A VILLAGE KEPT AFLOAT BY CONVICTS

COMULUS, N.Y. -- From his front porch, Ray Zajac can hear the inmates'
voices rising through the double set of glistening razor-wire fences
across Main Street. The late afternoon chanting of men exercising in
the drug treatment center is money to his ears. "The city is
subsidizing us by producing these criminals," said Mr. Zajac, meaning
New York City. "It's not a nice thing to say, but it's true."

That subsidy is about to soar. Once the state's Five Points prison
opens here in August, Romulus will be home to 3,200 free-ranging souls
and 2,200 inmates. The free-rangers aren't complaining.

"It's a salvation to us," said Mr. Zajac, who has run this Finger
Lakes town as the elected supervisor for 29 years.

Romulus is a village saved by prisons.

The state psychiatric hospital on Main Street closed in 1995, but
reopened as the Department of Correctional Services' Willard Drug
Treatment Campus. The 11,000-acre Seneca Army Depot began closing that
same year, but the state came through with the $180 million prison now
being completed on a secluded corner of the base.

"It's the largest construction project ever in the Finger Lakes," said
Michael F. Nozzolio, the local state senator and chairman of the
Senate's corrections committee, who brought home this juicy morsel of
bacon. Beyond the projected 638 full-time jobs and 191 spinoff jobs,
the prison will also rescue Romulus from its own sewage.

Waste water from about 200 homes near the prison site and Romulus's
only school ran through the Army's system for decades. With the Army
leaving, the hamlet would need a new system, which it could not afford.

But the prison's water and sewer system will serve the town as well,
and pay the local sewer district, which will run it, an estimated $2
million a year, said the district's administrator, the same Ray Zajac.

"It's a big business, crime is," he said.

Political, too. Sentiment is growing in New York State to rethink drug
laws that have helped push the prison population over 71,000, and last
week the state's chief judge announced an effort to send more addicts
to treatment rather than jail. But the Legislature ended its session
Friday with no action on proposals to ease the state's harshest drug
statutes, the Rockefeller-era laws that mandate minimum sentences of
15 years to life for possession or sale of small amounts of drugs --
stiffer sentences than the minimums for rape or manslaughter. Various
politicians in Albany endorsed easing the laws, but in the end, fear
of appearing weak on crime overcame political will.

The inaction in Albany and the construction activity here, 160 miles
west, demonstrate that there is just one safe political course when it
comes to sentencing wrongdoers: put the pedal to the metal.

But don't blame Romulus. Aside from some better-off folks with
houses on serene Seneca Lake, Romulus is a collection of three
tattered hamlets that largely lived off the state mental hospital and
the cold war threat of global conflict that kept the World War II Army
depot alive until the Berlin Wall fell. The world has changed, and now
Romulus will have a drug treatment center, a maximum security prison
and a nonprofit center for troubled youths that Gov. George E. Pataki
helped inaugurate on Wednesday.

"We're going from government to government," said Dennis Aloia, the
Seneca County manager. "When you're a hungry area, like this place is,
you're willing to accept things other places aren't."

Prisons are bonanzas in depressed areas, and Glenn R. Cooke, Seneca
County's development director, calls Senator Nozzolio "our rainmaker."
The senator has six prisons in his district, and the public policy
group City Project says more than a third of the state's prisons are
in the districts of three senators, Mr. Nozzolio included.

The prison will be well hidden on former depot land, but its effects
will not be. In Romulus, Sandy Lynd, the postmaster, is expecting
business to skyrocket. Dianna LaPrade said the medical office where
she works as a nurse had hired an additional doctor, anticipating an
influx of prison employees. And she said the guard jobs, with good pay
and benefits, will give grown children a reason to stay in town. "It's
a nice touch," she said.

But if the world changes again and there is a move to reduce the
nation's world-beating incarceration rate, it will cause economic
upheaval for places like Romulus. Not that anyone is expecting, as Mr.
Zajac said, "all the criminals to find the Lord" or for all the
politicians to go soft.

"I think it's less likely that will happen," Mr. Zajac said, "than the
Berlin Wall coming down."