MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A lot of U.S. prisons are closing down, after the industry went through a building boom decades ago. It was a complicated calculus with a lot of social impacts, but it's also hit the economic fortunes of rural America hard. North Country Public Radio's Emily Russell has this report.
EMILY RUSSELL, BYLINE: To understand where we are today, we have to go back in time - back to the early 1970s. Crime was on the rise, and the country had started its war on drugs. So states like New York began passing strict new drug laws that doled out long prison sentences. New York's prison population went from 12,000 in 1970 to more than 72,000 by 1999. Most of the people newly convicted were Black and brown men. And the state needed somewhere to send them all, so it turned to small towns upstate.
Why did you want to bring a state prison to Moriah?
TOM SCOZZAFAVA: Jobs. You know, we needed the jobs.
RUSSELL: Tom Scozzafava was the town supervisor of Moriah in the late '80s. The community of about 5,000 people had been struggling for years. The prison provided a boost.
SCOZZAFAVA: There was a couple stores in Mineville that opened up, mom-and-pop stores. There was a drugstore, new houses going up from correction officers that lived and worked here. And so there was a huge difference.
RUSSELL: New York's governor at the time, Mario Cuomo, saw prisons as a solution to rising crime, but also as an economic boon for upstate. During his tenure, Cuomo opened 30 new prisons. Here he is at his 1985 State of the State Address.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARIO CUOMO: We've already built 4,500 new prison cells to house the criminals who are convicted under the state's tough new laws. We'll build another 4,100 in the next two years alone.
RUSSELL: The number of prisons nationwide tripled in just three decades. But they weren't spread out equally among all states, according to Jacob Harris. He's a PhD candidate from Cornell University who studies prisons. Harris says states like New York, North Carolina and Texas opened far more than most other places.
JACOB HARRIS: So instead of saying, let's just build a few large prisons, we're going to spread these prisons out in these rural areas, and so these rural areas can have jobs.
RUSSELL: But then came the prison bust. In the mid-2000s, many strict drug laws were repealed, and prison populations began to plummet. When Mario Cuomo's son, Andrew, became governor of New York, he vowed to close prisons. Here he is at the 2011 State of the State Address.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ANDREW CUOMO: An incarceration program is not an employment program. If people need jobs, let's get people jobs.
RUSSELL: Since that speech, the state has closed more than two dozen prisons. Harris' research shows New York, North Carolina and Texas now account for a third of all prison closures in recent decades. Cuomo's successor, Governor Kathy Hochul, wants to close five more in the next year, in part to ease a staffing shortage. Amid a complicated moment for New York prisons, eight officers are facing murder charges for the recent deaths of two inmates at two separate prisons.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PRISON OFFICER: Hold the line.
UNIDENTIFIED PRISON OFFICERS: (Chanting) Hold the line. Hold the line.
RUSSELL: Meanwhile, officers went on a three-week wildcat strike earlier this spring, demanding safer working conditions. Prisons are deeply ingrained in the culture of Upstate New York. That's why their closures hit especially hard. A few years after the prison closed in Moriah, Matthew Brassard took over as town supervisor.
MATTHEW BRASSARD: Change is scary for a lot of people, including myself. But if we don't pivot into a different direction, we're just going to keep spiraling down, and eventually, we won't have any businesses.
RUSSELL: This community, like so many other former prison towns, now has to figure out what comes next.
For NPR News, I'm Emily Russell in Upstate New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.