RURAL TOWNS TURN TO PRISONS TO REIGNITE THEIR ECONOMIES

For a town of 4,114 in western Oklahoma, Sayre has an impressive
landfill. The scales to weigh the bales of crushed scrap are new. A
machine for shredding trees is new. So, too, is the 60-unit apartment
complex going up on the side of the road leading to the dump, the
asphalt that covers that road, and the sprawling Flying J Truck Plaza
nearby.

The wording on a trash-hauling bin parked near the landfill gives a
hint of what is behind the revival of this withered, century-old city.
It reads "North Fork Correctional Facility."

As in many other small towns around the country, a three-year-old,
$37 million, 1,440-inmate, 270-employee, all-male prison is
responsible for lifting Sayre's spirits and reigniting its economy.

"In my mind there's no more recession-proof form of economic
development," said Jack McKennon, 52, the city manager who persuaded
the Corrections Corporation of America to put its prison in Sayre.
"Nothing's going to stop crime."

Sayre is not alone in its economic strategy. According to the 2000
census, prisons have been helping to revive large stretches of rural
America. More than a Wal-Mart or a meat-packing plant, state, federal
and private prisons, typically housing 1,000 inmates and providing 300
jobs, can put a town on solid economic footing. As communities become
more and more familiar with the benefits that prisons bring, they are
also becoming increasingly adept at maximizing their windfall through
collecting taxes and healthy public service fees.

In the last decade, 245 prisons sprouted in 212 of the nation's 2,290
rural counties, many in Great Plains towns of Colorado, Oklahoma and
Texas that had been stripped of family farms and upended by the
collapse of the 1980's oil boom, said Calvin L. Beale, senior
demographer at the Economic Research Service of the Agriculture Department.

Mr. Beale said an average of 25 new rural prisons opened each year in
the 1990's, up from 16 in the 1980's and 4 in the 1970's. Growth
followed. In the 212 prison counties, the population rose 12 percent
in the 90's, far more than rate of 1.5 percent in the preceding
decade. Three small Oklahoma cities with new prisons -- Hinton, Sayre
and Watonga -- grew more than 40 percent.

Opening a prison is a natural option for down-and-out towns, said
Thomas F. Pogue, economics professor at the University of Iowa.

"It's a more stable industry for a town than a manufacturing plant,"
Professor Pogue said. "The wage level is a problem, but these prisons
are being located where people don't have much of a choice."

The North Fork Correctional Facility, a mile and a half from downtown
Sayre, is surrounded by buffalo grass and cottonwood trees. With light
gray concrete walls and red metal roofs, it could pass for an immense
new Comfort Inn were it not for double coils of razor wire and slotted
windows. The access road for the buses that bring in new inmates is
called Delivery Avenue.

The prison's economic value to Sayre is immediately apparent. The
Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison management
company based in Nashville, is the largest taxpayer in Beckham County,
of which Sayre is the seat. The county collects $411,000 in property
taxes from the prison, more than four times the amount it gets from
the next largest taxpayer, the Bar-S Foods Company, a meat-processing
plant. Eighty percent of the property taxes support county schools.
Jody Bradley, the prison's warden, said the prison spent $2.5 million
a year for goods and services in Oklahoma, largely around Sayre, and
disbursed about $7 million in wages.

The prisoners are themselves cogs in Sayre's economic engine. They pay
the city's 3.5 percent sales tax for the snacks and sodas they buy in
the commissary. They also pay a 35 percent to 45 percent tax for the
telephone calls, roughly 100 a day, all collect, all long distance.
Local calls are forbidden for security reasons, not that it is much of
an issue: the inmates all come from Wisconsin, which, because of a
space shortage, farms out more than 4,000 prisoners to other states.

The prisoners help in other ways, too. The city has torn down the old
high school and salvaged the bricks and stone work for a new City
Hall. The bricks stand in stacks in the prison yard, where for no
charge to the city, the inmates are cleaning them.

By any measure, Sayre, 120 miles west of Oklahoma City, was in
perilous shape before the prison opened. Shattered by the oil and gas
industry bust of the 1980's, it was surviving largely on federal crop
support payments to its dwindling farm population, said Jack W.
Ivester, the town's mayor.

At one point, officials turned off every other street light on the
main commercial thoroughfare to save money. In the center of town
stood a reminder of better times, a stately court house, which had
been featured as a backdrop in the 1940 film "Grapes of Wrath,"
starring Henry Fonda.

Now Sayre can set aside 15 percent of its revenues for capital
improvements. The money brought in from the telephone calls, sales
taxes, water and sewer fees and landfill charges accounts for nearly
all the increase in the city's budget from about $755,000 in 1996,
before the prison construction began, to about $1,250,000 this year.

