Oregon: Prisons, Prisons and More Prisons

Oregon’s major “public works” project over the last decade has been the building of prisons. In ten years, Oregon has added more than 7,000 prison beds, bringing it to a current capacity of over 11,000—a lot of prison beds for a state with less than 3.5 million people. At the same time, crime rates significantly declined (a decline which began several years before the introduction of harsher sentencing). And this huge growth in prisons continues unabated: the state is planning to build an additional six prisons within the next seven years, adding another 4,000 beds or more. Meanwhile, Oregon is in a state of fiscal crisis and for months has had the highest unemployment rates in the nation. All of this means less money in state coffers, and painful cuts are being made to K-12 education, higher education, and human services. One thing that has not been cut is the prison construction program.

The building of more prisons is just the tip of the iceberg of the corrections budget. Once the prisons are built and filled, the state must commit to much larger annual operating costs. Since the 1993-95 biennium, the Department of Corrections (DOC) operating budget has ballooned from $377 million to just under $1 billion. The DOC budget now surpasses the state budget for higher education and is poised to grow aggressively with the addition of new prisons. The argument has been made that protecting the entire public safety budget is essential to providing for community safety. The curious thing is, plenty of other public safety programs, including the state police, and all four rural forensics labs, have taken significant cuts. No, in Oregon it seems to be just the prison-building program that is sacred. What gives?

The Prison Build-up: Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

The main driver of the prison build-up in Oregon is the state’s mandatory sentencing law (Measure 11), passed by voters in 1994. Promoted as a law to lock-up repeat, violent offenders (with a racially biased ad campaign that focused on “gang members”), Measure 11 related cases are now approximately half of all new commitments. Many people sentenced under Measure 11 are first-time offenders. What the campaign to pass Measure 11 failed to address was the huge cost to taxpayers of locking up thousands more individuals for much longer periods of time.

While the Governor and most legislators opposed the passage of Measure 11, they lost no time in cranking up the big prison-building campaign. In early 1996, Governor John Kitzhaber acknowledged in a public speech that “locating a prison facility can be akin to locating a toxic waste dump.” Clearly, local communities might have strong feelings about being turned into prison towns. The state’s solution? Move fast and site the prisons before broad community input could be heard. Declaring an emergency, the legislature passed “supersiting” legislation that allowed the state to site all new prisons without the usual land-use planning review. In less than six months in 1996, the state chose multiple sites.

Economic Development or Economic Disaster?

The increase in incarceration rates may have been the impetus for the prison-building boom, but state officials and elected leaders quickly put a new spin on it. Building a prison was presented as a good economic development strategy for struggling small towns (all but one of the prison sites are in economically depressed rural communities). The DOC sent brochures to small town governments emphasizing that they could provide full-time, family wage jobs with the new facilities (interestingly, the word “prison” was never used in the brochure). The brochure also stressed how good the “facilities” would be for local business: goods and supplies could be purchased from local vendors, local contractors could be used to provide education and counseling, there would be access to a low-cost workforce (prisoners) for community works projects, and opportunities for private industry to access labor (again, prisoners) for jobs that are difficult to fill.

Some local communities took the bait. Local politicians, desperate to see more jobs and in some cases seeing an opportunity for personal gain, expressed interest in having a prison come to town. Once these local governments expressed interest, the state juggernaut took over. In nearly every case, local residents did not know in advance that their local officials were inviting a prison to town. Once they found out and expressed their opposition, it was too late—the invitation had been made and from then on all decisions would be made by the state.

The question of whether or not the prisons will bring economic development has not been answered. But initial evidence, and comparisons with similar small towns in California that have been saddled with prisons over the past twenty years indicate that the long-term costs to the communities far outweigh the benefit. There are a few things we do know about the situation in Oregon that should be cause for alarm in any town selected for a prison.

The promise of local contracts to provide education and counseling services is false. The DOC is known for preferring to use its own people to provide all services inside. That, combined with the cuts in services to prisoners, resulted in the elimination last year of nearly fifty teachers from the local community college who were hired to provide education services at the Ontario prison (the state’s first big expansion project). So much for local contracts. 

While towns may get a little money to improve local infrastructure (e.g. roads, water lines) needed for the prison, the long-term costs will burden local economies. For example, in Lakeview recent contracts with local government make plain that once the road improvements and water system for the prison are in place, it will be the local community’s responsibility to maintain them in perpetuity. In addition, the DOC required in their contracts that they be the number one priority for use of water in the community, and for snow removal on the roads. So for a relatively modest amount of money and a few temporary local jobs, Lakeview has essentially signed away its water rights and placed local workers and families second to the prison when it comes to clearing the roads during the fierce winter storms that are common in that remote part of the state. And to top it all off, local taxpayers will pay for maintaining the roads and water services to the prison forever.

It is true that the DOC will provide an extremely low-cost prisoner work force to local governments and businesses—which could cut jobs for local residents. Current policy allows private businesses to hire a crew of ten prisoners for $400 per day (the cost of providing a DOC supervisor for each crew). In rural communities where low-wage and seasonal jobs make up the bulk of local employment, the probability of increasing “free world” unemployment is high.

Playing Fast & Loose With Tax Dollars

State officials like to say that the money for building prisons is “other money,” implying that we shouldn’t worry about how much we’re spending. But as everyone knows, there is no such thing as a free lunch. This money doesn’t drop from the sky. It comes in the form of “certificates of participation”, a type of bond that gets paid for out of the state’s General Fund. In other words, Oregon’s taxpayers are paying back the prison debt—currently to the tune of $100 million in debt payments each biennium. With new construction, this will likely double. And this comes out of the same pot of money that’s used to fund schools, healthcare, roads and other basic services. So the more money we tie-up in prison debt, the less money is available for other programs.

Those initial bond sales, however, provided quite a windfall to the DOC. Since 1995, DOC has had over $800 million in bond money to play with. In fact, after construction of the new prisons in Umatilla and Wilsonville, it turned out that the DOC was sitting on about $50 million they’d saved on those projects (money that, as recently as the spring of 2001, they did not acknowledge they had). That’s quite a little slush fund. Given the state budget crisis and threatened cuts to their operating budget, the DOC offered up this money to offset program costs. So taxpayers will be footing the debt payments on this $50 million for the next twenty-five years, but the money has been used to pay short-term, immediate expenses. And there is reason to wonder if there are additional pots of bond money sitting around. At a recent public meeting in Lakeview, DOC staff said they could fund a costly geothermal well project out of other “savings” they had on hand. Too bad the schools don’t have money hidden away somewhere—they sure could use it right now.

Bucking the Trend & Moving Backward

Across the country, many states are finding themselves in the same tough economic situation. And the growth in corrections spending over the past decade has come under closer scrutiny as states are forced to make hard choices about scarce resources. But in Oregon, state leaders are looking firmly—backward. Meanwhile, more and more community advocates are starting to question the trade-off between prisons and other programs, and recent polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that building more prisons does nothing to solve the problem of crime.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of Justice Matters.