PrisonWatch^TM vs. Timesizing^®

• Massachusetts: Inmate goes free, AP via NYT, A23.
  A man who spent 33 years in prison for his role in an organized crime murder was freed after prosecutors acknowledged that he had been denied a fair trial because the FBI withheld information. The inmate, Wilfred French...was one of six men accused in the 1965 killing of Edward Deegan, a small-time hoodlum. Mr. French, 72, a frail former bouncer, was freed after prosecutors received FBI documents showing that the Bureau knew an important witness, Joseph Barboza, lied in his trial. Two others convicted in the case were freed this year.
  [Hey, with justice like this, who needs injustice?]

• Paraguay - Jail riot starts fire, killing 25 inmates, AP via NYT, A15.
  Rioting inmates set...a fire that swept through a prison in the border city of Ciudad del Este yesterday, killing at least 25 inmates and injuring about 200 others, authorities said. The fire started after inmates apparently bent on escaping attacked a guard with a homemade knife and the jailer fired back, killing the man, Paraguayan TV stations reported. More than 500 inmates then began rioting, some apparently setting mattresses on fire.

• Executions decline again; several factors are cited, pointer summary (to A18), NYT, A2.
  Executions declined across the country for the second year in a row, to 66 from 85 in 2000 and 98 in 1999. The decline is partly attributable to the ebb and flow of the appeals process, but it also comes in a year in which many states have re-examined the fairness of capital punishment.
  [And found it racist. And had a number of life sentences overturned by DNA evidence.]

• Supreme Court roundup - Court to weigh criminal sentencing, by Linda Greenhouse, NYT, A16.
  WASHINGTON DC...- The Supreme Court took a long-awaited next step today in its continuing reexamination of the respective roles of judges and juries in criminal sentencing, accepting a case [Harris v. United States, No. 00-10666] that could call into question several important federal sentencing provisions and perhaps the federal sentencing guidelines themselves....
  [Here's hoping! This could get rid of the rigid and compulsive stupidity known as minimum mandatory sentencing that has been allowing our prison-industrial complex to rival our military industrial complex in size and giving us a record prison population of 2,000,000 Americans, mostly in for trivial "drug war" charges and way disproportionately black (one in 10 adult black Americans) and Latino - a disgraceful Reagan-era legacy of costly self-righteous compulsiveness. When we finally make it easier for people to earn an honest living than a dishonest one, most of this "problem" will evaporate. But it may be another century before we lose our technology-obsoleted Puritan work ethic and flexibly lshare the vanishing work à la some such system as Timesizing.]

• California: Condoms for inmates, AP via NYT, A22.
  Los Angeles County has begun giving condoms to gay inmates...
  [I.e., virtually everybody in sex-segregated confinement, right?]
  ...at its downtown jail in an effort to stop the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.
  [Finally, some common sense. Look at how much tax money they could save -]
  The county Sheriff's Dept., which runs the largest jail system in the country, says it spends $180,000 monthly on AIDS medicine to treat 220 inmates.

• Competing for prisons, letter to editor by Asst. Dir. Marc Mauer of Sentencing Project in DC, NYT, A22.
  You report that the Census Bureau put entire populations of some prisons in the wrong towns (news article, Nov. 28). This highlights the complex fiscal incentives created by the sixfold increase in prison populations over the last three decades.
  Prisoners impose few direct costs on towns but can inflate the local population substantially, which translates into greater federal and state financing and political influence. This dynamic has contributed to the growth of incarceration even as crime rates have declined.
  Impoverished urban neighborhoods victimized by high unemployment and crime are further disadvantaged in the competition for money and influence. Instead of fostering this rivalry, we should pursue policies that create more meaningful employment for all.
  [It all comes back to jobs. And "jobs" come down to worktime per person per time unit, most conveniently, workweek. Sooner or later the inflood of worksaving technology will dawn on people like Marc Mauer and he'll change his wording from "create more meaningful employment for all" to "share the natural market-demanded employment among all." A fundamental change indeed. From artificial and rigid job "creation" (and destruction - via mass layoffs) based on an arbitrary workweek, to natural and flexible employment sharing, based on a slowly, bidirectionally fluctuating workweek.]

