NEWS

Prisons flipped into hotels, farms, nonprofits

Mollie Bryant

The Clarion-Ledger

Liberty Hotel in Boston was built as a jail between 1848 and 1851 and converted into a luxury hotel through a five year, $150 million renovation project.

When the Walnut Grove Correctional Facility closes, it will take with it about 200 jobs, 900 inmates and significant revenue from the town that gave it its name. It will leave behind the million-dollar question of what to do with the site itself.

Walnut Grove Mayor Brian Gomillion doubts the facility’s use could extend beyond what it was designed for — incarceration.

“Even though we may not be able to house state inmates, we may be able to work out something to house another state's inmates or possibly federal inmates, and that would be an economic success for our leaders, that those jobs could return and possibly bring even more if the prison has a full population,” Gomillion said.

Importing another state's inmates has not worked out for Mississippi in the past. In 2005, when Corrections Corporation of America owned the Tallahatchie County Correctional Center, 850 of the 1,100 inmates at the Tutwileri prison were from Hawaii. A riot broke out that left two prisoners hospitalized and had to be quelled with tear gas.

Gomillion said that there are efforts “behind the scenes” to bring in another private company to operate the prison, which Management and Training Corp. currently runs.

“I think everybody’s on board to do something with this facility and not let it just sit empty,” Gomillion said.

Mississippi Department of Corrections spokeswoman Grace Fisher would not coordinate an interview with an agency employee who has knowledge of what options MDOC is considering for the facility.

"Whatever we do with the facility is pending," she said.

Spokesmen for the Department of Finance and Administration and the Mississippi Development Authority said their agencies were not involved and referred questions to MDOC.

Walnut Grove is not unique in that a combination of budget cuts and declining numbers of inmates have forced prisons to shutter across the country, leaving states and communities to market the facilities to the highest bidder. In 2013, six states closed or considered shuttering 20 prisons, according to a study from The Sentencing Project. While some have kept their original purpose, sometimes renting space to house out-of-state inmates, prisons across the country have been converted into a stunning array of developments, from agriculture operations to upscale hotels.

For instance, more than a dozen prisons have closed since 2011 in New York, which offered tax credits and $50 million in funds to applicants aiming to invest in and redevelop the properties.

Criminal justice nonprofit Osborne Association received $6 million from the state to convert Bronx’s shuttered Fulton Correctional Facility into a resource center for those who have recently been released from prison. The reentry center will provide former inmates with housing and support services.

“Really, I think the hope was in many communities in upstate New York, the correctional facilities are the only source of economic activity, ... and if the government closed them, they wanted those communities to not be as negatively affected as they might have been otherwise,” Osborne Association spokesman Jonathan Stenger said. “Frankly, without that funding pool, as ambitious as we are, we would not have been able to dream of taking over this facility.”

Growing Change is another nonprofit with plans to combine repurposing a prison with bringing down the incarceration rate. The organization is working to transform the Scotland Correctional Center in Wagram, North Carolina, into a sustainable farm and educational center.

"We are in an area that has in many ways lost hope, so by reclaiming a site ... we’re helping to reinstate hope," Executive Director Noran Sanford said.

Unlike prisons in urban areas, rural facilities like the Scotland Correctional Center can pose more of a puzzle when it comes to converting them for other use. Urban prisons built in high-population areas near a variety of industries can be more appealing to buyers.

"It’s precisely because of that that you have to look deeply into the design question, the design question of how these sites should be used for the community," Sanford said.

At the moment, there are a wide range of completed and upcoming projects involving other defunct prisons. A Florida nonprofit converted the Gainesville Correctional Institution into a homeless shelter, and a minimum-security prison now serves as a training hub for the Kentucky State Police.

Admittedly surprising uses include the Liberty Hotel, a luxury hotel converted from Boston’s Charles Street Jail. In Virginia, the D.C. Department of Corrections sold the Lorton Reformatory to Fairfax County, which is developing the site into a residential community with apartments, retail and office space.

At least one city may resort to something altogether different — marijuana. Coalinga, California, is considering a proposal to convert the Claremont Custody Center, which closed five years ago, into a marijuana farm that would also produce cannabis oil.

“We’re in new territory here, where there are these active conversations happening,” said Nicole Porter, director of advocacy for nonprofit The Sentencing Project. “It’s also encouraging to see states that have closed prisons and reused them (in fields) outside of corrections, because in many ways, the correctional footprint is so large that if we’re really going to challenge mass incarceration, … we have to look for opportunities to downsize altogether and initiate and sustain conversations in communities, whether rural or urban, that have relied on prisons for an economic benefit.”

Contact Mollie Bryant at mbryant2@gannett.com or 601-961-7251. Follow @MollieEBryant on Twitter.