I am forced to once again comment on the fact that rural towns in America are being sold a bill of goods with respect to the proposition that prisons will be their hope for economic recovery.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post titled “Dear Small Town America, Private Prisons Do Not Lead to Economic Recovery.” Now I find that I have to reiterate my argument.

I just read this AP article over the weekend titled “Dying Communities See Salvation in New Prisons.”

For some, like Secinore, there is hope the prison could take away some of the sting, providing jobs and business opportunities. It’s expected to employ about 330 workers, with 60 percent — about 200 — coming from New Hampshire; the rest would be brought in from other federal prisons.

Others aren’t as hopeful. Back in 2002, Berlin residents voted in favor of a proposal to bring in a federal prison. Today, strict requirements for the jobs, among them that employees be hired before age 37, have diminished some of the excitement.

In the immortal words of Flavor Flav, all I can say is brothers and sisters don’t believe the hype. Folks in urban centers and small towns across the U.S. need to mobilize a social movement for economic justice. That is the answer. Not more prisons. How can we get poor people in Appalachia to understand that their liberation is inextricably linked to that of the young black man in North Lawndale and the migrant farmworker in California? The attempt to sell prisons as an engine for economic development is destructive and will not lead to SALVATION for these small towns.

The article suggests that the research is limited and unclear about the economic impact of prisons on localities. It points out however that whatever research is out there points to modest or negative results.

Although rural communities have successfully lobbied for — and built — prisons for years, not many studies have been done on their economic impact. Some studies indicate slight economic gains for some prison towns, according to a Congressional Research Service report in April. Others that have become prison anchors might have not grown as fast as those without prisons.

UPDATE: I received an e-mail from my friend Julia about this post. She made several important and relevant points so I want to share some of those here :

First off, I absolutely agree with the post and am grateful to see you writing about the issue of prisons in small rural towns and the connections to our urban centers. In Letcher Co., KY, where I was living before I came back to Chicago, there are plans to build another federal prison (FCI Letcher) and there’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s actually happening, what stage they’re in, etc. And there’s a lot of community support for the prison. As the coal industry leaves more and more people unemployed and young people have no option, prisons are seen as the only economically viable option. Lies about their benefits are not only promoted by the BOP and DOC, but through the schools (taking classes of middle school students to tour the prisons so they can see what a great job they could possibly have), and local talk. With such a large percentage of people with drug addictions (Oxycontin especially) in eastern KY, there’s even more people ineligible to be employed in the facilities, but that’s not the part of the equation they talk about in the info sessions. So people support it. They see it as the next way out.

But, there’s also a fairly vocal number of people against the construction of another prison in the region. They’ve witnessed the destruction in McCreary Co, where the prison was built on the top of a formerly strip mined mountain and the ground was unstable and the prison started to sink. They’ve seen that local people didn’t actually get jobs and that it didn’t promote the economic well-being of the town. They’ve seen the same thing in Martin County. And across the border in VA they’ve seen it in Big Stone Gap and Pound.