There are fewer incarcerated people in New York State's prisons, and fewer staff, too. And it's harder to recruit new corrections officers than ever before. That's partly what the prison strike earlier this spring was all about. So the state is arguing now fewer inmates, fewer staff, close more prisons. When just 50 years ago, they were building new prisons like crazy. So today we take a step back and look at the factors behind the boom and bust of the prison system in New York.
That's today's story of the day. Support for story of the day comes from Pearsall Wealth Management at UBS Wealth Management USA. Subsidiary UBS AG. Member FINRA SIPC. One Broad Street, Glens Falls. Hey, I'm David Summerstein. It's Monday, April 28th. First up, sinkhole update. The main route between the Canton-Potsdam area and Tupper Lake has been closed for nearly two months after a sinkhole opened up on the road.
Catherine Wheeler got a tour of the worksite on Friday and reports the road could open as early as tomorrow. On March 1st, a plow driver spotted a hole in the road on Route 56, about five miles north of Seavey's Corner. The hole was about five feet in diameter, but when you looked in, a 30-foot-long piece of road beneath it had collapsed. A bit worrisome because there was no gravel supporting the blacktop that was there.
That's Robert Haynes, the DOT's regional director here. He says the department closed the road that night, and within two days, crews were on site to dig down roughly 23 feet and expose the culvert running under the road. Haynes says it took about a week. When we got down to the culvert and looking at it, we noticed some damage on it. And we made the determination that since we had it exposed, it's a 100-year-old box cover. It was down there. It was constructed in 1928.
that now was the time to replace it with a new structure. The culvert was cracked. Sand and gravel had gotten in there and caused the road to collapse. Haynes says previous construction also contributed to the road's damage. This part of Route 56 was reconstructed in the 1980s. At the time, the DOT decided to leave the existing road and build the new one over top. What we feel occurred was the materials under that existing concrete road that's down there 8 to 10 feet.
got sucked into the culvert, got sucked out of the bank over many decades. After weeks of work, crews are putting on some of the final touches. Big machines go back and forth hauling gravel and rocks that'll support the shiny new guardrails. A small section of the highway is dirt and rocks. That's where they installed the new culvert. Haynes says this one is bigger and better than its century-old predecessor.
It's buried into the ground, and at the bottom, it's filled with materials that are similar to the stream bed. If we do go down there and take a look at it, you'll see that in the box is 18 inches of... gravel similar to the stream bed to provide a habitat or a way for aquatic organisms to flow through the upstream.
Haynes walks me down the steep slope to the forest below. The ground around the stream is coated in teal, what looks to be drier lint. But Haynes says that's a grass seed to replace what construction tore up. It's all over the rocks they've added around the stream to reinforce it, and the water bubbles right through the new concrete box.
Haynes says crews are planning to finish up their work within the next few days. The plan is to pave the road, then open it to traffic while crews finish installing new guardrails. but the timeline depends on the weather. Soon, though, the main connection between Potsdam and Tupper Lake will be open once again. Catherine Wheeler, North Country Public Radio in southern St. Lawrence County.
New York has closed more than a dozen prisons in recent decades, and five more could be on the chopping block in the next year. But the closures are also the result of the state's prison building strategy in the 1980s and 90s. Emily Russell spoke with Jacob Harris, a PhD candidate from Cornell University. He published a paper a few years ago about why New York and two other states now account for one third of all prison closures around the U.S.
So New York State had a really aggressive stance toward prison building where it wasn't just about filling enough beds to keep pace with the rising incarcerated population, but it was also about economic stimulus in these rural communities that were struggling to have a good job.
for the members of the communities and so the state and this is something that we see a lot of in states like north carolina and texas as well they use these prisons as economic development opportunities so instead of saying let's just build A few large prisons where we're going to put most of the incarcerated population. We're going to spread these prisons out in these rural areas. And so these rural areas can have jobs.
And what did you find in terms of the actual economic impact that prisons had on especially some of these more rural communities? Did it actually pan out to the promise that was made to those communities or did it not? So the best work that we've seen on this is that building prisons really had pretty negligible.
effects on the local economy, at least in terms of what you can get out of a quantitative economic analysis. You're certainly going to have some individual people, some individual businesses. that might be positively or negatively affected. On average, though, what we've seen is that the prison boom largely failed to live up to its promise of providing economic prosperity to these communities.
There was a mention in the paper about one of the more maybe real economic benefits was through hidden subsidies from tax dollars could you explain that a bit more so yeah essentially you have these relatively small rural communities with you know sometimes you might only have a population of a couple thousand and then
when you add in a large prison to that community with a large incarcerated population that might be a couple thousand, all of a sudden you're really substantially increasing the size of that community, at least as is being measured through the census.
or through different data sources. And so what that means is there's more tax dollars going to these communities. And so that's really what's meant by this hidden subsidy is by in a way, artificially increasing the population of that community, these communities are getting more money from the state or federal government. What are the impacts of a place like New York really focusing on the economic impact of prisons for 30 years?
And how is that playing out in prison closures compared to other states that weren't as explicit about using prisons as economic drivers? Yeah, so one of the main things that we see in our paper is a very clear pattern of the states that have the most aggressive prison building strategies. have then gone on to close by far the most prisons. So the three states that really stand out in building large numbers of prisons are New York, Texas, and North Carolina.
They really stand far and away above other states in the number of prisons that they built. And then we also see they stand far and away above other states in the number of prisons that they've closed. North Carolina is actually the leader in this, but New York is not far. Why does that matter? Like, what do you think the implications are today from the prison closures we've seen, but like the broader impact of New York taking that?
strategy back then and now closing so many prisons in the last 10-15 years. Well, it really ended up being a raw deal for these communities that went out of their way and advocated to the state government, promised the state government all of this land, all of this support for building a prison there. where just a couple decades later the state realizes
We built too many prisons. We have too much of this infrastructure. It's going unused. We need to cut back on the budget. And so those surplus prisons then provide a convenient... option for the state to say, well, we're going to close this prison. You know, so just a couple decades later, you see these states suffering those consequences. You know, I know this paper was published a couple years ago, but Obviously, there's been a lot of upheaval in New York's prison system.
particularly with the recent prison strike by COs all across the state. So I wonder if like what's been happening with the system in the last few months has it made you see the prison system differently in the prison economy or just like has it changed the way you thought about this kind of research so i think the thing with new york that that we've seen really recently with these strikes is that it reflects
among correctional officers nationwide. And that's causing this cyclical pattern of where conditions in prisons get worse, it's harder to hire more officers. And it's really a pernicious pattern that we've... gotten stuck in, especially since the pandemic.
That was Jacob Harris, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell, speaking with Emily Russell. Music today by Mark Corey of Watertown and Muskox of Ottawa. It's Election Day in Canada. Neighbors to the North, get out and vote. I'm David Summerstein, North Country.