Jamie Spencer posts about a  New York Times article addressing the reasons for closing, and the reasons for keeping, our nation’s prisons.  Ask the average taxpayer, and she’ll tell you that we need all those prisons to protect us, to lock away the bad guys so we can sleep at night without fear of a line outside the door of criminals waiting to break into our homes, rob us blind and do other really bad things to us. 

Well, there’s a whole different reason why prisons exist, having far less to do with our “protection”.  For depressed rural areas, they are a gold mine.  For politicians from depressed rural areas, they are a guarantee of re-election.  For anyone who doesn’t live in a depressed, rural area with a brand-spanking new prison, they are a dirty little secret of the redistribution of wealth from your pocket to the pockets of the people who live in those depressed, rural areas.  This might best be called “Republican Welfare,” though the Democrats are not above it either.

As rural economies across the country crumbled in the 1980s and the population of prison inmates swelled, largely because of tougher drug laws, states pushed prison construction as an economic escape route of sorts. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, an average of four prisons were built each year in rural America; the rate quadrupled in the 1980s and reached 24 a year in the 1990s, according to the federal Agriculture Department’s economic research service.

The boom, experts say, provided employment, but it also fostered a cycle of dependency. Depressed rural communities came to rely on the prisons as a source of jobs, economic sustenance and services, with little effort devoted to attracting other viable businesses.

See, and you thought there was no silver lining behind those dark clouds of drug crime.

The problem now, however, is that the numbers of prisoners are beginning to dwindle.  It’s a huge economic misfortune for these prison-dependent towns that people just aren’t committing enough crimes to keep the prisons full and the towns afloat.  Darn criminals.  You can’t even count on them for economic prosperity.

It’s long been widely acknowledged that putting and keeping people in prison is an expensive proposition for the taxpayer.  We’ve been sold on its value by hearing the non-stop virtues of law and order, and incarceration as the cure for so many of society’s ills.  Isn’t it worth it to know that your family is safe at night from violent criminals?  All those people working in the prisons in rural towns are shaking their heads like bobble-head dolls, “yes it is, yes it is.”  They have car payments to make, you know.

It’s not that people have stopped supporting the ever-increasing length of incarceration as the magic bullet that will safeguard our children and stop crime forever.  Indeed, even as crime continues to drop dramatically, the media and politicians continue to play on our fears to keep us interested and believing that the threat is real and omnipresent.

Now I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the demands for ever-higher prison sentences and creating crimes that never before existed is entirely a scam on the public.  At the very least, so many people support this approach that our tough and tougher on crime politicians feed off this tact for years.  But just so you aren’t mislead into thinking that the funding spent on prisons is primarily intended for the good of society, don’t forget that there are depressed, rural areas across America who appreciate your support.

It will be interesting to see how they argue for the need to keep these empty prisons open and well-guarded until they are needed again.  After all, who knows how long it will be before  driving with tinted windows will command a state prison sentence.  And once it is, we’re going to need prisons to house those dastardly criminals.