• Arizona: Savings on prison costs, AP via NYT, A19.
  The state avoided millions of dollars in prison costs through a 1996 law that requires some drug offenders to be placed on probation and given treatment rather than locked up, a study by the Administrative Office of the Courts has found. The state spent $1m in 1999 on treatment and supervision for 390 inmates kept out of prison because of the voter-approved law; imprisonment would have cost $7.7m....
  [An unexpectedly intelligent outcome for Arizona.]
  The law was intended to divert nonviolent drug offenders out of the prison system and into community treatment programs.
  

• Census said to misplace many prisons and dorms - Their populations show up, but elsewhere, by Janny Scott, NYT, A14.
  ...Across the country, demographers and planners say the Census Bureau appears to have misplaced entire populations of dozens of prisons and college dormitories. They say the Bureau inexplicably removed those populations from census tracts or blocks where the facilities had sat for decades and deposited them somewhere else.
  [Politically motivated?]
  Iin New York State, for example, 2,191 inmates at Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in the town of Beekman, landed mysteriously in Milan, a smaller town some 27 miles to the north, said Warren Brown, a professor of sociology at Cornell University.
  In California, the inmates of Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City turned up outside city limits, the citiy manager said. The city discovered the problem, he said, when a quarterly payment it received from the state plummeted because the 2000 census showed the city's population had shrunk.... It is unclear how many such problems exist..\.. "A number of federal and state [aid] formulas are based on total population"..\..said Tom Gillaspie, the [Minn.] state demographer.... "So when you have 500 or 1,000 people who are misallocated, it's a fairly substantial issue...."

• ["the other shoe drops" -]
  Arkansas: Early release for inmates, NYT, A13.
  Faced with overcrowded prisons and a backlog of state prisoners in city and county jails, the state's Board of Correction voted to grant early release to 560 inmates. The inmates, all nearing their parole eligibility dates, are to be freed in the next three months.
  [Isn't this a bit like having immigration laws and then voiding them with "amnesties" every ten years? Should we count these as 560 layoffs?]
  Almost 900 prisoners are backlogged in local jails awaiting transfer to state custody, and recent state budget cuts will not let the correction department open new prisons.
  [So Mandatory Sentencing plus Zero Tolerance times Unfunded Mandate equals Mandatory Leniency or maybe, with Ben Johnson, "the law is an ass." Or to avoid coverup, politicians are asses. And the elephants (e.g., law&order drugwar conservative Repubs) are bigger asses than the donkeys (Dems), because they don't have longer memories, they have shorter memories, and they're incapable of learning the lessons of history, e.g., the failure of Prohibition.]

• Texas: Shortage of prison guards, AP via NYT, A9.
  Military call-ups are contributing to a shortage of guards in state prisons, officials say. After Sept. 11, 123 prison guards were called to active duty. The state's prison system already had a shortage of 3,348 guards.
  [So what's another 123? But -]
  Up to 900 guards could be called to active military duty.

• South Dakota: Youth prison is closing, AP via NYT, A21.
  The state will close its prison for juveniles to save about $1m a year, Gov. William Janklow announced. Fifty-one young people are housed in the prison, at the eastern SD town of Plankinton, but the population has been declining each year.... The state will place troubled youth in other specialized programs in SD, or in neighboring states.
  

