{"id":1190,"date":"2012-01-05T19:28:14","date_gmt":"2012-01-06T00:28:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/rural-prisons-economic-bane-or-bust.html"},"modified":"2012-01-05T19:28:14","modified_gmt":"2012-01-06T00:28:14","slug":"rural-prisons-economic-bane-or-bust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2012\/01\/rural-prisons-economic-bane-or-bust.html","title":{"rendered":"Rural prisons: economic bane or bust?"},"content":{"rendered":"Some interesting points about prisons from a Georgia blogger.\n

\nKeith McCants posted Wednesday in Peanut Politics,\n\nPrisons as Economic Development: Boom or Bust for Rural Georgia?<\/a>\nIn Georgia today there are more prisoners than farmers. And while\n\n<\/a>\nmost prisoners in Georgia are from urban communities, most prisons\nare now in rural areas with high levels of poverty & a unskilled,\nuneducated workforce. During the last two decades, the large-scale\nuse of incarceration to solve social problems has combined with the\nfall-out of globalization to produce an ominous trend: prisons have\nbecome a “growth industry” in rural Georgia, in fact Rural America.\n

\nCommunities in isolated regions of the state began suffering from\ndeclines in farming, mining, timber-work and manufacturing are now\nbegging for prisons to be built in their backyards. The economic\nrestructuring that began in the troubled decade of the 1980s has had\ndramatic social and economic consequences for rural communities and\nsmall towns. Together the farm crises, factory closings, corporate\ndownsizing, shift to service sector employment and the substitution\nof major regional and national chains for local, main-street\nbusinesses have triggered profound change in these areas.\n<\/blockquote>\nSo, many rural areas have bought into prisons as a growth industry.\n

\nSome consequences are pretty obvious:\n

\nMany small rural towns have become dependent\non an industry which itself is dependent on the continuation of\ncrime-producing conditions.\n<\/blockquote>\nOthers may take more time to see:\n\n\n
\nIronically, while rural areas pursue prisons as a growth strategy,\nwhether this is a wise or effective strategy is far from clear.\nIncreasing evidence suggests that by many measures prisons do not\nproduce economic growth for local economies and can, over the long\nterm, have detrimental effects on the social fabric and environment\nof rural communities. Moreover, this massive penetration of prisons\ninto rural Georgia portends dramatic consequences for the entire\nstate as huge numbers of inmates from urban areas of the state\nbecome rural residents for the purposes of Census-based formulas\nused to allocate government dollars and political representation.\n

\nDespite a lack of studies documenting the effects of prisons on\nrural areas and small towns over time….\n<\/blockquote>\nActually, there are such studies.\nHere’s one about\n\nNew York state counties that have private prisons\nvs. ones that don’t.<\/a>\nThe gist:\n

\nCounties that hosted new prisons received no economic advantage as\nmeasured by per capita income.\n<\/blockquote>\nKeith McCants concludes:\n
\nIndeed, the rural prison boom occurred at a\ntime of falling crime rates and experience shows that the federal\nand state governments are reluctant to pull the plug on the many\ninterests that now lobby for and feed off prisons. Allowed to\ncontinue, this cycle will have catastrophic consequences for the\nhealth and welfare of individuals, families, and communities in\nurban and rural areas, and indeed for the nation.\n<\/blockquote>\nAny rural community with a prison risks ending up like\nLittlefield, Texas<\/a>,\nstuck with a prison that closed, or\n\nGrayson County, Virginia<\/a>\nwhose prison was built but never opened.\n

\n\n<\/a>\nHere’s a place we can stand against the bad economics of private prisons.\n\nWe don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.<\/a>\nSpend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.\nFollow\n\nthis link<\/a>\nto petition the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority.\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"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 […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,1113,40,14,71,8,2,19,72,20],"tags":[8817,1298,8704,8701,8709,8730,7,75,1297,6,8749],"class_list":["post-1190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-cca","category-community","category-economy","category-gdoc","category-georgia","category-government","category-history","category-incarceration","category-law","tag-cca","tag-crime","tag-economy","tag-georgia","tag-history","tag-incarceration","tag-lowndes-county","tag-prison","tag-private-prison","tag-valdosta","tag-vlcia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-jc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}