Course Correction

With prison closures, Cuomo confronts economic challenges, and his father’s legacy

Crime used to be a formidable political force in New York State. In the ’80s and ’90s, the prison population boomed from 21,000 inmates to 71,000, filling gymnasiums and rented spaces faster than the state could build prisons to house them.

But in the last 15 years, momentum has shifted in the opposite direction. The War on Terror has largely supplanted the War on Drugs.

Reform of the Rockefeller-era drug laws and increased reliance on alternative rehabilitation strategies have helped shrink the prison population to 58,000. A governor’s stance on the death penalty is no longer a make-or-break position. The outrage has dissipated.

The shift is what makes it politically possible for Gov. Andrew Cuomo to attempt to dismantle, brick by brick, his father’s legacy of prison expansion in New York.

The governor wants to eliminate 3,700 prison beds to save the state $72 million. Shuttering unused facilities may be fiscally sound, but the issue also seems to be one of personal import for Cuomo.

Shortly after the election, Cuomo made trips to both Sing-Sing and the Tryon Juvenile Justice Facility. He recalled for reporters the first challenge his father, Mario Cuomo, faced in office: quelling an inmate uprising at Sing Sing. As he gave his State of the State address, the trip to Tryon, as well as the memory of his father’s legacy of building prisons, seemed to weigh heavily on him.

“If people need jobs, let’s get people jobs,” he said. “Don’t put other people in prison to give some people jobs. Don’t put other people in juvenile justice facilities to give some people jobs. That’s not what this state is all about, and that has to end this session.”

Bob Gangi, former executive director of the New York State Correctional Association, a prison-reform advocacy group, was impressed.

“That was the first time I’d ever seen a mainstream politician take that stance on this issue,” Gangi said. “Everybody knew that these prisons were upstate to provide jobs up there. All the governors who opened prisons went along with that, because prisons benefited upstate Republican senators. Everybody played ball, and Andrew Cuomo took this very stark position trashing that practice.”

The elder Cuomo was responsible for opening 20 prisons during his time in office, funded largely through bonding from the state Urban Development Corporation, because he could never get the Legislature to agree to fund them. The prisons themselves became the economic bedrock of the upstate communities where they were sited. Often these were the only communities willing to accept such facilities. New York City and the surrounding suburbs were located closer to most inmates’ homes, but their residents feared the impact of maximum-security prisons on property values.

The former governor balanced his opposition to the death penalty with a hard line on sentencing. He even touted prison growth in his reelection ads.

“He was not alone,” Gangi said. “The Democrats were as enthusiastic supporters of hard-line policy and prison expansion as any conservative Republican.”

This time around, the younger Cuomo will decide which prisons to close.

In his original budget, the governor proposed creating a task force made up of legislators and experts to recommend which prisons to close. But the task force would have left lawmakers vulnerable to criticism, according to sources close to the budget process. Instead the Legislature agreed to allow the governor to have the final say on closures. So only Cuomo will shoulder the blame.

“We trust the governor’s judgment,” said Scott Reif, a spokesperson for the Senate Republicans.

The governor has a year to recommend closures. For the remainder of this year, the Legislature agreed to temporarily suspend a 2002 law requiring a mandatory year-long waiting period and legislative approval prior to closures. The law was passed after union officials and legislators noticed Corrections Department officials quietly lowering the number of beds in state facilities.

Cuomo still faces opposition to closures from the New York State Corrections Officers and Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOPBA) and from senators wary of the impact of the closures on the fragile upstate economy.

NYSCOPBA president Donn Rowe is concerned the closures will put more strain on officers. While the number of nonviolent drug offenders going to prison has gone down, Rowe said, the number of hardened criminals has not.

“Basically the inmate population isn’t classified or spread out properly,” he said.

“To cram these inmates into medium security facilities at 100-percent capacity is definitely going to be a dangerous situation.”

To calm upstate senators, Cuomo pledged to make grants of up to $10 million for districts impacted by prison closings to offset any economic damage. And he promised to keep certain facilities, such as Ogdensburg in Sen. Patty Ritchie’s district, open regardless.

Cuomo’s prison-closure strategy comes at a time of major shifts in attitudes toward incarceration. Downstate senators have helped lower any potential liability for prison closures by advocating for them on their own.  The governor also has an ally in Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who made reforms to the criminal justice system a priority while he was a state senator.

“What Cuomo is doing is historically unprecedented,” Gangi said. “If we’re talking about historical ironies, this is it. New York, which historically kicked off the trend in expanding prisons, is now exercising leadership in reversing it.”