This ought to be cause for celebration: New York state is closing some low- and medium-security prisons because it doesn't have enough felons:

On Jan. 11, the Spitzer administration announced plans to close Camp Gabriels, two other corrections camps and a medium-security prison, all of which have been operating below capacity since 1996 because of a decline in the number of nonviolent felons, the state’s corrections commissioner, Brian Fischer, said. Closing those prisons, Mr. Fischer said, would save the state millions of dollars, free up money for the treatment of sex offenders and mentally ill inmates, and finance programs like anger management and vocational training, meant to prepare prisoners for their release.

But New York has used prisons as a kind of rural subsidy (as has Texas), which has left some little towns hooked on prison jobs and prison labor. For example, "Camp" Gabriels, one of the prisons slated to close, employs 136 people in sparsely populated Franklin. Predictably:

[s]mall businesses have staked their survival on the prison workers who patronize their stores. Local governments and charities, meanwhile, have come to depend on inmate work crews to clear snow from fire hydrants, maintain parks and hiking trails, mow the lawns at cemeteries and unload trucks at food pantries. . . . “All those services, when you put that into dollars, there’s no way we’d be able to hire people to perform them,” said Mary Ellen Keith, supervisor of the town of Franklin, which relies on the crews to cut overgrown brush from the sides of 67 miles of local roads, among other tasks.

The locals, prison workers and unions are organizing a campaign to save the prisons. It's only a matter of time before they figure out that the solution is to increase the demand for what they're selling. Mete out stiffer sentences for recreational drug users, for example. Jail parking ticket scofflaws. Or just criminalize can-kicking.