Do a crime, save a prison
It is clear that we have to do something concerning the recently announced proposal to close the Ogdensburg Correctional Facility.
The reason the state wants to close Ogdensburg and other prisons – and why it already has closed places like Camp Gabriels near Saranac Lake in the past few years – is that we don’t have enough criminals to go around. So the most effective solution is for everyone to start promoting crime.
Others concerned about the Ogdensburg closing have already started down the more familiar road of forming Save Our Prison committees and organizing lobbying efforts and Facebook brigades and standing around public buildings with placards saying, “We Heart Our Correctional Facility.”
Those efforts are going to provide screeds of newspaper stories and hours of dramatic television news coverage right up until the day the Ogdensburg prison closes next year.
Grassroots efforts to save prisons might have worked years ago when the state was flush with cash and criminals. Now that we are short on both, it’s unlikely that the people in charge will listen to protesters screaming that closing the prison is going to kill Ogdensburg’s economy. They’ve heard it all before.
They didn’t listen when the protesters screamed about closing Camp Gabriels. They didn’t listen when the protesters screamed about closing Camp Pharsalia in Norwich. And on and on.
So you can have your committees and your placards and your politicians saying all the right things about how horrible it will be to lose the prison. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that your work is going to pay off. If you want to save the prisons, you are simply going to need more criminals. Thousands and thousands of them.
If you can get enough people willing to commit a crime for the community and get the prisons filled back up in a hurry, you have a chance of keeping the Ogdensburg Correctional Facility alive with activity.
The problem is I am not sure why you would want to do that. Studies have shown that prisons are not economic saviors. Washington State University professor and Fulbright scholar Gregory Hooks did an in-depth study of the impact prisons have on communites. In one published article about the study, he suggested he went into it expecting to confirm the hype that prisons were white knights saving communities in distress nationwide. Instead, he concluded:
“On average, prisons don't do much of anything. If you put a prison in a struggling county, they get worse, not better.”
Do a search on the Internet if you want to find the wherefores and whys that led him to his conclusion. If you are short on time, just take a look at Ogdensburg to confirm that his study was on the mark. Ogdensburg was a sad place before it got prisons. It is a sad place with prisons. It’s hard to see what economic benefit the prisons have provided.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be lots of folks tossing around numbers and bemoaning the pending loss of the prison in the upcoming months. There will be passionate debates. There will be powerful predictions of gloom and doom. There will be letter-writing campaigns. There will be protests.
The next year will be a civic-minded good time that will keep lots of people busy and out of trouble. And people staying out of trouble is the reason, after all is said and done, that the Ogdensburg prison is going to close. That seems pretty clear.
