RACISM AND PRISONS

Over the years, we've seen a lot of foolish reports issued by groups around
the state of New York who are trying to make one point or another. But the
report issued by the "City Project" and the Correctional Association of New
York State that claims "racism" has something to do with the location of
prisons in upstate New York reaches a new low in efforts to understand a
complicated issue.

The sad reality of course is that racism really does play a role in the
location of prisons in New York State. Unfortunately, the authors of the
so-called study have gotten it backwards.

If the authors of the study had bothered to take a look at efforts to
locate prisons in the New York City, New York City suburbs and Long Island
from 1960 to the mid-1980's they would have found that every effort met
with massive oppostion in "their backyards".

When the state attempted to locate prisons in minority neighborhoods, the
state's efforts were branded as "racist" because residents in those
communities saw it as using poor neighborhoods as "dumping grounds" for
projects that white neighborhoods refused to accept.

To make matters worse, state legislators from those same areas would
eventually turn on the proposal, arguing against the plans to locate
prisons in their districts, deciding that where ever it was proposed, there
was always something wrong with that particular location.

Over time, it became clear to most state policy makers that any effort to
locate a prison in New York City or in the Long Island or downstate area,
they would face massive opposition, even from the state legislators who
represent those areas.

In the early 1980's, an effort to locate a prison on Long Island drew
massive protests that forced the state to abandon the effort.

That was the reason that the state began entertaining requests from upstate
communities that were willing to accept prisons in their communities. Even
though many of the prisons were filled with inmates from New York City's
minority communities, the predominantly white upstate communities welcomed
them into their communities because they saw it as an opportunity to bring
more jobs to their areas.

Here in Ogdensburg, we accepted the first prison that was located upstate
in the 1980's. We still can recall the first visits by correctional
officials who told us they'd never before tried to site a prison in a
community where people actually welcomed them. At the time, it was such a
strange notion that the New York Times actually sent a reporter here to
search for someone who opposed the prison.

They couldn't find anyone.

People should realize that the City Project and the Correctional
Association have a hidden agenda in their effort to make it appear that
there is something nefarious in the state's successful efforts to locate
prisons upstate. Both groups want New York State to release drug dealers
from prison. If the groups can make it more difficult to build new prisons
by forcing the state to attempt to locate them downstate, they just might
be able to force the state to put the dealers back on the streets.