While the supporters of re-opening the private prison in Appleton appear to have declared victory after a Prison Population Taskforce informal informational hearing in which no recommendations were made, an article by Forum News Service reporter Don Davis suggests that the issue is far from a done deal.
Moreover, we've noticed that local leaders from Appleton and Swift County are claiming both that keeping the prison shuttered spells economic doom for their residents and that they've developed economic development strategies that don't include the prison.
We took a look at recent jobless rates in Swift County and surrounding counties--and were surprised at what we found.
Davis: Hurdles remain to reopen private prison
One of the implied claims by supporters of leasing the CCA prison is that Minnesota's public employee unions will support the deal. As we've pointed out in the past (see our post, Willmar paper allows supporters of re-opening Appleton prison to speak for its opponents) none of those making these claims have any authority to speak for union workers.
Let's hope that Goff Public isn't advising its clients and their supporters to assert what the union and other opponents believe--and that members of the press seek out opponents of the project to speak to their positions.
When reporters do, the story is much different. In Hurdles remain to reopen private prison (via the West Central Tribune) Don Davis reports:
Supporters of a shuttered private western Minnesota prison face plenty of roadblocks before they could get state inmates back in the facility.
Optimism was strong Wednesday when two Democratic senators said they liked the idea of the state leasing and running the prison facility, with unionized state workers.
But American Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees Council 5 union, which represents state prison workers, apparently will keep pressure on Democratic lawmakers to oppose the Appleton prison plan.
“AFSCME opposes a lease arrangement that would give CCA a foothold in Minnesota,” AFSCME spokeswoman Jennifer Munt said about the Corrections Corporation of America, which used to run the prison itself. “Our union believes that private prisons should be prohibited. They shouldn’t be able to operate or lease their facilities in our state because it’s morally wrong for corporations to profit from human incarceration.”
Munt said that the union supports using the facility, which has been closed since 2010. For it to be used as a prison, however, she said an acceptable option would be for the state to buy it.
“Criminal justice is a core responsibility of government, and public workers should be protecting public safety,” Munt said. . . .
In an email earlier this week to Bluestem Prairie directing our attention to the Public News Service release, Union and Community Groups: Keep Private Prisons Out of MN, Munt noted:
FYI. AFSCME opposes a lease agreement that would give CCA a foothold in Minnesota.
One of the more interesting parts of the discourse at the end of Thursday's hearing when the Appleton option was raised after hours of other possibilities dealt with conflicting claims for reopening the prison, made by local officials.
Claims: Reopening Appleton prison paves way to fewer beds; hard times but no bubble
Munt is on to something when she speaks of the foothold in Minnesota, and the conflicting claims within Appleton and Swift County officials' testimony give us pause.
It's claimed that Swift County is suffering from the prison's shuttering in 2010, but that the county has moved away from the prison (originally owned by a corporation set up by Appleton leaders hoping to turn a buck on prisoners; when the group defaulted on its bond, they turned their nose up at the option to sell the facility to the state, taking an offer from CCA instead).
Reopening the prison will cause the city to bloom again, but it will also spur the state to reform the criminal justice system, and a temporary lease will save money by avoiding bonding for more state prison space.
The argument that leasing the facility is piece friendly to criminal justice reform--rather than just local boosterism--was made earlier on the editorial page of the Swift County Monitor; it's a fine example of motivated reasoning.
As Davis noted in an earlier article, Plan to house state inmates in Appleton's shuttered prison gains new support, some lawmakers on the taskforce noticed the conflicts within the city and county's claims:
Under an outline Appleton and Swift County officials presented, the state would lease the prison but the Corrections Department would run it and could staff it with union workers. Hendrickx and Appleton Mayor Chadwick Syltie told the task force that reopening the prison would provide a boost to an area with high unemployment. Roy downplayed the CCA option, saying it could cost $50 million a year to run the Appleton facility, compared to his plan that would add a $16 million annual operating cost. . . .
Some task force members warned local officials that they could face a second prison closing if they are successful in prison populations
“It would be my intent that it would be the first one to be closed” as prison populations fall, Rep. Dan Schoen, D-St. Paul Park, said, adding that he opposes the Appleton prison even though he has family in the area.
“We could be creating a bubble that is going to burst,” Rep. Raymond Dehn, D-Minneapolis, said.
After the meeting, Appleton and Swift County officials said they have diversified their economy since the prison closed in 2010 and are better able to handle it if the prison reopened and later closed. . . .
Just how jobless are Swift County and West Central Minnesota workers?
Which is it? We're also curious where that high unemployment in our area is outside of Swift County, which was 3.8 percent in September, according to the map at County Unemployment Rates, September 2015 (Not seasonally adjusted) on the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development DEED) website.
Here are the September 2015 figures for Swift County and surrounding areas (click on the photo for a larger view):
While Swift County's 3.8 percent unemployment rate is the highest in the area, most of West Central Minnesota hovers between 2.1 percent and 3.2 percent.
When we look at historical data for 2014-2015, we find that Swift County did have a big bump about the time the commissioners hired Goff Public, but the unemployment rate has declined even in the benighted prairie county (click on the photo for a larger view):
How does Swift County's unemployment rate compare to that of the rest of Minnesota? Since the state rate of 3.8 percent on the DEED website is seasonally adjusted, while that for Swift County is not, we cannot make a Honeycrisp-to-Honeycrisp comparison on that.
However, the non-adjusted Minnesota rate is 3.2 percent, so Swift County's rate is .6 points higher, while the rest of the counties in the area are equal to or below the state non-seasonally adjusted rate. The highest unemployment in Greater Minnesota is found in the Range and vicinity, with the city of Hibbing topping the map with a 8 percent non-seasonally adjusted rate.
We don't see anyone pushing to open the Appleton prison--which is a privately-owned prison, not a public building for which bonding could be used to repurpose the facility for a mental health or drug treatment center, as Senator Barbara Goodwin, Dfl-Columbia Heights, suggested on Thursday--also advocating a sunset on the lease accompanied by a timeline of reform to reduce the prison population.
Instead,without such assurances, this looks like a plan to help CCA draw some compensation for its idle property. (And perhaps the silliest thing said during Thursday's hearings was Mankato state senator Kathy Sheran fretting that Swift County would lose property taxes if CCA went bankrupt. We suggest that she read the company's financial reports to ease her mind).
The senators' remarks, along with Swift County weeping about its unemployment crisis, are found on the MnHouse Info channel's YouTube of the entire hearing, which runs four hours, nine minutes. The debate over Appleton begins at the 3:18 minute marker, at the very end of the long hearing. Here's the outline of time stamps from the House's channel:
07:00 - Gavel.
08:45 - Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission (Nathaniel Reitz, Executive Director).
45:15 - Mandatory Minimums and Guidelines Departures.
1:13:00 - Probation Violation Overview.
1:38:00 - Racial Disparity in Minnesota’s Prison Population.
1:56:00 - Drug Prisoner Profiles.
2:25:00 - Correctional Facility Capacity Reports.
3:18:00 - Appleton Prison Options.
The video:
Photo: The shuttered prison at Appleton.
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