THE TOWN THAT LOVED PRISONS PAYS A VERY STIFF PRICE

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 dissected by the
beautiful, trout-filled Salmon River, 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.

Twenty percent of Malone's population of 20,000 are now 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 who don't work at the prisons 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 of the Office of Community Development for the
village.

"Did we get seven hundred fifty 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 on a daily basis 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, not the state's,
taxes have gone up and the payments will be more than $1 million this year,
Sherwin said.

What Malone got was the state's first maxi-max prison for its most
incorrigible inmates. At Upstate, they spend 22 hours a day in lockdown,
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.

Sherwin, who was born and reared in Malone, deplores the prison boomlet.

"It will institutionalize a degraded environment and quality of life," he
said.

"Is this our legacy to our children?" "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?"