Big Houses on the Prairie

Prisons bring money, tourists to depressed small towns

BY JAMES BROOKE
New York Times

FLORENCE, Colo. A FEW miles from the ``Alcatraz of the Rockies,'' the
maximum security federal prison where Timothy McVeigh spends 23 hours a day
in an isolation cell, a cheery billboard beckons tourists: ``Stop and do
time with us. Colorado Territorial Prison Museum and Park. Historical,
Educational, Exciting.''

Eight miles down U.S. 50, at Canon City, a gray souvenir Tshirt proclaims
in red lettering: ``Corrections Capital of the World Fremont County.''

While local boosterism can lead to exaggeration, 18 percent of Fremont
County's 40,000 residents are involuntary guests of the ``Graybar Hotel'':
7,150 inmates in 13 prisons, four of them federal and nine state.

As prisons emerged as a growth industry in the 1990s, this county,
nationally known as the home of the magnificent Royal Gorge, illustrates a
modern trend using prisons as a tool for rural development.

Nationwide, the number of beds in state and federal penitentiaries
increased 43 percent, to 976,000, in the first half of the 1990s, according
to a Justice Department survey released in August. Prison employment jumped
31 percent, to 347,320.

A variety of economically pressed small communities, disregarding the
stigma traditionally attached to the label ``prison town,'' have opened
their doors to prison construction in recent years, ranging from Hobbs,
N.M., to Tupper Lake, N.Y., to South Bay, Fla., to Beeville, Texas, to
Crescent City in Northern California.

In a measure of prison pride, museums have sprouted. Every year, about
15,000 tourists troop through Canon City's museum, located below the
looming gray walls of Colorado's oldest prison, the Territorial
Correctional Facility, built in 1871 and still operating. Inside the gate,
visitors encounter a deactivated, limegreen gas chamber.

Leavenworth, Kan., beckons tourists with a billboard: ``How about doin'
some TIME in Leavenworth?'' The local convention and visitors bureau uses a
new slogan: ``You don't have to be indicted to be invited.''

Ruth Carter, 81, the mayor of Canon City, said, ``We have a nice,
nonpolluting, recessionproof industry here.'' With local coal mines
closing and ranches limping, the prisons of Fremont County filled the
vacuum, employing 3,100 men and women. Here, prisons are called ``the
industry.''

For this industry, Canon City has always been a company town. In the 19th
century, when Colorado's territorial legislators decided to give the
capital to Denver and the university to Boulder, they gave the prison to
Canon City. The trend has continued.

The four federal prisons that opened since 1994 south of Florence have
brought a flood of jobs and new residents. The four adjoining institutions
employ slightly more than 1,000 workers, with an average salary of about
$30,000. At the maximumsecurity prison where McVeigh is incarcerated,
there is almost one employee for every inmate.

``We as a community are doing better and better,'' Carter said of the
influx of workers, adding, ``They are buying and renovating houses that I
would have bulldozed.''

A former juvenile probation officer, Carter recently traveled to Odessa,
Texas, to preach the benefits of prisons for ailing rural towns.

``I told them that you are worrying that your grandmothers, your mothers,
your daughters are going to be raped and sodomized,'' said Carter, who
lives in a cottage, surrounded by her cats, cactus plants and collection of
cut crystal. `` `No sirree,' I told them. `When those people get out of
prison, they are getting out of town as fast as they can.' ''

Jail breaks have been infrequent in the 125 years that Fremont County has
been Colorado's corrections capital.

In Florence, where there is one prisoner for every free citizen, an upscale
housing development centered on a golf course is being built just over a
knoll from the prison where McVeigh awaits his appeal of a death sentence
for the Oklahoma City bombing.

For aesthetics, a forestgreen, Colorado lodgestyle roof tops the beige
walls of McVeigh's prison, officially the United States Penitentiary
Administrative Maximum Facility, also known as ADX. The highest security
prison in the United States, it replaced a penitentiary in Marion, Ill.

While some communities might see such a prison as the societal equivalent
of a nuclear waste dump, Fremont County fought hard for the $60 million
penitentiary complex that holds McVeigh.

``When I first came here, in 1984, the city was in a depression,'' said
John Lemons, a reporter for the Canon City Daily Record. ``There were empty
stores on Main Street; unemployment was 11 percent. The ROTC commander said
he had great luck recruiting here.''

Residents were so eager to lure a federal prison that they massed on Canon
City's Main Street for the TV cameras of ``Good Morning America'' and held
up a banner reading: ``We want a federal prison! Fremont County, Colo.''

Today, Main Street is bustling and unemployment is 4 percent.

The federal money has allowed Fremont County to look the other way as state
legislators, seeing prisons as a tool for economic development, turn their
attention to the state's eastern plains with funds for new prisons there.

A mix of state and privately run facilities, the prisons are giving new
life to a farflung archipelago of aging farming towns: Brush, Burlington,
Las Animas, Olney Springs, Ordway and Walsenburg.

In coming years, Eastern tourists heading to Colorado's booming mountain
resort towns will fly over a growing network of what one Denver wag calls
``Big Houses on the Prairie.''