• Walpole MA - Assaults spur search at prison, Boston Globe, B2.
  A tactical team of 75 officers started a massive, cell-to-cell search of MCI-Cedar Junction yesterday and have locked down the facility until further notice, a Dept. of Corrections [DOC] spokesman said. The search, which DOC spokesman Justin Latini called a "major shake-down," came in response to recent inmate-on-inmate assaults and to a rise in the number of weapons found at the facility.
  [MCI = Massachusetts Correctional Institution]

• US prison plan advances in Congress, AP via Boston Globe, B13.
  The suggestion that the government build a federal prison in Berlin [New Hampshire] has moved forward in Congress. The Senate has approved spending nearly $10m to evaluate Berlin and its surrounding areas for a prison. The proposal is part of a budget bill that goes to a committee to work out differences with a bill approved by the House.
  [America's self-deterioration continues despite the tragedy that supposedly "brought us together." Forget about "a stitch in time saves nine," this is "millions for quarantine, but not a dime for cure." The Senate should look back at the intelligent alternative to all this that it passed 53-30 sixty-eight years ago and take an entirely different approach - make it easier for people to earn an honest living than continuing to make it easier for them to earn a dishonest one.]

• Inmate increase drives up N.H. prison costs - Longer terms also blamed - The number of people jailed for new crimes peaked seven years ago, but incarcerations continued to grow due to parole violations, AP via Boston Globe, B2.
  CONCORD, NH - ...Nearly $100m was spent last year by the state and its counties to keep people locked up, the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies said in a report released yesterday [on] prison spending and policies over the past decade.... The state budgeted $66m from general tax sources for prisons last year, compared with $5m spent in 1981. Counties appropriated an additional $33m last year for jails..\..
  The number of inmates increased from 337 in 1981 to 2,370 in 2001, the report said..\.. It found that the state spent about the same amount of money (adjusted for inflation) per inmate each year, and said that means overall cost increases were due to [inmate] population growth.... The Center found that the crime most likely to land someone in prison last year was a parole violation for drug or alcohol abuse.... The study found that the number of people jailed for new crimes peaked seven years ago, but incarcerations continued to grow due to parole violations. Parole and probation violations accounted for just 11% of offenses in 1982. By last year, the figure had grown to nearly 50%, the report said....
  From 1993 to 2000, the state paroled 4,941 inmates, but 2,450 of them returned to prison, most within 10 months. Nearly half of the parole revocations were for violations of terms of release, not new crimes, and 70% involved substance abuse, the study found.
  Inmates also are serving longer sentences, due in part to a 1982 "truth in sentencing" law that requires inmates to serve their full minimum terms. The Center estimates the statute was responsible for roughly 9,495 inmate-years at a potential cost of $184m.
  ...Center codirector Richard Minard, the study's author...said that New Hampshire's inmate population growth was relatively small compared to other states. The US Bureau of Justice Statistics said New Hampshire's incarceration rate was the nation's fourth lowest last year, behind only Minnesota, Maine, and North Dakota....

1. Number of adults in corrections system soars - Yearly increase slows; 3% are on parole, probation, by Jennifer Loven, BG, A2.
   WASHINGTON - The number of adults behind bars, on parole, or on probation reached a record 6.46 million in 2000 - or one in 32 American adults [more than one in 10 black males], the government reported yesterday....
   
