PRISON PLANS FAIL IN RURAL NEW YORK

In the 1980s, when the country was fighting a war on drugs, and Mario
Cuomo was building more prisons than any other governor in New York
history, there was a poor rural village named Malone, N.Y.

Malone's farms and businesses were struggling, and there were no jobs
for its sons and daughters, so the village officials had an idea.

"We'll build us a prison!" the officials said. "That will bring
construction jobs, prison jobs and food-service jobs. A prison will
save our community."

Malone is a beautiful, 19th century New England-like town bisected by
the beautiful, trout-filled Salmon River, I a more likely setting for
a college campus than a prison. The communities near New York City
didn't want prisons, while depressed towns upstate eyed them hungrily.
Malone wooed and won its state prison, the Franklin Correctional
Facility, which now has 2,900 inmates. Two years later it got the Bare
Hill Correctional Facility, with 1,900 inmates.

Cuomo was voted out, and George Pataki came in and proposed building
yet another prison. It was sited for Tupper Lake, in the sub-Canadian
Adirondacks region. But when it was argued that a prison would pollute
the town lake, the site was scrapped. There was Malone, however, with
its reputation for loving prisons. So the state built a third prison,
Upstate Correctional Facility, which opened last summer and houses
1,400 inmates.

Malone's population is 20,000, including the inmates. More than 300
miles from New York City, it's at the end of a long journey for the
wives and girlfriends of inmates and their children, most of whom are
from the city.

But the prisons haven't worked the economic miracle that town
officials hoped for. They have brought Malone racial diversity of a
sort, since more than 90 percent of the inmates are black and
Hispanic, while Malone is overwhelmingly white. Sometimes residents
see inmates on crews that do public construction and chip ice off
sidewalks in the winter.

The prisons could be credited with reducing Malone's poverty rate,
since the $30,000 a year in goods and services each inmate receives
from the state exceeds many salaries in Malone.

But the 750 jobs that the Upstate brought to Malone went mostly to
people from outside the town, because of prison system seniority
rules, according to Boyce Sherwin, director of the Office of Community
Development for the village.

"Did we get 750 jobs?" he said. We didn't get a hundred.

A hoped-for food processing plant to serve the prisons hasn't
materialized, and a $4.5 million expansion of the sewage treatment
plant, paid for by the state to accommodate the new prison, has
increased the amount of nitrates that are dumped daily into the Salmon
River.

There's been a huge increase in traffic and in the sewage flow into a
beautiful trout stream, said Sherwin, Who called the design
specifications for the plant "totally unacceptable and barely at the
legal limit for such pollutants.

Because the loans to build the sewage plant and a new water system for
the prison were based on the village's borrowing capacity, taxes have
gone up, and the payments will be more than $1-miltion this year,
Sherwin said.

What Malone got was the state's first maximax prison for its most
incorrigible inmates. At Upstate, they spend 22 hours a day in
lock-down, with two hours of recreation in an outdoor cage. The town
doesn't even have a YMCA, and the only form of recreation is the bars,
Sherwin said.

"It's an economic tool now, but they're not the long-term answer,"
says Ann Ruzow Holland, executive director of Friends of the North
Country, a community development group that has opposed
prison-building upstate.

"Once you have the reputation of a prison town, you won't become a
Fortune 500 company town, or an Internet or software company town, or
even a diverse tourism and company town, Holland says.

Sherwin sees a dream that has gone sour. "It was get a prison and your
community is set," he says. "But look around, is this heaven?"