Andrew Henderson for The New York Times
Prisoners from Camp Gabriels harvesting ice for a winter festival in Saranac Lake, N.Y.
The New York Times
Rural Franklin County is home to five state prisons.
Posted on 01/26/2008 8:40:09 PM PST by neverdem
GABRIELS, N.Y. — After 17 years of marriage, Joy and Richard Gonyea managed to save enough to trade their trailer in November for a cozy prefabricated home with a room for each of their two children and a pool in the backyard. The home overlooks the pine trees on the edge of their two-acre property in rural Vermontville, eight miles from the secluded state prison where Mrs. Gonyea works.
“This home is all we’ve ever dreamed of,” said Mrs. Gonyea, 43, a registered nurse who runs the medical department at the prison, Camp Gabriels, a minimum-security facility in this minuscule hamlet in Franklin County, at the northern end of Adirondack Park.
“This,” she said, “is the place we always wanted to have for our kids.”
Then she began to cry.
On Jan. 11, the Spitzer administration announced plans to close Camp Gabriels, two other corrections camps and a medium-security prison, all of which have been operating below capacity since 1996 because of a decline in the number of nonviolent felons, the state’s corrections commissioner, Brian Fischer, said.
Closing those prisons, Mr. Fischer said, would save the state millions of dollars, free up money for the treatment of sex offenders and mentally ill inmates, and finance programs like anger management and vocational training, meant to prepare prisoners for their release.
But for Mrs. Gonyea, her neighbors and co-workers, the prospect of losing Camp Gabriels has stoked fear and doubt — about their future and about the future of their communities, which have come to depend on the prison over the years to survive.
As rural economies across the country crumbled in the 1980s and the population of prison inmates swelled, largely because of tougher drug laws, states pushed prison construction as an economic escape route of sorts. Throughout the 1960s and...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Sad story, I guess. But one would think that a decline in the number of prisoners, and thus need for fewer prisons, would be a good thing.
Are we supposed to encourage criminals to go out and break more laws to boost the prison population?
The jails and prisons are overcrowded here, couldn’t we just ship some of them east? ;)
Oh please. She’s an RN. She won’t have any problems finding another job.
They didn’t say they had fewer prisoners, just fewer NON-VIOLENT offenders (those who get sentenced to minimum-security facilities like this one.
Twenty years and you get full retirement. Nearly all state jobs are like that.
Meanwhile, I am a good bit older than Mr. Gonyea, have been working since HE was in school, and I still have to work. I still have to work and pay outrageous NY taxes so people like these can bitch because their guaranteed NY State job might ask them to move and take a job somewhere else. For the same or better money. With the same guaranteed twenty years (total) and retire promise.
Cry me a freakin river.
The wife is an RN and her husband is a CO and they live in a prefab? Give me a break.
Move ….
She can get a job anywhere, and so could he, with his experience. The only problem, as I see it, is there unwillingness to move.
They should outsource - we here in California don’t have enough prison cells. I say put them on a prison train to New York if need be.
Sounds like they live too close to the Indian casinos.
Someone’s been blowing all their money.
If I had my way I would outsource all our really nasty types to Russia. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, all those gulags have been standing vacant. Think of the poor prison guards and their families there that need work.
Now THAT would be a deterrent! Probably wouldn’t get many of them back, though.
Normally, retirement for people in uniform, from the NY State prison system requires a minimum of 25 years, unless you are retired on a disability. The state retirement system has several tier levels to their pension system. Each tier has a different criteria for retiring. If you retire earlier than age 55, you are penalized for retiring earlier. You don't get your full pension.
Try working behind bars for 25 years and see if you wouldn't retire at the earliest opportunity. I spent 10 years as an officer and 13 years as a Sergeant. Because I was in the oldest retirement tier level, I was eligible for a month's credit for each year I had worked. This allowed me to retire 23 months earlier than I normally would have. I was 56 when I retired. Because I had prior time in the retirement system, I retired with almost 33 years on the books.
During my time in uniform, I saw many of my fellow officers drop dead. Many were younger than me. When I took the job in 1980, the life expectancy of a correctional officer was 58. I vowed then, that I would not die working for New York State, and I managed to keep that promise. Since I've retired, I've run into quite a few of the people I worked with, and inevitably, they always tell me of someone else who dropped dead...and again...they were all younger than me.
What you don't understand is that when you take a uniform job in NY State corrections, you don't get your choice of prisons. You have to go where the opening is. That means if you live in Buffalo, New York, you may have to take a position downstate somewhere. And getting back home isn't easy either. Many of the people I worked with, who had taken promotions, ended up having to be away from home for 3-4 years. And because the state created a lot of temporary promotional positions, you could end up being in that temporary position for years and never get a permanent appointment in the job title you were working. That meant they could bounce you to another facility in the state, or reduce you in rank at any time. That's one of the reasons I never took a Lieutenant's promotion. For me it would have been an inconvenience to have to move somewhere else for God knows how long, just so I could have a few extra coins when I retired. It wasn't worth it to me.
It's gotten so bad that they can't even recruit people to take the test anymore. And it's tough trying to get people to take a promotion away from their home facility because of the games the state plays.
I'm glad I retired when I did because these prisons are being turned into nothing but mental hygiene facilities. I got out while the getting was good, and I haven't been sorry once.
44 and retired !!!!!
You noticed it too.
If I had to do it all over again I would have stayed out of college and the private sector and instead gone straight to the state or fed.
44! and ZERO threat of losing any of his pension too!
Convicts was NYC’s largest export upstate for a lot of years. With the crime rate down, that’s dropped off a whole lot.
Rudy's fault!
Not that I'd vote for him.
No, Rudy was only one factor out of many.
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