The rise and decline of NY prisons, and how closures impact the North Country
New York’s prison system has been under intense scrutiny in recent months. Corrections officers at a prison near Utica were charged with murdering an inmate in December. In March, an inmate at another upstate NY prison was allegedly beaten to death by officers. Meanwhile, a three-week wildcat strike by officers created chaos and highlighted a dire staffing shortage in the state's prison system.
Advocates and many state lawmakers think one solution to this moment is to close more correctional facilities. But the communities home to those correctional facilities - many of them in the North Country - say that move is misguided and would devastate local economies.
To understand the current state of New York's prison system, you have to go back to the early 1970s, when New York City was dealing with a drug crisis.
In 1973, Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed new legislation that would become known as the Rockefeller drug laws. The goal was to crack down on the drug trade by doling out lengthy prison sentences for drug-related convictions.
In the decade that followed, the state’s prison population went from 13,000 to more than 30,000. Most of the people newly convicted for non-violent drug charges were Black and brown men.
The state needed somewhere to send all those newly incarcerated people, and one place it turned to was the North Country. Many people around the rural region saw new prisons as an economic opportunity.
Moriah lobbies for a new prison
Tom Scozzafava was among those who lobbied to open a prison in the small Essex County town of Moriah, where he worked as town supervisor. Scozzafava believed his hometown would benefit from the economic boost.
"They were good-paying jobs," said Scozzafava. "Not only the corrections officers, but also civilian positions, and we needed the jobs.”
Moriah had been struggling for more than a decade, following the closure of the Fisher Hill mine. So when the new Moriah Shock Correctional Facility opened in 1989, Scozzafava said he was thrilled. His hometown and the area around it saw new signs of life.
"There were a couple of stores in Mineville that opened up, mom-and-pop stores, there was a drug store, new houses going up for correction officers that lived and worked here and civilian employees, and so there was a huge difference," said Scozzafava.
By that time, the state’s prison population had grown from 30,000 to more than 50,000 people, and it kept rising.
Prison jobs and economic growth in the North Country
Between the 1980s and '90s, prisons were popping up all across the North Country. The rural region with just 2% of the state’s population now had 24% of its prisons. Most of the new prisons each incarcerated and employed hundreds of people.
The prison in Moriah was on the smaller side with about 100 staff, but a hundred people with good-paying jobs and good benefits can make a real difference in a town like Moriah.
Plus, prison visitors came to town and spent money at local businesses.
Boyea’s Grocery and Deli is a few minutes down the road from the prison. Owner John Boyea said prison visitors were regular customers at his and other stores around the community.
"They traveled four or five hours sometimes and they’d patronize the businesses and wait for the facility to be open to be able to go do visitation," said Boyea. "Some of those families we’d see more often.”
Prison reform, population decline, and prison closures
By the late 1990s, New York's prison population hit its peak. There were more than 72,000 people incarcerated in the state’s 72 prisons. According to state data, about a third of the population was locked up on drug charges.
"That Rockefeller drug law was ridiculous," said David Abair, "I mean, it was overkill.” Abair was a corrections officer in the North Country from 1999 until just a few years ago, when he retired.
“They were locking people up that never should have been locked up," said Abair. "When they finally repealed the Rockefeller drug laws, that was good, and it did drop the inmate population quite a bit.”
On average, New York's prison population began to decline by 1,000 inmates each year following its peak in 1999. In 2009, then-Governor David Patterson closed a small prison in Saranac Lake known as Camp Gabriels.
That move would kickstart a push to shutter prisons, including seven in the North Country, in places like Chateaugauy, Lyon Mountain, Ogdensburg, and Watertown.
Saving prisons to save jobs
The most recent round of prison closures came in 2024 and included Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Washington County. Republican State Senator Dan Stec spoke at a local rally last summer, just months before the prison closed. He mirrored the crowd’s anger at Democratic lawmakers in Albany.
"They said, 'we’re going to close a big one far away, no one cares, no one lives there,'" said Stec. "I’ll tell you who lives there: 65,000 people in Washington County live here, 66,000 people in Warren County, 32,000 people in Essex County. Great Meadow [has] 650 employees and is the largest employer in Washington County.”
That argument, that the state should keep prisons open in part to preserve local jobs, is what many leaders in Albany have been pushing back on for years. When Governor Andrew Cuomo took office in 2011, he made it clear at his first State of the State address that closing prisons was a top priority.
"An incarceration program is not an employment program," said Cuomo to widespread applause. "If people need jobs, let’s get people jobs."
Since that speech, the state has closed more than two dozen prisons. Cuomo’s successor, Governor Kathy Hochul, has kept up that effort, closing eight in the last few years, including the prison in Moriah, where David Abair spent most of his career as a corrections officer.
Abair enjoyed working at Moriah Shock, which was more like a military-style boot camp than a prison. "There should be more of that [kind of correctional facility], not less," said Abair. He said the closure of the prison stung and hurt the entire region.
"It was devastating. You know, we were a family at Moriah," said Abair. "Moriah [Shock] was the largest employer in that community. And it didn’t just affect them. It affected people from all around, like myself— I was traveling from Keeseville. There were people traveling from Jay, Ausable Forks, from Plattsburgh, from as far south as Fort Edward.”
Who should shoulder the blame?
The ebb and flow of prisons opening in the 1980s and closing decades later has frustrated many people and communities in the North Country. Every state prison that has been shuttered around the region since 2009 has remained empty, and many have fallen into disrepair.
Marsha Weissman believes that communities like Moriah are partly to blame for the ups and downs. Weissman is a professor at Syracuse University and previously ran a non-profit aimed at helping formerly incarcerated people.
"Communities were competing for these prisons, so they share a part of the responsibility for not thinking through the deal they were making with the devil," said Weissman.
The deal was this: communities like Moriah got new jobs and an economic boost from prisons, but they did so at the expense of incarcerating primarily Black and brown men and choosing to be part of a prison system that many advocates say destabilized communities, destroyed families, and cost all New Yorkers hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
The possibility of more prison closures
Today, the state’s prison population is half of what it was in the ‘90s. Staffing levels have declined by more than 50%, from 21,000 corrections officers and security staff a few decades ago to about 10,000 today. Officers say the staffing shortage and other recent reforms have created dangerous working conditions in prisons, which sparked the recent three-week wildcat strike.
Meanwhile, Governor Hochul is citing that staffing shortage as a reason to close five more prisons in the next year. She and the state legislature included the provision in both of their draft budgets. Hochul addressed the issued at a press conference in mid-March.
"We’re going to continue focusing on the environment [in prisons], improving the conditions as best we can," said Hochul, "but I need to consolidate now so I can manage the population with the fewer people that I have that are doing it.”
Despite all the closures in the last two decades, the North Country is still home to about a quarter of the state’s remaining prisons. So if Hochul closes five more in the next year, there's a good chance that one or more will be in the North Country.
Matthew Brassard took over as town supervisor in Moriah a few years after the local prison closed. He believes that prisons were an economic lifeline for rural towns like his.
"They were jobs programs and they were needed," said Brassard. "Now that they’re gone, it’s a shame.”
Brassard now wants to see his hometown pivot towards tourism. Moriah is on Lake Champlain and central to other hubs in the area like Burlington, Glens Falls, and Plattsburgh. But that can be a tough sell in a town with an aging population that lived through the recent mining and prison booms.
"Change is scary," said 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.”
Like so many other former prison towns, the community of Moriah now has to figure out what comes next.
