9-1 margin, Cameron voters approved a bond issue to double the sewer plant’s size.

The boom in prison construction started in the late 1980s, when urban crime became a political and social issue and courts began demanding prison reform to alleviate crowding. Even as the crime rate is dropping nationally, the prison population is continuing to grow.

“A lot of the construction boom has to do with changes in our criminal statutes--minimum mandatory sentences, three strikes and you’re out, the end of parole,” said Robert Verdeyen, director of standards at the American Correctional Assn. in Lanham, Md.

“Any time you start changing the laws and making penalties stiffer, you’re going to drive your population up.”

Texas, for instance, has completed a $1.5-billion prison-expansion program. California is in the middle of a $5.2-billion project that will add 51,000 prison beds. Missouri, which still has so many inmates (a record 65,000-plus) that it has to ship some out of state, is building six prisons so that it will no longer be an exporter. Oregon is using lottery proceeds to raise $90 million for two new facilities. Virginia is projected to need 18 new prisons by 1999.

Nationally, four prisons a month are opening and in 1993, the nation added 43,000 prison beds--or about five an hour.

“The sad side to all this is that you hate to see jobs created because you have to lock a lot of people up,” said Bowling Green’s Smith.

Populations Tripled

Although Republicans and Democrats accuse each other of being “soft on crime,” the facts seem to indicate otherwise. The nation’s prison and jail populations, now 1.6 million, have tripled since 1980 and have grown so fast that today one in 167 U.S. residents is incarcerated. If these inmates were suddenly turned loose on the job market, the unemployment rate would jump between 1 and 2 percentage points, economists say.

Including the number on parole or probation, 5.3 million people are under the jurisdiction of the criminal-justice system--2.8% of Americans. In some cases it costs taxpayers $30,000 to $50,000 a year to keep an inmate locked up. But even that expense is not likely to curtail the prison-construction boom--or the prison population--as long as the nation as a whole supports the “get tough on criminals” philosophy that is favored by many state governments.

Colorado Atty. Gen. Gale Norton’s suggestion to reduce the need for additional prison beds: Let inmates sleep in shifts. To widespread applause in Virginia, Gov. George F. Allen abolished parole, doubling expected prison time. North Carolina also did away with parole.

California and Washington state passed “three-strikes” laws. A law mandating life sentences without parole for certain two-time offenders will take effect in Georgia in 1999. Michigan forces parole breakers to serve their original time before they can begin sentences for their newest offense.

Boot-camp prisons, characterized by tough, military-like discipline, are receiving support from Idaho to New York.

The rush to get criminals off the streets has benefited more than small-town America, where inexpensive land, reliable and cheap labor, and the presence of relatively few labor unions make them desirable sites for new prisons.

Inmates themselves have become valuable commodities, much like the parts manufactured in a factory. Private companies have emerged to run prisons and to broker the transportation of inmates between states by chartered jet and bus when individual penitentiaries reach capacity. Cameron’s existing prison, for example, was designed for 2,000 inmates but houses 2,600.

Smith Barney Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co. have underwritten prison construction with private tax-exempt bonds. Several architectural firms have started prison design studios. And when construction began on Cameron’s new maximum-security prison, the design crew included a specialist in color coordination.

Although the streets may be getting safer, that comes at a price: States have had to divert money from other programs to fuel the prison boom. “All of us look at the futility of having to spend money on prisons,” said Gov. John Engler of Michigan, where the prison system employs one in four state workers.

Higher Spending

Florida spends as much on corrections as on colleges. California spent 2% of its budget on prisons in 1980 and 9% in 1994. By 2002, the figure may reach 16%, according to an estimate by the RAND Corp., a Santa Monica-based think tank.

“There’s a lot of folks who think people need to be locked up, but not everyone wants them in their backyards,” said Verdeyen of the American Correctional Assn.

Indeed, a minority of communities--particularly those with a high proportion of retirees and urban refugees--is not as eager as Cameron to become a prison town.

Prisons can strain city services and result in demands for housing that is unavailable. Citizens worry that inmates will hang around once they are released. In some cases, small towns with prisons have had to extend their police departments’ on-duty hours to round-the-clock, not because residents are less safe but because residents want the security of knowing someone is on duty if there are problems.

The maximum-security Mule Creek State Prison was built in the 1980s in Ione, Calif., southeast of Sacramento. From Day One, most residents considered it an eyesore, sitting prominently on a hilltop along the main artery into town. Many of the 800 jobs were filled by people from the Sacramento and Stockton areas.

Three years ago the town rejected, by 2 to 1, California’s proposal to build another prison in Ione. State officials “didn’t mask the prison as they promised,” said Mayor Cal Terhune, a former corrections official, “and we couldn’t really establish that Mule Creek had done that much for the economy. Businesses were going broke before the prison came and they kept going broke.”

“In the end the people just decided we’d had enough of prisons and we’d done our fair share in taking care of the prison population. The bottom line, I think, is that the whole question of bringing in a prison is a quality-of-life issue.”

Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.