OR: Rural Prisons Fail to Fulfill Economic Promises
May 8, 2006 - 3:35pm
Deer Ridge Correctional Institution is scheduled to open in 2007 in the central Oregon town of Madras. Like many rural towns in Oregon and other states, Madras needs more jobs and a better local economy. In the 1990s, the Oregon Department of Corrections convinced city leaders that a prison would be the economic development project the community needed.
Washington State University, Iowa State University, and The Sentencing Project have each published studies of prison towns showing that rural prisons don't provide the type of economic benefits the City of Madras is expecting.
Rural towns with prisons have less job growth and economic development than similar towns without prisons. Why? Because prisons don’t function like a regular business or industry. They don’t pay business or property taxes. They employ fewer local workers than promised, and prisoners often compete with local people for minimum wage jobs. Prisons rely on central distribution centers instead of buying supplies locally.
New jobs are the main hook for small towns who court prisons, but current Department of Corrections (DOC) staff have the first chance at jobs when a new prison opens. Representatives from the Oregon DOC initially promised Madras that 70% of jobs in the prison would go to residents. Several years later, corrections officials decreased that percentage to 60%, and this year DOC spokespeople said that maybe 50% of the prison’s employees would be hired locally. And inmate work crews compete with outside workers for low wage jobs, decreasing the amount of minimum wage work available locally. Prisoners at Snake River Correctional Institution (SRCI) in Ontario sort onions for a frozen food company and do park maintenance.
Prison towns also bank on prison staff living and shopping in the town. But in rural Oregon, corrections staff choose to commute from other towns. In Umatilla, sixty of the 400 people who work at Two Rivers Correctional Institution live in Umatilla. At SRCI, only 42% of the staff live in Oregon. The rest live in Idaho.
This news brief is based on a story from the Bend Bulletin, “Prisons Fail Economic Hopes.” For the complete article, check their archive.