   • Jails and prisons held 30% of the adults in the corrections system, or 1,933,503....
   • An additional 725,527 adults [11%] were on parole, a period of supervision following release from prison..\..
     [Adding these figures, we get 6.498562m, not 6.46m, so we've figured the missing percentage here on that basis. It still comes out to 100% all right.]
   • People on probation accounted for 59% of the total, or 3,839,532....
   [Ah, America, Land of the Free.]
   Over the past two decades, the number of adults in the corrections system has tripled, so they now make up 3.1% of the country's adult population, compared with 1% in 1980, said Allen J. Beck, a chief researcher with the Justice Dept.'s Bureau of Justice Statistics.... During the 1990s, the corrections population increased 49%. By the end of last year, there were 2.1m more adults in the system than there were in 1990..\.. "It's just overwhelming," said Kara Gotsch, a spokeswoman for the ACLU's National Prison Project, which advocates alternatives to incarceration. "It just shows that we need to put much more into prevention."...
   [It all comes back to jobs. If we cut the workweek and make it easier to earn a better living, we get more jobs and less crime. If we don't, we make it easier to earn a dishonest living than an honest one, so we get fewer jobs and more crime.]
   Nearly 2.5m people were released from parole or probation in 2000. Among parolees...in 1990..\..half successfully completed the terms of their release. By 2000, just 43% completed parole and stayed out [of prison] through the end of the year.... [Still,] Beck [claimed] that the number of Americans who have returned to prison has remained stable over time. [However,] to Gotsch, that shows the shortsightedness of policies that focus more on punishment and less on rehabilitation.
   ["As ye sow, so shall ye reap" or modern "What goes around, comes around." Deal out punishment and boomerang, get punished. We don't need punishment, we just need Buckminster Fuller's "design out the possibility of recurrence."]
   "It's no wonder that they're re-offending at incredibly high rates, because we don't teach them anything else," she said.
   [Her point is reinforced by the Massachusetts-specific article below. And take a look at commercial TV programming. Much of it is training for crime, and violent crime at that. Or at least for sexsexsex without a thought about AIDS or contraception. And check out "Back-to-school shocking - Students' racy fashions have parents, educators in a bind," by Laura Pappano, BG, front page, where we read, " 'Those folks who make up the styles are making me crazy,' said Paul Berkel, principal at Dover-Sherborn Regional Middle School..\.. When school opens Wednesday at the Thomas Blake Middle School in Medfield, Peg Mongiello, the principal, {will} demand {that students} not reveal the four B's - breasts, buttocks, belly buttons, or boxer {short}s. Mongiello keeps T-shirts, blouses, and dress shirts in her office for students who bare too much skin." Hey, maybe we should just go for nude schooling. That'd probably fix things fast.]

2. In Mass., freed inmates face dwindling prospects, by Sarah Schweitzer, BG, front page.
   As a swelling number of inmates wrap up sentences imposed during the incarceration boom of the 1990s, they are returning home to find few housing options and shrinking job prospects - a trend likely to worsen in a softening economy.... Already advocates for the homeless estimate that of the 20,000 inmates released from Massachusetts prisons and jails last year, 1 in 5 ended up in homeless shelters, in unstable living conditions with family and friends, or on the streets....
   The problem is compounded, specialists say, by cutbacks in programs like early release and parole, which provided supervision for inmates returning to life outside cell blocks.... "These are the people most in need of services," said Brian A. Callery, president of Community Resources for Justice, a Boston think tank and a support group for former offenders..\.. "What we have is a growing number of ex-offenders....with a new sentence imposed on them: hopelessness," said Philip Mangano, exec. dir. of the Mass. Housing and Shelter Alliance.... [and from photo caption on inside page, B5 -] Alfred Gibson says he has not been able to find housing or a job since he was released from prison in 1999.
   [Back to text - now, inside page -]
   "I've never dealt with so many women with criminal records," said Tracey Williams, program coordinator for the Breakaway Program at Dimock Community Health Center in Roxbury, which helps women find jobs and build self-esteem....
   Housing, Williams and others say, is the most pressing problem, particularly since federal rules bar many with criminal records from subsidized housing.
   [There's an incentive to swell the rate of recidivism.]
   "I've been homeless for years," said Alfred Gibson [from photo], who has been living in a shelter since his release from prison in 1999. This week, he qualified for federally subsidized housing, after a lengthy appeal. "Everyone wanted me to have a job before I got the housing, but I couldn't get a job."...
   [It all comes back to jobs.]
   Boston police say they are deeply concerned about the bubbling population of former offenders.... "We are all holding our breaths about the economy," said Conny Doty, director of the Mayor's Office of Jobs and Community Services. "As it softens and as we see layoffs, we may reach a point where employers who have been willing to step up to the plate will become more risk-averse."...
   [The pressure builds and builds to simply, flexibly, share the vanishing work and spread the funneling income - Timesizing, not downsizing - trim hours for all and keep all employed, instead of trimming jobs for a few, and a few more, and a few more....]

