Two ISU sociology professors have found bringing prisons into small towns has not always created the prosperity those towns believed it would, and actually has a negative economic impact in some cases.

“Small towns would look to prisons for the jobs [they] could bring, so that’s what prompted me to ask the question. Does [building new prisons] fulfill the promise that small towns hoped that it would have first of all, and what if it doesn’t?” said Terry Besser, associate professor of sociology and co-author of the study.

Besser and co-author Margaret Hanson, assistant scientist in sociology, found one reason bringing a prison to a small town created a negative economic impact was because communities who built prisons were asked to “give up certain things to provide infrastructure and bonding capabilities,” Besser said.

“You bring in 300 jobs, which is average for a prison nationwide. You would expect to get some economic return from that, but it doesn’t turn out to be the case [nationally],” Besser said.

She said this trend is not only a national issue but is also related to the global economy.

At the same time that small towns are losing jobs overseas, “we have this parallel trend which is that big increase in incarceration rates, so it seemed only natural that the two of them would coincide with one another,” Besser said.

Developers started looking at prisons as a new economic opportunity for small towns, but Besser and Hanson’s study showed this might not be the answer.

The study pointed to a trend in lost property values and lower overall growth rates in communities where new prisons were built.

Although the majority of the new prisons built were in the southern United States, the national trend shows building a prison in a small town may not be the cure it once was thought to be.

Besser used data gathered from the national 1990 and 2000 Census to evaluate her findings.

“Final analysis is quite powerful in that I only looked at towns with equal poverty levels in 1990 and compared that with new prison towns with towns [without prisons] of equivalent poverty levels,” Besser said.

One Iowa town found sometimes it is a good thing not to be in the national norm.

Bringing a prison to Clarinda “has not been a negative issue to us,” said Frank Snyder, mayor of Clarinda.

“In our case it picked up higher paying jobs and secured the mental health facility.”

The complex has around 300 employees, with the majority living within a 30-mile radius of the town, said Mark Lund, superintendent of the Clarinda Treatment Complex.

The prison houses all three levels of inmates, minimum security to maximum security, as well as a prison trustee program, Lund said.

Rick Allely, executive director of Clarinda development corporation, said economic expansion has been a “tremendous boom” for the town in the last two years.

The Clarinda Treatment Complex now houses the prison, hospital, nursing home, adjudicated youth facility, shelters, the community mental health facility and a retired volunteer program among others, Lund said.

The prison and other facilities in the complex are the “mainstay of the community,” said Gordon Kokenge, former city councilman who facilitated bringing the prison to Clarinda.

The stigma of having a new prison built was never in the community. In fact, a lot of people lobbied for a new prison, Kokenge said.

“[There was] virtually no opposition in the community; we are an institutional community,” he said.