The money flowing into city coffers made it possible for Sayre to hire
nine new employees, bringing the total to 30. Last year the city
granted them $100,000 in raises. Mr. McKennon's salary has doubled to
$48,000 in nine years. The police force has grown to eight officers
from four, and for three years in a row, the city has been able to buy
a new patrol car. Sayre has erected three new water towers, making
five.

"We build two miles of improved streets each year now," Mr. McKennon
said.

To lure the Flying J, Sayre bought 28 acres along Interstate 40 for a
bargain price of $2,700 an acre and then sold the land to a developer
at cost. The truck stop, which has been open less than a year, employs
117 people and is expected to pay $150,000 a year in sales taxes, said
Chris Christian, the city treasurer.

"We wouldn't have gotten the Flying J without the prison," Mr.
McKennon said.

As a result, Beckham County's unemployment rate is a rock-bottom 1.7
percent, from 3.2 percent in 1998 when the prison was built, even as
the nation's unemployment rate rises.

"The ones that want to work, they can go out there and get a job,"
said Leroy Hagerman, who operates an auto-repair shop downtown.

Mr. Hagerman's daughter got one of the best jobs, as one of six
captains at the prison. "Not many places where a single woman can make
$30,000 a year," he said.

While the prison's immediate economic value is clear, it remains an
open question as to how deep or wide ranging its benefits will be.

The city's core population, excluding the 1,440 inmates, dropped in
the 1990's to 2,644. from 2,881. Housing permits have more than
doubled since the prison was built, though the market remains tight
for the prison's 270 employees, most of whom earn $17,000 to $19,000 a
year.

"The prison is a super positive for us," Mayor Ivester said. "But it's
a life raft, an inner tube. We're still on the ocean. We're not going
down, but we're not really going up either."

The prison can take a toll on local services, too. Linda Brown, the
clerk of the Beckham County Court, said inmates began flooding her
office with five or six complaints and other filings a week. Some were
legitimate, like several who sent in divorce papers, Ms. Brown said,
"but most seemed frivolous."

One inmate tried to change his name to Poison Jonathon Love. Among the
reasons he listed was a desire to further his "modeling and acting
career." Serious or not, Ms. Brown said, few inmates followed standard
filing procedures.

"They wouldn't send the correct papers," she said, "so we would have
to send them back."

She said the requests subsided after the warden posted a notice
spelling out the procedures required.

Before the prison came, townspeople worried about indigent visitors
and families of prisoners moving to town, possibly swelling the
welfare rolls. But because they must travel from Wisconsin, only a few
show up each day.

Residents say they went along with the prison, though there was never
a vote for it. Many signed pro-prison petitions, which were circulated
in banks and grocery stores around town.

"We all took a tour out there, a before-they-opened-type-thing,"
Clydene Manning, the county clerk, said of efforts to reassure
residents. "I'd just never been inside a prison before. It looked like
a safe and secure place to me."

Some residents said they would have preferred a more inclusive
process.

"My only complaint was it was kind of a done deal before the town
really knew about it," said Belinda Wilkinson, the cashier at the
Texaco station, about 100 yards from the prison and the closest business.

Sales are now brisk, Ms. Wilkinson added, though she also gets more
bad checks, mostly from guards.

Residents' initial concerns for their safety have subsided. No
prisoner has escaped; the inmate who came closest became ensnared on
the prison's razor wire. But about 20 guards, residents of Sayre and
surrounding communities, have been injured in fights and assaults. As
many as 70 percent of all guards quit within a year, some for
better-paying jobs in the recovering oil fields, and the prison is now
19 guards short, Mr. Bradley said.

Sayre faces a larger problem. The nation may be on the verge of a
prison glut, bad news for towns that have come to rely so heavily on
them. Only 11 rural prisons have opened or are scheduled to open this
year, compared with 38 in 1998, the peak building year, Mr. Beale of
the Agriculture Department said.

In Wisconsin, the growth of the inmate population has halted, and the
Department of Corrections has set as an informal goal to stop
exporting inmates within 10 years. Oklahoma sent some prisoners to
Sayre three years ago but took them away because of a contract dispute
with the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation's largest
operator of private prisons.

For now, the prison money is flowing, and Sayre is trying to build the
foundation of an economy that might eventually get along without it.

Mr. McKennon wants a Wal-Mart distribution center, an Alco department
store and above all a motel.

"I'll give you the land," he said, smiling in the 104-degree heat. "No
way you can keep from getting rich."