• 3-strikes law is overrated in California, study finds - More older inmates deemed real result, by Tamar Lewin, NYT, A10.
  [Let's cut to the chase and just cop the pointer summary on A2 -]
  A study by a nonprofit research group, the Sentencing Project, concluded that seven years afater enactment, California's three-strikes law had increased the number and severity of sentences for nonviolent offenders - and contributed to the aging of the prison population - but had had no significant effect on the state's decline in crime.

• A growth industry cools as New York [state] prisons thin, by David Rohde, NYT, front page.
  With the number of inmates in state prisons across the country either stabilizing or dropping after decades of explosive growth, New York is taking early steps to reduce its prison staffing significantly. The Dept. of Correctional Services has frozen hiring at 36 prisons across the state, and hopes to eliminate 614 prison jobs through attrition by March....

• U.S. drug charges doubled since 1984, AP via NYT, A14.
  More than 30,000 people were charged with federal drug offenses in 1999, more than double the number 15 years earlier [in 1984], and most of those convicted were drug traffickers, said a Justice Dept. study released [yester]day.... The study by the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics found that only 4% of drug criminals had been convicted of simple possession; 91% were convicted of trafficking. It also found that drug offenders were serving longer sentences. The average prison stay rose to 5½ years in 1999 from 2½ years in 1986.

• Private-prison bailout, letter to editor by Pres. Vincent Schiraldi of Justice Policy Institute in DC, NYT, A26.
  Re "Number of people in state prisons declines slightly" (front page, Aug. 13 [see 8/13 below]): While state prison populations are leveling off, federal prisons continue to grow [accounting for] one-quarter of the increase in America's prisoners in 2000.
  You [NYT] note that a decline in the number of inmates spells bad news for private prison companies. Yet the Federal Bureau of Prisons is currently involved in what amounts to a bailout of the private prison industry. As states pulled out of...contracts [with private prison companies], the federal system accounted for more than 70% of the increase in private prison beds in 2000.
  Congress and the president should learn a lesson from...state [legislatures and governors]. A good start would be to
  • abolish mandatory sentences
  • choose treatment over incarceration for drug offenders
  • and stop relying on private prison companies.
  [This letter provides an interesting reason for avoiding the privatization of government agencies that contain or remedy social problems = if privatized, these functions create a substantial private-sector self-interest in perpetuating the social problems that provide their raison d'etre. An interesting and nettled case-in-the-middle is the CIA, which is still theoretically public-sector but has become so unaccountable to government or anyone else that it functions like extremely private part of the private sector, and makes it impossible in the "Land of the Free" to ever really solve the drug problem or redefine it into a non-problem, whether as a decriminalized lifestyle choice like all the other bad-but-legal things or even as a controlled medical issue like prescription drugs.]

• Official at prison is demoted in clash, NYT, A17.
  The superintendent of New York State's newest maximum-security prison...Thomas A. Eisenschmidt, was demoted to captain..\..Wednesday after he posted a memo calling a corrections officer a "poster child for birth control pills" and challenging him to a fist fight in the parking lot.... [The] memo respond[ed] to a series of mock newsletters put up in the prison by a corrections officer whose identity remains unknown. The newsletters had ridiculed the superintendent and other senior staff members at the Five Points Correctional Facility in Romulus NY.... The demotion was the third of a prison superintendent this year, an unusually high number....

• South Carolina: Guilty plea in prison sex case, by Lino Rodrigues, NYT, A17.
  A former state prison supervisor has pleaded guilty to having sex with Susan Smith, an inmate who was convicted in 1984 of drowning her two children in a lake. The supervisor, Houston Cagle...was arrested last year, and the incident prompted a criminal investigation of several staff members in the state prison system. Another man, Alfred R. Rowe Jr., a former prison captain, was also charged with having sex with Ms. Smith and will go to trial on Sept. 10. Sexual intercourse with an inmate is a felony and carries a maximum of 10 years in prison for each count.

