Prison

TAMMS, Ill.

Gas-station owner J.D. Huffman remembers when he first heard that the village where he has lived all his life was going to host the state's new "Super Max" prison.

"I thought guards would come through here to buy gas," he said.

New stores, maybe a motel, would go up, Huffman thought, as the 500-bed prison drew employees and visitors to the town in the state's remote southwest.

"But I'm here to tell you, none of that happened," Huffman, 71, said.

Huffman and others in Tamms say the town of 750 has changed little since the Tamms Correctional Center and adjoining work camp opened in 1995 and 1998.

The prison has been a benefit to the area around the town, but not to Tamms itself, they say. The prison means Tamms collects more state tax dollars paid on a per-capita basis. But the town, which brings in just $5,000 a year in property tax revenue, loses $1,500 to $2,000 a month maintaining the prison's sewers. Mayor Carol Mitchell said officials did a bad job negotiating terms, and the prison has become "a slow drain."

Sergio Molina, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Corrections, said the department does not promise towns anything but a fair hearing when they compete against each other to host a new prison.

Still, the residents' complaints are common in the dozens of rural towns across the country that have hosted the prison-building boom of the last 20 years, said Calvin Beale, a demographer with the U.S. Agriculture Department in Washington D.C.

Officials in Charleston, Mo., hope that a new prison, set to open Sept. 21 will boost their economy. The prison will house almost 1,600 inmates and employ 445 people.

Towns -- desperate for jobs to replace shuttered coal mines in Illinois and downsized manufacturers -- were the sites of more than half of the prisons built in the 1990s, Beale said. The same area accounts for only 19 percent of the U.S. population.

In Illinois, the numbers are similar. Of the state's 29 adult prisons, 12 are in the rural south, the most sparsely populated area of the state.

"Corrections departments want cheap land and someplace that welcomes a prison, and the towns want jobs and business," Beale said.

That's what former Tamms Mayor Walter Pang said he wanted when he applied for the prison in the early 1990s.

"I wanted our children not to have to leave the area to find a job," said Pang, 78, who retired as mayor last spring.

Pang joined a panel of others from far Southern Illinois out to persuade then-Gov. Jim Edgar to build the prison in Tamms.

Residents in Tamms and in Anna, 18 miles away, wrote $100 checks to help pay for incentives, Wang said. A plywood sign stood in Tamms' village center with the names of those who chipped in.

They offered the state 219 acres of free land and promised to beef up the town's sewer, water and gas utilities at their own expense to accommodate the facility. They also promised to provide two free years of water and sewer services.3

Tamms beat 32 other towns for the prison.

Jerry Reppert, an Anna publisher who served on the panel, says the prison has brought jobs and steady income to Union, Pulaski and Alexander counties, home of the highest jobless rates in the state.

He cited new housing construction in Anna and nearby Jonesboro that he said was spurred largely by an influx of prison employees.

More than half of the 423 employees at the prison live in the three counties, he said, with the biggest share going to Union County, where Anna and Jonesboro are.

"It's done just what we thought it would," Reppert said.

Molina said the department never promises its employees will come from any particular area, although 25 percent of the slots in any new facility must be filled with transfers from other prisons.

But while Reppert and others consider the prison a regional project, Tamms must repay more than one-third of the $1.4 million needed to finance the incentives, Wang said.

The town has received around $20,000 a year in state tax money since the Tamms work camp opened in 1995, Mitchell said. The Super Max inmates have not yet been counted in the town's population because of a 2000 census error that is being appealed, and don't yet bring in any revenue, she said.

The biggest problem Tamms faces is maintaining the sewer system the town and the prison share, Mitchell said.

Tamms has lost $1,500 to $2,000 a month since 1997 delivering those services, she said, because officials did not negotiate a high enough price for them with the department. "And (corrections officials) told us we'd make all this money with the sale of the utilities to the prison," she said.

Tamms has already laid off one of its four maintenance workers, and Mitchell says only selling the town's gas company will keep the town afloat.

Molina said he was unaware that the city had been losing money, and said he would investigate the matter.