Harlem residents might have been expected to cheer
when they learned of Governor George Pataki’s plans to close a local prison.
Instead, some got mad. Stepping up to the microphone at a recent community
meeting, Gwen Bowen blasted the proposed shutdown of Parkside Correctional Facility,
which is at the corner of West 121st Street and Mount Morris Park West in
Harlem. “I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have a husband, friend, father,
sister, brother, or cousin who has been incarcerated,” says Bowen, a real
estate agent who chairs the prison’s citizen advisory board. “They are our
families and they’re from our community. To have them be pushed out of their
community just isn’t fair.”
Such outcry is extremely unusual. While most New
Yorkers would protest loudly if a jail opened on their block, a few dozen
Harlem residents are actually fighting to keep this women’s prison, which
opened in 1975. There are seven state prisons in New York City, and Parkside is
the primary work-release facility for women. Inmates come to Parkside as they
near the end of their sentences, and the facility eases their transition out of
prison by helping them land jobs. Some of Parkside’s 130 inmates live at home
and check in every day, while others sleep at the prison two days a week, and
still others are locked in every night.
The state budget Pataki proposed earlier this year
claims that closing Parkside would save an estimated $1.5 million. According to
the state’s Department of Correctional Services, Parkside is no longer needed,
largely because Pataki barred violent offenders from the state’s work-release
program in 1995. The total number of participants shrunk from 6300 in 1994 to
2900 today. Among women, the numbers plunged from 630 to 385.
Parkside’s fate rests with the outcome of the state’s
ongoing budget negotiations. In the interim, some Harlem activists are making a
last-ditch effort to save the prison by lobbying politicians and collecting
petitions. This group, which calls itself the Committee to Stop the Closing of
Parkside, includes employees of the prison as well as local residents. For
years, inmates have raked and picked up trash in the park across the street
from the prison. “If it hadn’t been for them, Marcus Garvey Park would be down
the tubes today,” says Ethel Bates, the coordinator of Marcus Garvey Park
Conservancy, who is helping lead the push to keep Parkside open. “The city owes
them a lot.”
When members of the group trying to save Parkside
talk about their motives, they sometimes sound like the residents of towns in
upstate New York, who regularly lobby for new prisons. Prison employees and
inmates “give a lot back to the community,” says Elsie Brooks, who manages
Paris Blues, a local bar. “They use restaurants, beauty salons, pharmacies. A
lot of the businesses they put money back into are black owned and Hispanic
owned.” According to Parkside’s supporters, the prison injects more than
$500,000 a year into Harlem’s economy.
The Guardians Association— an African American group
that represents correction officers and others in law enforcement— is fighting
to keep Parkside open, even though state corrections officials have promised
there will be no layoffs. Statistics compiled last year by the Department of
Correctional Services show that fewer than 2 percent of guards at New York’s
state prisons are nonwhite. But at Parkside, all 15 guards are African American
or Hispanic, according to the Guardians.
“The bulk of our people go to prison, but the bulk of
the jobs go to white people,” says Shirley Phipps, the group’s spokesperson. “They’ve
been profiting off our sons and brothers and fathers for years. We have to keep
the revenues in our community.”
Not everyone in central Harlem is upset about
Parkside’s proposed closing, however. Peggy Toone, president of the 121st
Street Block Association, says she does not oppose Parkside’s programs— just
its location. When Toone moved into a spacious brownstone a few doors down from
the prison 20 years ago, her block was mostly rooming houses and vacant
buildings. Today, most of those properties have been converted into one- or
two-family homes. While the value of her house has soared, she says, many
problems with the prison have persisted.
Toone’s list of complaints includes inmates shouting
to their boyfriends from the prison’s windows, guards taking all the parking
spaces on the street, and a prisoner stashing drugs in a neighbor’s flowerpot. “It’s
not a matter of people not being empathetic and caring,” says Toone, an
entrepreneur and artist. “What we’ve endured would not be tolerated in other
places. It’s like we’re living in a prison camp.”
Harlem assemblyman Keith Wright also supports
Parkside’s shutdown. “There were some alleged acts of prostitution being
performed,” says Wright, a Democrat who sits on the assembly’s corrections
committee. “People just don’t like seeing that in the morning, especially when
they’re taking their kids to school.”
Inside Parkside, some people wonder what will happen
if the prison closes. Many inmates will wind up at the city’s only other prison
for women, Bayview Correctional Facility, located across from Chelsea Piers.
Bayview is expected to expand its work-release program, but Luz Santana worries
that the total number of female inmates who can participate in work-release may
drop even further.
Before she became a counselor at Parkside, Santana
was herself a prisoner. She was in her 11th year of a 15-years-to-life sentence
for killing her abusive stepfather when Governor Mario Cuomo granted her
clemency in 1986. Santana has not forgotten how hard it is to re-adjust to life
after a decade behind bars, so now she is fighting to keep Parkside open.
“I think this program should be made available to all
the inmates coming out of prison,” Santana says. “It’s much better for them to
go back into the community with some sort of support system to fall back on
rather than giving them $30 and a trench coat and putting them on the curb and
saying you’re free.”
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