• Number of people in state prisons declines slightly - 3 decades of growth end - Treatment of drug offenders and falling crime rate are cited as likely factors, by Fox Butterfield, NYT, front page.
  The number of inmates in state prisons fell in the second half of last year, the first such decline since the nation's prison boom began in 1972, says a Justice Dept. report [Bureau of Justice Statistics] released yesterday.
  The decline was modest, a drop of 6,200 inmates...or 0.5%....
  [What about the overall prison population?]
  ...In fact, for all of 2000, counting state and federal prisons, the number of inmates actually grew 1.3%, the report said. But that is well below the average growth rate of 6% in the 1990's and [constitutes] the lowest rate of increase since 1972, the report said. \But\ the number of state prisoners rose 500% over the last three decades, even growing each year in the 1990's as crime dropped. The total number of people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, local jails and juvenile detention centers was 2,071,686 at the end of 2000, the report said.... At the end of 2000, there were 1,236,476 people in state prisons and 145,416 federal prisoners..\.. In 1972..after 50 years of stability in the incarceration rate, 200,000 Americans were in state and federal prisons. Now 1.3m are....
  Experts attributed [the tiny drop in state prisons only] to several factors [is this even worth the bother?]:
  • the continuing decline in crime, which began in 1992;
    [a decline in crime doesn't count when you're just locking people up longer for smaller "crimes"]
  • new attitudes about offering drug offenders treatment instead of locking them up;
    [There should be no such thing as lifestyle crimes, such as "drug offenses."]
  • and a greater willingness by parole officers to help parolees instead of sending them back to prison for minor infractions....
    [The prison-industrial complex must be racking their brains how to lobby against this development.]
    A decline in the number of inmates could be bad news for private prison companies, whose stock prices depend on a steadily growing number of inmates, and for some prison guards unions, like the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. The association has been the biggest contributor to a number of California politicians and the most powerful force in the state pushing for tougher sentencing laws, like California's "three strikes and you're out" statute..\..
    [Honest to God, what a barbaric, self-destructive country this has become. This must be how "the first becomes last."]
    John Ferguson, the president and CEO of the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest for-profit prison company, said he had seen some "softness in demand" in Texas, [that is,] a decrease in the number of inmates. But Mr. Ferguson predicted that in the long term the private prison business would continue to flourish because the federal prison system was projected to continue to grow..\..
  Thirteen states experienced a decline in their number of prisoners for the full year..\..Alan J. Beck, the main author of the report...said, led by
  1. Massachusetts, with a drop of 5.6%,
  2. New Jersey, down 5.4%,
  3. New York, down 3.7%,
  4. and Texas, down 3.2%.
  [From the accompanying map, the states with the highest rises in state and federal prison populations in the second half of 2000 were, unranked -
  • Idaho
  • North Dakota
  • Mississippi and
  • Vermont - Shame on Vermont for keeping such company!]
  The three states with the highest incarceration rates, the report found, were
  1. Louisiana, with 801 prisoners per 100,000 residents;
  2. Texas, with 730...
  3. and Mississippi, with 688....
  The states with the lowest incarceration rates were
  1. Minnesota, with 128 inmates per 100,000 residents
  2. Maine, with 129...
  3. and North Dakota, with 158....
     [But since North Dakota is one of the four with the highest rises (above), seems like it's trying to catch up.]

