The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The new jail, however, seems to be a done deal; indeed, Hampden County Sheriff Mike Ashe is now asking for another $6 million to add 56 more cells. That would require the approval of the Legislature and the Romney administration to raise the bond ceiling on the project--approval opponents concede is likely to be given. The sheriff's department says the jail will improve conditions for female inmates, who right now are outnumbered by men 11 to 1 at the co-ed jail in Ludlow. That imbalance means there's no room for women, the majority of whom are locked up for non-violent crimes, usually drug-related, to get the services the new jail will offer, such as drug treatment, classes, job training and re-entry programs.

But to Comerford, there's something wrong when those kinds of services are most readily available behind bars. "Mazel tov, Sheriff Ashe--great, you're throwing someone a bone," she says. "But a woman shouldn't have to get locked up to get healthcare, to get her addiction looked at, to get a GED. What I'm interested in is the root cause of what brought her to jail."

And that root cause, adds activist Holly Richardson of the Statewide Harm Reduction Coalition, is almost invariably poverty, exacerbated by a classist and racist system that views some people as throw-always. About one-third of the women now at Ludlow, she estimates, are there waiting trial. "We're talking about poor people who can't make bail, who end up for months waiting for trial because the court system is backlogged," and therefore are more likely to take a plea bargain to get home sooner.

"If you or I are arrested, we're going to find a way to bail out, and then we're going to hire a private attorney to handle it while we're at home," she says. For a poor woman, time in jail could mean losing her job, her housing, her kids.

The jail does come with financial incentives for the city of Chicopee, which receives a $10,000 mitigation fee for each cell; the proposed expansion would boost that total to $1.76 million. The state also paid the city $1.3 million for the land and committed $2.6 million for infrastructure work on Center Street.

Mayor Michael Bissonnette says the jail is key to redeveloping that corner of his city, now distinguished by overgrown weeds, junkyards and the burnt-out shell of the old American Bosch plant. "Two years from now that entire corridor will be developed," says Bissonnette, who sees the area as "a springboard for new business."

Bissonnette, a former criminal defense lawyer, says he has sympathy for the case made by jail opponents and supports preventative programs and alternatives to incarceration. "As a practical matter, I'd rather see money spent on these types of services at a point prior to incarceration," he says. Still, he adds, the reality is that some women are going to end up in jail; now, at least, "they're going to be housed in a progressive facility that's new and clean, and hopefully will get the services necessary to gain skills, education, maybe get some guidance for post-incarceration."

Lois Ahrens, director of the Northampton-based Real Cost of Prisons Project, is exasperated by arguments that jails lead to economic development; she points to multiple studies showing the exact opposite (see www.realcostofprisons.org). "Jails and prisons are in this category of industries of last resort," she says. "Jails and prisons, toxic waste dumps, pig farms -- those are in the communities that have given up thinking there's any hope, so they settle for this."

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