The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

It has been just a month since the prison emptied out, but its loss has taken a toll on new business ventures in Lake County. Without an anchor in the area, a number of projects and renovations have been put on hold, including a new hotel and a manufactured housing community, said Jim Truxton, village of Baldwin president and owner of a few H&R Block offices in the area.
"We didn't see the prison as being 'the thing,' but we saw it as a base to build on," Truxton said.
What state and local officials didn't count on was fewer violent young offenders than projected. Young inmates who had been in the Lake County facility were moved to other prisons last month. The state's prison capacity is just short of 49,000 and isn't expected to hit capacity until March 2008, according to Department of Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan.
"We saw these young offenders committing violent acts so this facility was intended, designed and constructed to house those offenders," Marlan said. "Six years later, we have not seen that population we thought was going to develop. It was just a business decision."
Located about 90 miles from Grand Rapids and 36 miles from Lake Michigan, Baldwin has a modest tourism industry but not much else. It's on the way to the ferry stop in Ludington and local officials are creating a museum in nearby Idlewild to mark the former resort area popular among blacks during the Jim Crow era. But it's not expected to be finished for another year.
The area doesn't have an agricultural base because the land is too sandy -- only jack pine and scrub oak can grow. No major manufacturing facilities exist for fear they will pollute the river basin, which could mean fewer visitors during the summer and the hunting season.
"We're not near the markets, we're not near the raw materials and we don't have a trained labor force and no infrastructure, so how would you attract anything else?" asks Debi Smith-Olson, president of Lake-Osceola State Bank. "It's just not possible and we've been trying."
Marlan says prisons shouldn't be used as tools to promote economic development because they are expensive to operate and are intended to do only one thing: protect the public.
Tracy Huling, a consultant based in upstate New York who has researched the economies of areas near prisons, said the situation in Baldwin shows short-term thinking by both state and local officials. She said the two sides should have been working together to determine whether there were other options for the prison.
"States have been creating penal colonies for years and there are consequences," she said. "It's understandable to see how folks get into this situation, but someone has to take the leadership role and say there's got to be a better way."
Community leaders insist they tried to attract new businesses to the area during the six years the prison was open. They applied for and received a $3 million federal grant to develop a strategic plan for the area and Baldwin received a Renaissance Zone designation from the state to encourage development.
"We've had lots of ideas and we've tried them all," Connie Theunick-Perley, director of the Michigan State University Extension in Baldwin, said before a recent meeting among community leaders.
Local officials met with Gov. Jennifer Granholm last month to talk about the future of the area.
Since then, they have been working on a list of projects they think would help alleviate the loss of the prison. Although they want to diversify their economy, their top recommendation to the governor is reopening the prison.
Without it, they said the area will lose out on hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue and fees for the area school district, local governments and the water and sewer systems, which were built to accommodate the large facility. They also said they may have to shut down the water system and drain the water tower because there won't be enough flow to keep the water from becoming stagnant or freezing in the winter.
Despite their efforts, reopening the prison appears unlikely. The state budget remains tight and the state is being sued over its decision to end its lease with the GEO Group by the Boca Raton, Fla.-based company, the Village of Baldwin and Webber Township.
http://www.southbendtribune.com/stories/2005/11/21/local.20051121-sbt-MICH-B1-Prison_economic.sto