Beleaguered Towns Pin Hopes on Prisons

Nothing has been quite the same in this small town since the thieves, rapists and murderers arrived.

Business is picking up at Wilma’s Drapery Shop. Downtown traffic flows with late-model pickup trucks headed to the new Mexican or burger joint. A convenience store opened on the corner--and stays open around the clock.

With the addition of 960 state convicts, an air of prosperity has been kicking up the dust on Main Street. For residents who once saw Holdenville crumbling into extinction, the future shines as bright as the razor wire around the new private prison west of town.

Forget fear of escapes. Put aside the “prison town” label. The question this faded farming and oil community faced was this: Live or die?

Holdenville, like a growing number of rural towns from Hobbs, N.M., to South Bay, Fla., saw the chance to make crime pay.

When the privately operated Davis Correctional Facility opened in March, it brought this central Oklahoma town 210 jobs, a $5.1-million annual payroll and about $3.1 million in local purchases each year.

It brought life.

“Four years ago, you could throw a cow across the street and not hit anybody,” said Wilma Mitchon, watching the traffic from her downtown drapery shop window. “Now, they’re going this way and they’re going that way. We needed something. This town was dying.”

Two and a half miles outside the city limits, rolling grassland gives way to rows of silver fencing--84,000 square feet of it. Razor wire coils around a set of buildings neatly spaced like a junior college campus. Behind the medium-security walls dwell the town’s unlikely saviors, men convicted of violent crimes or those who posed the threat of escape from less secure prisons.

The mayor doesn’t talk about what brought them to this town of 4,800. He focuses on why he wanted them here.

“We now have a base economy,” said Jack Barrett, who spent years touting small-town virtues to investors to help finance the prison. “Sales tax collections are up 10%. We have a new Taco Mayo, a new Sonic, a new convenience store and deli . . . and a housing shortage.”

But you have to take the bad with the good, and there is no shortage of towns willing to do just that. The nation’s enormous demand for prison cells has fueled a boom in private prison construction, which has in turn prompted municipalities to woo prisons.

“There is no sign of a slowdown of prisoners on the horizon,” said Cushing Mayor Joe Manning, who led the push for the private lockup there. “The public shows no desire to incarcerate less people.”

The new prisons make no promises of prosperity. Hinton grocer Ron Sowell believes the Great Plains Correctional Facility has helped the town since opening in 1991. But although he occasionally sells the prison potato chips or flour, he knows it orders most items from outside suppliers.

“I’d like to sell them a lot more than I do,” Sowell said, “but I can see their point.”

The prison doesn’t pay property taxes because it is owned by a Hinton trust. Only one prison administrator and about a third of the guards actually live in the town of 1,200. So where are the economic benefits?

Prison traffic keeps the grocery, three convenience stores and a five-and-dime open, Mayor Jimmy Smith said. And high school graduates no longer have to leave town to find an $8.15-an-hour job.

“It wasn’t anything we thought would make anybody rich,” Smith said. “Had the prison not gotten started, I think we’d see far more stores with boarded-up fronts. I think it helped save the town.”

Smith had lobbied for the prison. And in January, when an inmate bounded over the fence in the first escape and left his footprints on local lawns, he took some heat.

“There’ll be another one someday,” Smith said matter of factly. Risks come with the territory; no prison is escape-proof.

But it was the risks that opponents dwelt upon when the Oklahoma town of Comanche considered building a prison.

“It could be a member of your family that is taken hostage, raped or murdered by an escaping inmate,” fliers warned. The prison might bring drug-traffickers, tuberculosis, even AIDS

“I think our biggest concern was how it would change the town,” said Nancy Martin, a local attorney.

In May, Comanche voted against the prison, 293 to 239. Councilman Johnny Brown Jr. called it the town’s death knell.

The town’s farming and oil industries dried up years ago. “I don’t see anything knocking on the door to fill that void,” Brown said.

In Holdenville and Cushing, officials saw little choice.

“Any small community would rather have an IBM computer plant than a prison,” said Manning, mayor of Cushing. “But in the realistic world, the option is not between an IBM plant and a prison. The option is between a prison and nothing.”