By Mikel Chavers
For Standish, a small town in northern Michigan that’s home to a maximum security prison the state is preparing to close Oct. 31, the economic effect of the closure will be felt pretty hard—unless the facility is picked by the federal government to house Guantanamo Bay detainees.
But the small town’s fate hangs in the balance and just one month away from closure and job loss, the town still waits on word from the federal government.
The prison is the small town’s largest employer.
Michigan’s unemployment rate is already at 15 percent and closing prisons is a hard pill to swallow. “That creates even greater pressures for us,” said John Cordell, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections.
Cordell predicts the small town of Standish could lose 300 or more good-paying jobs when the state closes the prison at the end of this month.
“It is a significant economic hardship,” he said.
Standish may get some relief—if the federal government decides to transfer Guantanamo Bay detainees to the maximum security facility. The Obama administration is considering the Michigan facility or a facility in Kansas for the detainees, according to the Associated Press.
But Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s office said there’s still no word on the move and it’s unclear whether the Standish facility will be picked to house terrorism suspects from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the AP reports.
Megan Brown, a spokeswoman for Granholm, told The Bay City Times the Standish prison is still under consideration to hold the detainees amidst rumors that the feds were no longer considering the Standish facility. “We have been talking continuously with the White House and they have let us know that no decisions have been made,” Brown told the newspaper.
“There is nothing at this point that we’ve been notified of,” Cordell said about the possibility of the Standish facility housing the detainees.
Michigan, a state that’s been shrinking its prison population for years, has closed 15 state prison facilities throughout the decade—probably the most of any state, according to Cordell.
“We were able to absorb most of the staff that would have been put out on the street” as a result of the prison closures, Cordell said, simply by shuffling staff. But this year the state will close eight prisons and, with looming budget cuts, the department of corrections could see up to 1,000 layoffs, Cordell said. Officials hope layoffs will be closer to half that amount, he said.
Including the Standish Maximum Correctional Facility, Michigan will close eight prison facilities this year; five of them are prison camps. The cuts will help the department of corrections meet a $120 million savings goal for the 2009-2010 fiscal year corrections budget and comes during tough budget times—the state is facing a $1.4 billion deficit next fiscal year, according to a Michigan Department of Corrections press release.
Read more about states closing prisons in the October State News.
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