Youth Incarceration Comes to the North Country

 

By Dr. Alexandra Cox

New York state is spending over $50 million to repurpose two prisons in the North Country so they can incarcerate just over 250 teenagers in these specially designed ‘youth’ prisons. The recent passage of the state’s law to raise the age of criminal responsibility for some teenagers created a provision for the Department of Corrections and Community Services to create ‘youth friendly’ prisons which are informed by developmentally-appropriate services and interventions. While the passage of the law to raise the age of criminal responsibility was an important step forward, and the construction of these facilities represents a clear acknowledgement that teenagers are inherently different than adults, the impact that the passage of this law has on the North Country should be interrogated. I will be speaking on April 8 in Lake Placid about my book on some of the historic and contemporary issues of juvenile imprisonment in the state.

I’ve come to know the Adirondacks well over the last few years, although my roots extend further back (my uncle, Peter Cox, was the editor of the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in the early 1960s). Prisons first brought me to the North Country, but the region’s natural beauty, the richness of the landscape, its history, and its people, led me to stay. But it is prison, unfortunately, that brings me back once again. I first came to the region to work on the case of a man who was convicted of killing his brother, in order to beg for leniency in his sentence. My client’s story was a true North Country one — a man whose life declined as the dairy economy of the region did. His fate would be prison, not unlike many of the people he grew up with, although they held the keys, and he would be behind the gate. As the dairy economy dried out, some of his friends turned to prison jobs as salvation. My client, in his seventies, has ultimately been sentenced to die in prison, and the last time I saw him was at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, where he told me about the days he spent inside of his cell, playing Sudoku, and protecting himself against the harsh conditions around him. 

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Source: Adirondack Daily Enterprise (via Empire Report New York)