Some interesting points about prisons from a Georgia blogger.

Keith McCants posted Wednesday in Peanut Politics,

Prisons as Economic Development: Boom or Bust for Rural Georgia?
In Georgia today there are more prisoners than farmers. And while


most prisoners in Georgia are from urban communities, most prisons
are now in rural areas with high levels of poverty & a unskilled,
uneducated workforce. During the last two decades, the large-scale
use of incarceration to solve social problems has combined with the
fall-out of globalization to produce an ominous trend: prisons have
become a “growth industry” in rural Georgia, in fact Rural America.

Communities in isolated regions of the state began suffering from
declines in farming, mining, timber-work and manufacturing are now
begging for prisons to be built in their backyards. The economic
restructuring that began in the troubled decade of the 1980s has had
dramatic social and economic consequences for rural communities and
small towns. Together the farm crises, factory closings, corporate
downsizing, shift to service sector employment and the substitution
of major regional and national chains for local, main-street
businesses have triggered profound change in these areas.

So, many rural areas have bought into prisons as a growth industry.

Some consequences are pretty obvious:

Many small rural towns have become dependent
on an industry which itself is dependent on the continuation of
crime-producing conditions.

Others may take more time to see:

Ironically, while rural areas pursue prisons as a growth strategy,
whether this is a wise or effective strategy is far from clear.
Increasing evidence suggests that by many measures prisons do not
produce economic growth for local economies and can, over the long
term, have detrimental effects on the social fabric and environment
of rural communities. Moreover, this massive penetration of prisons
into rural Georgia portends dramatic consequences for the entire
state as huge numbers of inmates from urban areas of the state
become rural residents for the purposes of Census-based formulas
used to allocate government dollars and political representation.

Despite a lack of studies documenting the effects of prisons on
rural areas and small towns over time….

Actually, there are such studies.
Here’s one about

New York state counties that have private prisons
vs. ones that don’t.
The gist:

Counties that hosted new prisons received no economic advantage as
measured by per capita income.

Keith McCants concludes:

Indeed, the rural prison boom occurred at a
time of falling crime rates and experience shows that the federal
and state governments are reluctant to pull the plug on the many
interests that now lobby for and feed off prisons. Allowed to
continue, this cycle will have catastrophic consequences for the
health and welfare of individuals, families, and communities in
urban and rural areas, and indeed for the nation.

Any rural community with a prison risks ending up like
Littlefield, Texas,
stuck with a prison that closed, or

Grayson County, Virginia
whose prison was built but never opened.

Here’s a place we can stand against the bad economics of private prisons.

We don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.
Spend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.
Follow

this link
to petition the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority.

-jsq