Reporter Rick Karlin reports on how the closing of  Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility will affect businesses in the Adirondacks. 

 A prison's fate keeps small town on edge

Adirondack community girds for economic impact of prison camp closure

The Times  Union (Albany, NY)

2/1/10, Web site

 

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=895588

 

By  RICK KARLIN, Capitol bureau  

 

MORIAH CENTER -- John Boyea knows all about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He owns a business in the middle of rural upstate New York's prison belt at a time when the facilities, after decades of debate, are starting to close.

 

 Boyea is a native of Moriah, a town squeezed between Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks in eastern Essex County. He attended Hudson Valley Community College, where he learned how to service time-card clocks. Boyea started building a career in the Capital Region, but after changing technology cost him a job he came back to this hamlet, which is basically a three-way intersection with a two-pump gas station.

 

He opened a combination convenience store/pizza shop five years ago, figuring the guards, teachers and other employees of the state prison system's nearby Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility would provide a steady stream of business.

 

Now that's all about to change due to the state's plans to close Moriah next year, along with three other prisons.

 

Boyea said some of the prison workers who stop for cigarettes, pizza and chicken wraps tell him they still can't believe the prison will actually close.

 

"Some of the guards have said that (closure) has been looked at in the past, but nothing ever came of it," said Boyea. Indeed, Albany lawmakers have for years talked about closing upstate prisons to save money and conform to the state's lower inmate population.

 

But now prisons are actually closing down. Last year, the state shuttered three minimum security camps: Mount McGregor in Saratoga County, Gabriels in Franklin County and Pharsalia in Chenango County as well as seven "annexes" (additional housing units) at prisons across upstate.

 

There are several reasons for the closures. Rockefeller Drug Law reforms and demographic changes have led to fewer inmates. And last year, Democrats took control of the state Senate for the first time since the mid-1960s. The Senate had been an upstate Republican stronghold that could be counted on to ensure that prisons, a steady source of good jobs, remained open.

 

Democrats, including many from New York City, had complained that prisons were being used to support what they termed a "prison-industrial complex" that provided jobs for correction officers as well as police, prosecutors and others in the criminal justice system.

 

The Senate turnover and the state's ongoing budget crisis have set the stage for more closures.

 

But while scholars could spend years debating the effects of easing drug laws and prison closures, the local economic impact is immediate and palpable.

 

"Get ready to lose some jobs and some population," said Dennis Brown, who was supervisor of Pharsalia, a 250-inmate minimum-security prison camp that closed last year after more than four decades of operation.

 

The Moriah shock camp opened in the late 1980s at the site of an abandoned iron mine. "They shut down for vacation, and they never reopened," said Moriah Town Supervisor Tom Scozzafava. The summer 1971 shutdown by Republic Steel cost 600 jobs.

 

Scozzafava's grandfather came from Italy to work in what was then the Witherbee Sherman mine, which supplied ore for horseshoes used in the Civil War and tracks for the transcontinental railroad.

 

That same year, the Adirondack Park Agency was created. While it protected the region's wilderness, Scozzafava and other locals say the park also limited new residential and industrial development, hurting job opportunities.

 

The area's woes were highlighted in then-Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's 1984 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, in which he offered a rebuke to President Ronald Reagan's image of America as a "shining city on a hill."

 

New York and the rest of the nation, Cuomo said, was actually two cities. "In our family are gathered everyone from the abject poor of Essex County in New York to the enlightened affluent of the gold coasts of both ends of our nation," he said.

 

His remarks created a political firestorm in the region, prompting Cuomo to visit and apologize. The governor said he meant to be illustrative rather than knock his own constituents.

 

The "abject poor" remark -- the mention of which still draws scowls around Moriah -- "played a big role" in the state's decision to build the shock facility in Essex County, Scozzafava said.

 

The shock camp, which currently houses 178 inmates and employs 102, uses a military boot camp approach for inmates designed to help with rehabilitation. A sign at the prison's entrance touts it as a "Gateway to Excellence."

 

The prison is the area's second-largest employer. The largest also is taxpayer-funded: a regional center for the disabled.

 

A visit to the area illustrates how dependent Moriah is on the prison and other forms of public-sector spending. Heading toward the town after leaving Interstate 87, you pass through a winding forest road. Hard by the road, two large two-family wood-frame buildings sit in varying states of decay.

 

Years ago, they housed miners. "Most of those are empty," said Cheryl LaDuc, a clerk at the prison who is one of dozens of townspeople pushing to keep the facility open.

 

Officials say state employees will get "bumping rights" that will enable them to transfer to jobs at other prisons if Moriah closes. But most of those are easily an hour away. LaDuc and many others have concluded that, just like the miners, correction staffers will simply move away if the facility closes.

 

Employees aren't the only ones taking the new closure plan seriously: Top state union leaders were among the more than 200 people who attended a meeting Thursday in nearby Port Henry.

 

Crammed into the Knights of Columbus hall were Ken Brynien, president of the Public Employees Federation, and Donn Rowe, president of the Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association. Officials from the Civil Service Employees Association were there, as well as GOP state Sen. Betty Little and Assembly members Tony Jordan and Teresa Sayward.

 

Unions view the fate of Moriah as an omen of worse things to come, with facilities in Clinton, St. Lawrence and Wayne counties scheduled to close next year.

 

For many at the meeting, the potential closure was the second economic shock they've experienced recently. Since October, many residents who work in Vermont have seen their commuting time doubled or tripled after the Champlain Bridge in nearby Crown Point was closed and then demolished due to structural decay. "It's a double whammy," LaDuc saod.

 

Vermont has an IBM plant in Burlington, some 60 miles away. There's a Goodrich aerospace factory 20 miles away. There's also a lower-tech Cabot Cheese plant.

 

Gov. David Paterson on Wednesday announced the imminent opening of a free commuter ferry that will operate until the new bridge is built.

 

The relief of that news, however, was cold comfort -- an additional reminder of how dependent they are on the state and how helpless they feel.

 

Reach Karlin at 454-5758 or rkarlin@timesunion.com.