A GROWTH INDUSTRY COOLS AS NEW YORK PRISONS THIN

With the number of inmates in state prisons across the country either
stabilizing or dropping after decades of explosive growth, New York is
taking early steps to reduce its prison staffing significantly.

The Department of Correctional Services has frozen hiring at 36 prisons
across the state, and hopes to eliminate 614 prison jobs through attrition
by March, forcing corrections officers to begin to grapple with something
they never imagined possible. New York City's plummeting crime rate might
cost them their jobs if the goal is not met through attrition and might
deliver a further blow to communities already braving a slowing economy.

The change in New York, where officials project the decrease in the inmate
population to be about 9 percent, is threatening the livelihoods of people
like Alan Ada.

In the mid-1980's, he surveyed his options in Cape Vincent, N.Y., a tiny
resort town on the Canadian border, and decided to follow the calling of
thousands of other young people upstate. Children of laid-off paper-mill
workers and struggling dairy farmers, they chose a booming field that most
never dreamed of, but that offered a steady salary, a pension and health
insurance. Like them, he became a corrections officer.

New York City quickly proved him wise. Desperate to ease overcrowding in
its jails, the city built a $90 million jail in Cape Vincent in 1988 near
the banks of the St. Lawrence River and began flying inmates north on
twice-weekly jet shuttles nicknamed "Con Air."

The new prison allowed Mr. Ada to get a steady job in the place where he
was born and raised, a rare feat in Cape Vincent, a town of 2,400 in the
Thousand Islands wilderness that falls silent when the leaves turn and the
summer tourists depart.

As the number of inmates in New York soared in the 1990's, the state took
over the prison, doubling its population and work force. Across upstate New
York, shrinking rural communities and their legislators clamored and
competed for prisons, a seemingly recession-proof industry. But the boom
times are coming to a jarring end.

"Who ever thought crime would go down?" asked Tim Munroe, a corrections
officer who has worked in the Cape Vincent Correctional Facility for 12
years. "Who ever thought we would run out of inmates?"

Officials in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Texas — states also experiencing
declines in their prison population — said they had no plans to reduce
their prison work forces. Experts caution that it is not yet known whether
the nationwide prison population is dropping or simply stabilizing. But if
the decline becomes a clear trend, hundreds of small, rural prison towns
across the country could find themselves confronted by the same unnerving
news as Cape Vincent.

"Regions and towns that have based their whole economies on prisons are
going to be confronted with some really serious problems," said Michael
Jacobson, a professor of criminology at John Jay College of Criminal
Justice. "This is going to be a problem for the governor and Legislature.
In the same way towns lobbied to open prisons, they are going to lobby
against closing them."

In New York, a continued drop would bring a halt to what has served as a de
facto economic development program in the state's isolated corners — prison
growth. Assailed by critics as a shortsighted use of state resources and
defended by supporters as necessary for public safety, New York's sprawling
70-facility, $2.4-billion-a-year prison system pours hundreds of millions
of dollars into the upstate economy each year.

The dependence bred by nearly 30 years of unchecked prison growth is
evident in isolated Cape Vincent, where deer nibble on grass near the
prison, wild turkeys wander the roads and Canadian radio stations dot the
airwaves. Prison employees expressed fear, anger and suspicion about the
state's plan and complained of low morale and management problems. A group
of corrections officers met with H. Carl McCall, the state comptroller and
a candidate for governor, this month to express concerns about cutbacks.

The vast majority of officers interviewed asked not to have their names
published because they feared losing their jobs. Corrections officers'
salaries start at $33,000 and rise to $48,000 in 20 years.

"When they say the crime rate is down, it's just a political thing,"
scoffed Mr. Ada, one of several officers who questioned whether the rates
are actually dropping. "I think it's just something for the politicians to
make them look good."

Mr. Ada, who is also the local fire chief, complained that proposed changes
in the so-called Rockefeller drug laws would further reduce the prison
population, and he was convinced that crime continues unabated downstate.
"All you have to do is look at the New York City news," he said.

The supervisor in Cape Vincent, Tom Rienbeck, said that the prison is the
community's second-largest employer after its public schools, and that the
state's goal of cutting 168 of the prison's 528 jobs through attrition
would hurt.

"Anytime you lose that many jobs, it's something to worry about," Mr.
Rienbeck said, adding that he, too, never dreamed the prison population
would drop. "You always figure you're going to have criminals. It's like
being a doctor, you figure there are always going to be sick people."

Mr. Rienbeck and corrections officers expressed worry that the state would
not reach its goal through attrition and that layoffs would be necessary.
"There are maybe a handful of people close to retirement," Mr. Ada said.

James B. Flateau, a spokesman for the Department of Correctional Services,
said the Cape Vincent's prison has lost 26 officers, for example, through
attrition since April 2000. The state's goal is to lose 117 officers and 51
civilian employees by next March, but Mr. Flateau emphasized that the
figures are only targets. He said that the department expects to meet its
goal statewide and that higher attrition in other prisons could make up for
less in an area like Cape Vincent.

Groups that criticized explosive prison growth in the past are using the
slowdown to again call for change. Jennifer Wynn, director of the Prison
Visiting Project for the Correctional Association of New York, questioned
the wisdom of making prisons such a large economic force in upstate New York.

"Since 1982, New York has opened 38 new prisons, every one of them in a
rural upstate community that relies on prisoners — mostly poor people of
color from New York City — to fuel the local economy," she said. "Maybe
it's time to invest in more positive and sustainable industries than
warehousing people."

Several upstate county governments may also have miscalculated. For the
last decade, state prison overcrowding resulted in thousands of inmates
serving their sentences in county jails instead of state prisons. After
years of legal battles, the state now reimburses the counties for housing
the inmates.

Some rural counties, seeking to make the arrangement profitable, built
large jails with excess capacity. But with the prison population dropping,
some sheriff's departments that run county jails are stuck with oversized
centers with empty bunks.

"There are jails that overbuilt in anticipation of needing additional space
for themselves and in anticipation of taking advantage of some extra
dollars from the state," said Peter Kehoe, executive director of the New
York State Sheriffs' Association. "Those people are beginning to worry."

The worry is palpable in Jefferson County, home to Cape Vincent, and
neighboring St. Lawrence County. Hiring freezes are in effect in four of
the five prisons, some of which are known as "cookie cutters," a reference
to the speed and identical designs desperate corrections officials used as
they scrambled to build them in the 1980's and 1990's.

Besides the hiring halt, 350 officers temporarily assigned to prisons in
the two counties fear being moved to downstate prisons where their jobs are
permanently assigned, according to Mr. Munroe, a former union leader in
Cape Vincent who believes the drop in crime is real and good for society
over all. He added that he did not believe anyone considered what would
happen if the crime rate dropped. "There wasn't much forethought," he said.

Dozens of local men are already making the commute to downstate prisons.
One corrections officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the
hiring freeze put off his hopes of being able to work in a nearby prison.
"Cape Vincent is my No. 1 jail," he said. "It's two miles from my house."

He drives two hours to a maximum security prison in central New York.
There, he works double shifts for two to four days, sleeping in an
apartment he shares with 12 other officers. He returns to Cape Vincent and
works odd construction jobs during his days off.

But he and other local prison employees all enthusiastically endorsed
theirs as a "clean industry" that produced steady employment and little
pollution. No guards have been seriously injured since Cape Vincent's
prison opened, they said, and no inmates have escaped.

With mills and other area businesses continuing to close, Mr. Ada regrets
that his town did not agree to house more prisons in the boom times,
saying, "It's supposed to be one of the more secure state jobs."