Inspired by the thread about NIMBYs and the thoughts of the late great George Carlin who wondered why people didn’t want to live next to prisons, since if anyone escapes the last thing they’re gonna do is hang around and generally criminals aren’t likely to do their business in the shadow of a correctional facility.
So if you have a prison in your neighbourhood (let’s assume it’s in the US) is the crime rate likely to be lower or higher than the national average?
I guess it would. Living in Brazil I would not be afraid of escaping criminals (they would do their business elsewhere…) but with riots - they tend to get pretty rough even on juvenile correctional facilities. Also, they are most of the time an eyesore - ugly, huge, windowless buildings.
Driving to visit my brother near Ann Arbor, Michigan I saw signs warning me not to pick up hitch hikers due to the prison nearby. We lol’d.
The old prison in Melbourne was in a low-rent area. It was low-rent because of the old prision. And also, it had the prison because it wasn’t good-loking enough, or close enought to anything, to be high-rent.
It had a higher crime rate because it was low-rent. It wasn’t an exceptionaly low-rent area, so it wasn’t exceptionaly high-crime.
They’ve sold the old prison site for real-estate, because the site was becoming too valuable to let prisoners stay there. The schools are improving, the rents are up, and crime is down. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation though.
A lot of our prisons are in or near city centres. The mind boggles at the real estate value of Durham http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Durham_Prison_-_geograph.org.uk_-_228811.jpg or HMP Leicester http://legacymedia.localworld.co.uk/275788/Article/images/16776150/4083948.jpg
I’ve seen signs like that in New York. It’s a reasonable warning.
But it must suck if your car breaks down, you have no money, and are wearing an orange jumpsuit!
One suspects that the residents might also be perturbed by the prison visitors, who by association might be regarded as somewhat less than trustworthy.
I used to lease a car parking spot under a hotel that backed onto the local remand centre. I figured the back alley there was one of the safest around, given it had 7x24 surveillance from a plethora of cameras along the building. What was amusing was that there is also a day care centre close by. It was built at a very similar time, and looks for all the world like a mini version of the remand centre. This is right in the city, the street the day care centre is on turns into the central sleaze street a bit further on.
Prisons are never great works of architecture. Any highly secure site tends to look pretty awful, and isn’t exactly what you want to see if you are paying serious money for the real estate. Parks, leafy vistas, lots of expensive looking houses, not razor wire and no windows.
if just occurred to me that–since the escaped criminal doesn’t want to hang around-- he’s going to need a car. Right now.
And if your car happens to be the one he spots…
So either car theft or carjacking seems probable–and not picking up a hitchhiker is also a reasonable precaution…
Of course, the number of escapes is minimal, so it probably won’t affect the statistics much.(how often does a typical prison have a convict escape?–once every couple years, maybe?)
I’ve heard complaints that the families of the prisoners often move to the nearest town to be near them, and not all prisoners are the black sheep in their family, if you follow my drift.
nm
Some towns desire prisons nearby. The corrections officers are relatively well paid and solid citizens.
Folsom, CA is a fairly upscale suburb of Sacramento, and also contains Folsom State Prison. Locals call it Folsom University (F-U).
I have not heard of Folsom’s crime rate being any worse or better than any of the neighboring towns, but I hear is it a good place to live with good schools, housing, and open spaces.
Here’s a link to the comparative crime statistics for Waupun, WI (home of 3 prisons) vs. the state vs. the nation in 2008.
It’s not a perfect comparison; we don’t know how similar towns of Waupun’s size compare, nor do we know if the crime rate in Waupun also reflects crime occurring in prison,like prison rape (I suspect it does, the cops do go into the prisons to investigate and arrest folks). Other defects could be cited.
But except for rape, Waupun has lower rates of crime than WI as a whole and the nation at large.
That’s my thinking. He needs clothes, a bit of cash, maybe a phone. And here’s a bunch of houses right next to the prison…
The link to Durham prison does not really give you a realistic idea of the value of the land. The area on one side is old, and very interesting, but you would never get planning permission to build something new, its all listed status, the other side of Durham prison is a council estate.
It certainly has land value, but not outrageously so, you would get some nice hosing on it, no industry or business.
Leicester nick is probably better in terms of land value, I reckon that would be worth a few bob, get some pretty significant size shopping centre or retail park on it, and its next to major roads so easy for parking and transport.
The main risk from UK prisons does come from the visitors, however local residents probably do better than other similar locations since police frequently go around looking for warrants, the naughty boys don’t tend to hang around too long.
Anecdotally I have heard there is a specific problem with Wakefield which houses some of the very worst sex offenders. These prisoners may well have been disowned by their families and have served long periods of time, so they find it very difficult to even think about resettling around their former home towns, as a result they settle in Wakefield town itself - so there is a far higher number of former serious sex offenders in Wakefield than would be expected in a comparable city.
Hm, back in the day one of the men in my parent’s church was one of the men at Attica’s riot that got the really drastic head injury when he was a hostage. One detriment of living near a prison is being an employee when they decide they need a really big riot with hostages.
And the mother of an ex-fiance owned the tiny recreational farm next to Dillwyn Correctional - they used to send over a few deputies to guard the place in the few days leading up to and including the day of an execution just in case. She said that whenever they had an escape you could hear the sirens and loudspeaker announcements if you were sitting on the back porch [and then some of the deputies would show up and search the barn and outbuildings fairly thoroughly.]
Living near a prison might be unpleasant, but you’ll be thankful when the zombies come.
One sees these signs every few miles on I-80 from one end of Nevada to the other. Nevada has lots of prisons hidden in them thar barren wastelands. There’s also one such sign on U. S. 101 in California, somewhere near Camp Roberts (near southern end of Monterey County or northern San Luis Obispo County). I’ve never been aware of any prison in that area.
Prisons sitting on valuable real estate: Surely San Quentin State Prison, in wealthy Marin County, California, must be high on this list. The prison occupies a phenomenally beautiful point of land jutting out into San Pablo Bay (as the northern portion of San Francisco Bay is called), on the outskirts of San Rafael. This land would surely command a plus-que-fabulous price on the free market, to be developed into up-scale condominia.
Wikipedia page, including a long-shot photo showing nearby hills and an aerial photo.
Another article, with a good aerial photo (scroll down a ways).
ETA: BTW: As shown in these photos, San Quentin has windows.
