Small towns used to see prisons as a boon. Now, many don't want them.

It’s not clear whether the prison system has found any interested towns.“Given that the proposal is still in its very preliminary stages,” a state Department of Correctional Services spokeswoman said, “it is not appropriate for us to speculate about who is or is not interested at this time.” The director of the state prison system declined an interview request.When I was in prison 10 years ago for a drug charge in upstate New York, we never thought about whether the locals wanted us there. In 2003, The Sentencing Project, which advocates shorter prison sentences, found that new lockups don’t necessarily help local economies, and rural counties that built prisons followed a similar economic trajectory as those that didn’t.“Prisons did very little for the local economy, because unlike with other kinds of employment, where there are linkages with other businesses in the area, prisons didn’t buy things locally,” Thomas Johnson, a retired University of Missouri professor who studied prison towns, told me. Many of the prison workers commute instead of moving to town, and the population now is actually less than it was two decades ago.Last year, in testimony to a state legislative committee, Department of Correctional Services Director Scott Frakes admitted that the Tecumseh site didn’t work out as expected.“Tecumseh's problem in the beginning was unfortunately just no one to draw from,” he said, referring to staffing challenges, “and that mistaken belief that was repeated across the country that if you build a prison near a little community, it will expand the economy.”That “mistaken belief” has played out throughout the country.