(NEW YORK) MintPress — For sale: A property in New York’s lush Hudson Valley, complete with a 16-car garage and surrounded by hundreds of yards of lakefront land.
The catch: The seller is the State of New York and the building is an old prison.
Indeed, Governor Andrew Cuomo declared in his first address to the State Legislature at the beginning of 2011 that prisons were “not an employment program” and then proceeded to shut seven of the state’s remaining 67 correctional facilities. That followed a similar move by Cuomo’s predecessor, Governor David Paterson, who closed three prisons in the face of major budget problems.
The state, in fact, has a glut of vacant prisons thanks to a sharp fall in its prison population, and Cuomo is selling them as part of his efforts to reduce the budget deficit, which also include more traditional measures such as freezing wages and consolidating government offices.
“Instead of spending millions maintaining facilities we don’t need, the governor’s approach saves taxpayers millions and opens up transformative economic development and investment opportunities in communities across the state,” said the director of state operations, Howard. B. Glaser.
Among the others up for grabs at rock-bottom prices: a facility situated amidst 69 acres of waterfront land on the west shore of Staten Island, which comes with a two-story gym, a baseball diamond and an open-air pavilion and a property on 20 acres adjoining a state forest, perfect for hunting, trapping and fishing and including both a chapel and a carpentry shop.
Reversal of fortunes
The closures reflect a dramatic change in the state’s prison system. After New York adopted mandatory drug sentences in 1973, the number of inmates in its correctional facilities soared from 13,437 to a peak of 71,472 in 1999. That prompted a boom in prison construction, much of it while Governor Mario Cuomo, the current governor’s father, was in office.
But since then, due to lower crime rates, new programs that allow early release for nonviolent offenders and the easing of its strict drug laws, the number of prisoners has fallen nearly a quarter, to about 55,000, leaving thousands of beds empty.
The trend is not unique to New York. According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of state prisoners nationwide dropped in 2009, and again in 2010, for the first time in about 30 years.
Even in California, which is notorious for its overcrowded prison system, the number of inmates in state facilities has stabilized. After several decades of rapid growth, its prison population peaked at 173,000 in 2006. A gradual decrease then brought it down to 163,000 by the end of 2010.
Still, in May 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that California must obey a lower court order to reduce its prison population, agreeing with federal judges who had found that overcrowding was the main cause of “grossly inadequate provision of medical and mental health care.”
In its decision, the higher court said that the prison system, which has held nearly twice its capacity for more than a decade, should cut the population to 110,000 by the spring of 2013. The justices also set a series of benchmarks for state prisons to reach before then.
A realignment plan instituted by Governor Jerry Brown in October 2011 called for most lower-level and nonviolent offenders to serve their sentences in local jails. Since then, according to prison officials, the state system has processed an average of 933 fewer inmates every week, and by the end of February 2011, the population was down to 141,000.
The developments may be welcomed by those who have criticized the U.S. — with the highest documented incarceration rate in the world (743 per 100,000) — for incarcerating a large number of non-violent and victimless offenders.
Tough sell
Meanwhile, the unused New York facilities have been languishing on the market.
“It’s a building that’s just sitting there,” said Harold Vroman, chairman of the board of supervisors in Schoharie County, where Cuomo shut down a 100-bed minimum security prison last year. “Who wants to buy a jail, you know?”
Not only are most prisons hugely expensive to maintain or demolish, but many are also in rural areas with plenty of undeveloped land and low property prices.
“The stuff out in the middle of nowhere, it probably has nothing,” said Elizabeth Minnis, chairwoman of the American Institute of Architects’ advisory group for correctional facilities. “You’re going to have to just try to get it off your books. It’s almost worth paying somebody to take it off your hands or give it away for free, because it becomes a liability.”
Referring to the 998-bed Oneida Correctional Facility in the city of Rome, which shares utilities with another state prison, local commercial real estate broker Fred Macchia said, “The only possible thing that you could use this for would be for government or military. You couldn’t make it into a hotel. You couldn’t make it into an apartment complex. You’re talking millions of dollars to renovate. Who’s going to do it?”
Cuomo administration officials, however, are now becoming more proactive, reviewing proposals for a new retail development to replace the former Arthur Kill Correctional Facility on Staten Island, and for a manufacturing plant at Camp Georgetown, a shuttered 262-bed prison in central New York.
And in Warwick, in the Hudson Valley, local officials are trying to find a new use for the former Mid-Orange Correctional Facility, looking at ways to split the 763-bed property into smaller units. Several manufacturers have expressed interest in the site. Other ideas included a wildlife sanctuary, a solar power plant and a Greek-style yogurt production facility.
“We didn’t want them to think that we were just going to sit on our hands and let this play out,” said the town supervisor, Michael Sweeton. “We looked at is a great opportunity.”
California, take note.