Robert David Sullivan 2

Spare the rod, spoil your local park

Several states are trying to save money by shutting down prisons. This may mean consolidating inmates into fewer facilities, but it's also the case that crime rates have dropped over the past couple of decades, and there's a movement away from prison sentences for low-level, nonviolent drug offenses. But a Stateline.org story on the trend points out that some cities and towns aren't happy to lose a source of cheap labor:

In Kansas, local officials have opposed the closing of a minimum-security prison in El Dorado, about 30 miles east of Wichita, saying they don’t know how they will keep up with park maintenance and other community jobs that the inmates perform. A Republican state representative from the region is working to get the state corrections department to change its mind and keep the prison open.

Here in New York, work crews from the Sullivan Annex have stocked trout in local rivers, shoveled around fire hydrants after snowstorms, worked at a nearby food bank and cleaned up campgrounds, said Dahlman, the prison officer. Now that the state has announced it is closing the prison, he said, crews are accepting fewer requests from churches and other community groups in case they won’t be able to finish the jobs.

Look on the bright side: If parks go untended, perhaps the "broken windows" theory will kick in and crime rates will shoot upward, thereby justifying the reopening of the prisons and restoring the means to clean up parks without taxing the citizens who enjoy them.

Hateful geography

Today's Washington Post illustrates a census of hate groups in the US, compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama. The group claims that the total has risen from 602 at the beginning of the century to 888 last year. I would approach this number with some skepticism, since it doesn't say anything about the size or level of activity for each group (and, after all, the SPLC would probably find it harder to raise contributions if it reported a downward trend in hate activity). But the maps do suggest that different kinds of hate groups find it easier to exist in different parts of the country. The Ku Klux Klan has a inland base west of the Appalachias, going from Indiana and Ohio down to Mississippi. Neo-Nazis are concentrated in the upper Midwest (Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois). Racist skinheads are mostly in the urban Northeast, including New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And the Deep South is home to a relatively large number of white nationalists, black nationalists, and neo-Confederates.

Only two states -- Rhode Island and South Dakota -- don't seem to have any hate groups at all.

Dropping out of high school, dropping into jail

The end of the year brings many gifts to data lovers, and two non-unrelated reports hit computer screens today: the Department of Justice's annual prison population census and the Department of Education's annual report on high school dropout rates. We will be crunching the numbers and mapping the data from these and other surveys in the future, but one thing that jumps out from the Justice report is that New Hampshire had the only double-digit percentage growth in its prison population from 2005 to 2006. The number of prisoners in the Granite State went from 2,530 to 2,805, or up 10.9 percent (versus a national increase of 2.8 percent, and a jump in Massachusetts of 3.1 percent). That's still relatively low for the state's size (Hawaii has more than twice as many prisoners), but the change is startling.

Also surprising is that New Hampshire, which is generally one of the best-educated states, had a high school dropout rate of 3.5 percent in 2004-05, not too far below the 3.9 national rate. In Massachusetts, the rate was 3.8 percent; it was highest in Alaska (8.2 percent) and lowest in North Dakota (1.9 percent).