8/10/2001  Sentencing plan seen costing $900m plus, and swelling prisons, by Ralph Ranalli, Boston Globe, front page - Acting Governor Jane m. Swift's proposed guidelines [in Massachusetts] to toughen sentences for criminals would swell the state's prison population by 20%, the draft of a new report...by the state Sentencing Commission..\..predicts.... [The] proposal...mostly reflects the wishes of state prosecutors and keeps intact tough mandatory drug sentences. It also raises potential sentences by 25-35% and would shift "a substantial number of cases from the District Court to the Superior Court," the draft of the Sentencing Commission report states.
Those changes would swell the state's inmate population by 8,690 prisoners by 2009....
[Just what we need - not.]
The increase would be 2,203 in state prisons, which house about 11,000 inmates now, and 6,4878 in country jails, which had a population of 11,136 in 1999....
[Yeah, let's just turn Massachusetts into Alabama and start busing inmates back and forth between overcrowded state and county jails.]
"How can they make any kind of case with a straight face that our state needs a wholesale ratcheting up of the prison population?"..\..Martin Rosenthal, chairman of the guidelines committee of the Mass. Assoc. of Criminal Defense Attorneys...said. "There is no plausible case there that passes the laugh test."

8/02/2001  Former police officer strangled by inmates, AP via Boston Globe, A2.
SAVANNAH - ...because they feared he would expose their plan to escape by chiseling through a wall, authorities said.
[So with him dead, how'd the authorities find out?]
Michael Kelly Deal...who was in jail [for] failing to pay child support was found hanging by a bedsheet in his cell July 24.
[How'd other inmates get into his cell?]
Chatham County authorities originally believed that Deal had committed suicide, but investigators now believe he was strangled with a bandage outside his cell and then dragged inside and strung up, Sheriff Al St. Lawrence said.
[How'd other inmates get out of their cells, get into his cell, get him out and strangled, get him back in, and get back into their cells - all without notice? Something stinks in Savannah.]

8/01/2001  1 prison story -

• Rural towns turn to prisons to reignite their economies, by Peter Kilborn, NYT, front page.
  SAYRE, Okla.- ...As in many other small towns around the country, a three-year-old, $37m, 1,440-inmate, 270-employee, all-male prison is responsible for lifting Sayre's spirits and reigniting its economy. "In my mind, there's no more recession-proof form of economic development," said Jack McKennon...the city manager who persuaded the Corrections Corp. of America to put its prison in Sayre....
  [We agree that there's nothing more counter-cyclical than prisons, but we disagree that they're "economic development" - more like economic decay.]
  In the last decade, 245 prisons sprouted [we say "spawned" as in "spawn of hell"] in 212 of the nation's 2,290 rural counties, many in the Great Plains towns of Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas that had been stripped of family farms and unpended by the collapse of the 1980's oil boom, said Calvin L. Beale, senior demographer at the Economic Research Service of the Agriculture Dept. Mr. Beale said an average of 25 new rural prisons opened each year in the 1990's, up from 16 in the 1980's and 4 in the 1970's.
  [So does this mean that in the 2000's, there are going to be 35 prisons opening every year, and in the 2010's 45, and in the 2020's 55, etc.? Is this the Reagan and Bush families' vision of an America of "family values"? So the future of the Land of the Free is a giant penal colony. Worse even than the nightmare vision of that Star Trek Second Generation episode called "Past Tense" where in c.2025 all the inner cities had been walled off to house the burgeoning population of the unemployed. Guess this is what America is heading for when we're getting it hooked up to our basic braindead goal -]
  Growth followed. In the 212 prison counties, the population rose 12% in the 90's, far more than [the] rate of 1.5% in the preceding decade. Three small Oklahoma cities with new prisons - Hinton, Sayre and Watonga - grew more than 40%....
  [Oh wow, that is sooo impressive! Growth at any cost. Quantity regardless of quality. America the future giant penal colony is also assured when we're spray-painted with people who think like those in the photos -]
  ...Mayor Jack Ivester of Sayre, Okla...called the prison "a super positive for us." [photo caption]
  [Hey, America is turning into its old enemy, the USSR, the so-called "Evil Empire."  This is how "the first becomes last," folks. It's happening before our very eyes. ]

For earlier prison stories, click on the desired date -