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January 06, 2007
OK: Spavinaw Debates Prison Plan
Spavinaw debates prison plan
By RHETT MORGAN World Staff Writer
1/5/2007
SPAVINAW -- Angel Green has no health insurance and works two jobs to make do, so talk of industry in her small Mayes County town of Spavinaw -- even if that industry is a private prison -- excites her.
"A lot of people here are retirees," Green said of residents who are lured here by the community's scenic waterside setting on Spavinaw Lake.
"What they don't understand is that there is a younger generation here that is living at the poverty level or below."
A standing-room only crowd of least 130 people turned out Thursday evening for a town meeting to discuss whether the community will embrace a private prison.
Leaders of the Florida-based GEO Group Inc. told the audience that the company is considering expanding its for-profit facilities.
Although it is looking at several sites, the company has proposed erecting a 1,000-bed prison in Spavinaw, a move that GEO claims would generate 200 jobs.
State Rep. Doug Cox, R-Grove, said Thursday that a prison in Spavinaw could boost the economy in the town of 600 people.
"I view this as an industry that doesn't pollute the water, doesn't pollute the ground, doesn't cause the air to smell," he said.
Cox said more than 25 percent of residents in his legislative district
receive food stamps and that at
least 50 percent have no health insurance.
Don Houston, senior vice president of the GEO Group, told the crowd that if the prison is located in Spavinaw, it would generate jobs that average $10 an hour and that one-third of the employees wouldn't be corrections officers.
"We're 18 months away if they said go tonight," Houston said. "We're at the point of just talking to you."
Frank Smith is a national field organizer for Private Corrections Institute, a nonprofit watchdog group that speaks out against private prisons. The Kansan said the Mayes County town isn't large enough to support a correctional facility.
"They will manipulate anybody they can to get what they want," he said. "They are interested in a profit. They are not interested in the community."
Spavinaw has only three businesses and, according to the Oklahoma Tax Commission, monthly sales tax revenues there have averaged about $2,100 over the past year.
Many of the residents must drive to nearby towns to work.
"You can't get a flat fixed or an oil change or nothing around here," resident Floyd Littlefield said.
Some attendees worried about whether the community's public safety would be compromised by a minimum- to medium-security prison. Others spoke openly about GEO's commitment to hiring local people.
"This town is dying," William Smoke said. "It needs help bad."
Smoke used to run the local tag agency before it had to shut down about three years ago.
He and his wife, Deborah Smoke, own two homes in Spavinaw, but they now live in Tahlequah, where she works at a hospital, she said.
"This is a great thing," said Deborah Smoke, a former Department of Human Services employee. "We need jobs."
http://www.tulsaworld.com/NewsStory.asp?ID=070105_Ne_A9_Spavi28718
Posted by lois at January 6, 2007 10:01 AM