The governor wants to close the Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility to save money. We applaud him for his determination to save money — he seems one of the few in Albany with any concrete ideas — but this particular strategy seems destined to do more harm than good.
The boot-camp-style rehabilitation prison in Moriah's Mineville hamlet takes first-time, non-violent drug offenders and tries to rehabilitate them. The six-month program has been largely successful statewide, and shock-camp inmates have lower recidivism rates after release.
We all know we have to swallow hard and accept cuts if the state is to survive financially in these tough times. But the Town of Moriah, where the shock camp is located, had been having tough times long before the current recession.
The town's iron mines closed in the early 1970s, putting hundreds of people out of work. The town never really recovered from that, and the original intent of putting a shock facility in Moriah in the 1990s was to give the community some economic relief. And it did.
But then the Champlain Bridge closed last year, and suddenly the many local residents who had jobs in Vermont couldn't get to them anymore. The state subsidized local ferries, which helped some, but still gave commuters a very long trip to work. And a new bridge won't be in place for at least two years.
So the town, along with the whole area, got swatted economically again.
Now Gov. Paterson comes out with his state budget and wants to close Moriah Shock.
The 102 people employed there would either be out of work or would have to transfer to another facility somewhere.
So is it really prudent to close Moriah Shock, or does truly it do more harm than good?
By the state's own estimates, Moriah Shock saves millions of dollars each year in incarceration costs. Inmates are granted early release and are less likely to revert to a life of crime that will land them back into the system.
So maybe the governor should take another look at Moriah Shock, which he pledged to do last Thursday when he met with local officials and residents to trumpet the scheduled opening of the ferry to alleviate the crisis imposed by the bridge razing.
He owes it to all New Yorkers to make sure closing that facility is a net gain for the state and not a net loss. In this regard, more is at stake here than the townspeople of Moriah, the home, famously, of then-Gov. Mario Cuomo's "abject poor." Having sympathy for the effort to save the state from more financial disaster, we would be calling for this re-examination of the bottom line only if we believed keeping Moriah Shock open would be in the state's best interests.
An honest re-appraisal stands a very good chance of showing that the closure would cost more in the long run than it saves.
Opinion
February 1, 2010
EDITORIAL: Moriah Shock deserves second look
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