WSU Researcher article

This document was shared at the Town Council Meeting last Monday by the Coopers. When you come across residents or citizens that believe the prison may be a benefit, please direct them to this article for further understanding what a 'detention center' may do to our community.

WSU
Researchers Find Prisons Offer Few Economic Benefits to Small Towns

Monday,
July 19, 2004

PULLMAN,
Wash. -- Throughout a boom in correctional facility
construction that has spanned the past three decades, many of the
nation’s most depressed rural communities have vied to become a
site for new prisons, expecting significant economic benefits would
follow.

As the U.S. prison population grew almost 400 percent
between 1980 and 1998 – to about 1.3 million inmates – it
became widely accepted economic development dogma that communities
that secured prison projects could expect significant economic
rewards.

Although such claims met skepticism among some
social scientists, there was scant evidence available to dispute them
until the publication this year of the results of a research effort
led by Gregory Hooks, chairman of the department of sociology at
Washington State University.

Done in collaboration with WSU
sociologists Clay Mosher and Thomas
Rotolo and Linda Lobao, an Ohio State
University sociologist and recent president of the Rural Sociological
Society – the study turned up some surprising results.

“We
found no evidence that prison expansion has stimulated economic
growth,” Hooks said of the nationwide study that assessed of
the impact of both new and existing prisons over the past 25 years.


In fact, in findings that proved the most dramatic reversal
of conventional wisdom on the subject, the new study concluded that
becoming home to a prison facility may actually hinder economic
development efforts, particularly in rural communities that are
already hard-pressed.

“We provide evidence that
prison construction has actually impeded economic growth in those
rural communities that were already growing at a slower pace.”
Hooks said. “Among slow-growing counties, it appears that new
prisons do more harm than good.”

Unlike prior studies,
which the researchers said relied largely on the perceptions of
business leaders or considered only a small number of study sites,
the most recent research analyzed the economic impacts of prisons on
communities in more than 3,100 counties throughout 48 states.

It
suggests that three major traditional indicators of economic
well-being in rural communities – growth in earnings, per
capita income, and employment – consistently showed relatively
little improvement as the result of local prison construction
throughout the period from 1969 to 1994.

“There is a
visible pattern of earnings and employment growth,” Hooks
noted. “However, those counties without a prison have the
highest annual rate of growth – and those with a newly built
prison grew at the slowest pace.”

While the researchers
suggest additional study is needed to explain why prisons seem to
impede economic growth in some communities, they believe the findings
are an indication small towns may be paying too high a premium in
their efforts to attract such facilities.

“The
increasing practice of host communities competing to provide
incentives is shifting prison infrastructure investment costs from
corrections bureaucracies to local governments,” Hooks said.


“Desperate for jobs, rural counties are diverting large
portions of limited infrastructure budgets to support a correctional
facility,” he said. “As a result, the infrastructure may
become ill-suited for other potential employers, and local
governments may have fewer funds left over for other investments in
the local infrastructure.”

In a follow-up paper that has
yet to be published, WSU’s Mosher worked with sociologists from
Mississippi State University to identify factors that may contribute
to the lack of economic growth experienced in communities that accept
prison facilities.

Led by Peter B. Wood, a sociologist with
the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at
Mississippi State, this most recent research paper points out that
the vast majority of prison construction jobs, and even the majority
of internal prison jobs – some 60 percent nationally – go
to workers from outside the communities where new prisons are
sited.

“They are most likely to live in a neighboring
community with more amenities and no prison,” Wood said.
“Thus, their consumer behaviors – shopping, banking,
housing, schooling, etc. – usually influence markets outside
the prison community.”

Once a county or community is
known as a “prison town,” discussion of other kinds of
economic development often evaporates, the researchers noted.

Indeed
– in a trend that has had an increasingly detrimental impact on
employment and wages in small communities and elsewhere – the
researchers note that private companies increasingly are hiring
inmates at sub-standard wages in an effort to lower their employment
costs.

“In recent years, inmates have engaged in jobs
ranging from telemarketing to the manufacturing of computer circuit
boards and furniture,” Mosher said. “Prisoners in
California have served as booking agents for Trans World Airlines,
while Microsoft uses convicts to assist in the shipping of Windows
software. Honda pays $2 an hour to prisoners in Ohio to do the same
jobs that members of the United Auto Workers Union were once paid $20
an hour to do.”

The researchers cite several earlier
studies involving companies that have begun employing prisoners, only
to close down their outside operations elsewhere. In one example
researched in 1999, a Texas-based company named American
Microelectronics employed approximately 150 workers at its
headquarters in Austin before shutting down its operations there and
reopening within a Texas prison with an all-inmate workforce.

While
concluding that most of the anticipated economic benefits of housing
prisoners in small communities rarely materialize, the study found
evidence there can be another type of significant financial reward
for small communities willing to host relatively large prison
populations.

“The exception seems to be in towns where
inmates may represent a large proportion or even a majority of the
total population and the town is able to qualify for more state and
federal aid dollars,” Mosher said.

As an example,
researchers cite the case of Florence, Arizona, which recorded a 2000
census population of 17,054 – only 5,224 of whom live outside
local prison walls. With two state prisons, three private prisons,
and a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service detention center,
prisoners account for 70 percent of the town’s population,
which is the highest nationally of any town of more than 10,000.


Since inmates count as residents for U.S. Census purposes,
the researchers said Florence has twice paid for special recounts to
update its population, each time increasing the town’s share of
state and federal funding, which now amounts to more than $4 million
per year.

But relatively few small communities play host to
such disproportionately large prison populations or enjoy major
windfalls in government funding. And despite prevailing claims and
expectations to the contrary, the statistical data published earlier
this year by Hooks and his colleagues provide strong evidence that
seeking to benefit economically from prison construction can be an
inherently risky proposition.

“Ironically, despite sharp
ideological and intellectual differences, the critics and the
advocates of the prison-construction boom share the assumption that
prisons have contributed to local growth, especially in hard pressed
local areas,” said Hooks. “Regardless of the ideology and
political aims, claims that prison construction accelerates local
economic development fly in the face of mounting evidence that state
and local initiatives rarely impact local growth; and these claims
are contradicted by our analysis.”