ALBANY – A familiar aspect of life in the Town of Wawarsing will soon be disappearing, as the New York State Department of Corrections (DOC) has announced the closures of several minimum and medium security facilities, putting an end to the prison work crews that continuously provide services to buildings and institutions throughout the town.

The DOC will be closing the annexes at Eastern and Sullivan Correctional Facilities, medium security sections of the maximum security prisons. The annexes provide 12 work crews between them — two at Eastern and 10 at Sullivan — and are part of a larger series of closures that are a response to the state's mandated budget cuts. With the annexes at Eastern and Sullivan, the DOC will also be closing annexes at Green Haven in Dutchess County, Groveland in Livingston County, Lakeview in Chautauqua County, and Washington, in Sullivan County, as well as the minimum security portion of Wayne County's Butler Correctional Facility. The closures are set to take effect by October of this year. Even sooner, by July 1 the department will close Franklin County's Camp Gabriels, Camp Pharsalia in Chenango County, and Saratoga County's Camp Mount McGregor.

The closures will save the state an estimated $20 million this year, and $30 million in the 2010-2011 fiscal year, says Erik Kriss, a DOC spokesperson.

According to a press release from Donn Rowe, the president of the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association (NYSCOBA), the closures will contribute to an overcrowding problem.

"Our prisons, which currently operate at 104 percent capacity, are already overcrowded and understaffed and these cuts will only exacerbate an already dangerous situation, endangering the lives of corrections officers and increasing the risk of inmate violence," he said in the release.

As to whether or not these closures will contribute to an overcrowding problem, Kriss says that rumors of such a problem are actually exaggerated.

"[NYSCOBA is] looking at a federal statistic that measures the number of general confinement beds versus the number of inmates," he says. "At any given time there are many inmates who are in special housing units, infirmary beds, out to court, and in other specialty beds, and when you add those specialty beds together with the general confinement beds, you come up with more than 67,000 beds throughout our system and we have fewer than 60,000 inmates in the system."

Despite the savings the closures will provide, the community will lose the work crews on which it's grown to rely. When asked what services the crews provide for the town, Town Clerk Jane Eck says, "Where do I start?"

Eck notes that the work crews from Eastern and Sullivan rake the cemetery, clean it before Memorial Day, paint the town's churches and synagogues, paint the school during the summertime, and do work at the firehouses, just to name a few of the jobs they do for the town's benefit. Just this past Tuesday, a crew could be spotted on Route 209 putting up new road signs.

Terry Houck, an employee of Eastern Correctional Facility, adds to Eck's sentiments in his capacity as Deputy Supervisor of Wawarsing.

"It would be a shame if we couldn't utilize the community work gangs that have helped so many facets of the community," says Houck. "They've done the community good service for the years that they've been there, and it'll be hard to make up all the work that they do." He adds that the crews have done work in the town's parks at the beginning of the season, have done work on the rail trail, and were expected to do so again this year. It remains unknown what crews will be available to do already-approved projects that planned to utilize them as the DOC transfers inmates to other facilities in preparation for the closures. The cost to the town and other organizations to make up for the lost services are unknown.

Kriss says that he doesn't anticipate any layoffs of the employees as a result of these closures, and says that the department will work to transfer employees to other facilities as close to home as possible. Corrections Commissioner Brian Fischer, who ordered the closures, wrote in a letter to the affected facilities' workers that the DOC "will make every effort" to transfer the employees, either to other correctional department positions or to other state agencies.

"We recognize that this is going to be very difficult on staff and the communities," says Kriss. "But the taxpayers have been paying for a prison system that's really been operating more facilities than we need given the steep decline in the inmate population. And it's time to bring the inmate population and the size of the prison system in line."

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