To the editor:

It appears that Polk County soon will have a new jail, an odd choice considering that the trend for the past two decades in North Carolina and elsewhere has been to close them.  In fact, the state has shuttered or consolidated perhaps half of all prisons in existence in the 1990s.  Moreover, because of new sentencing standards and law enforcement practices, the state’s prison population has been in a slow but downward spiral.

The decision by Polk’s commissioners to build a new jail not only runs counter to state and national trends but also perhaps the board’s own tax policies and proclamations. Yet political hypocrisy and perfidy only alarms those easily scandalized who will find such misdeeds entertaining.  How much will the new jail cost?  Who will pay for it?  Why would the present Board make such a hurried and affective long-lasting decision that consequentially involves more far more than money and then decamp?  The more you look into the jail project the more you might find buyers resistance mounting.  Or a boutique conspiracy.

First, the specificity of the project should be measured by the vagueness of cost and payment.  No one has given a firm figure on end costs, and, if they do, should be ignored.  More will be added.  Plans call for a 100-cell jail that, at best estimates, might house 50.37 prisoners by 2040.  Moreover, county manager Pittman’s wariness in admitting that no money will be made housing prisoners from elsewhere only begs the question.  Why do this at all?  An older, dilapidated jail?  Build a retaining wall around it and put on a new roof, the old KISS answer.

Yet how to pay for this porky project?  A referendum voted on by the good citizens of the county?  No.  That would be folly unbound.  How much better to increase the county’s indebtedness but by a consumer loan?  Taxes then must be raised to pay for more “debt service.”  But how much?  Look closely at two other items discussed in the commissioner’s meeting on April 18 for an answer.  A firm “completing,” a key word that communicates much, the reevaluation of real property reported that some values will go up and some will go down, that they found “porches that are not right” and “outbuildings not noted.”  How deliberately imprecise can you be?  Does anyone reading this really believe that righting a few porches for increased value and finding those unreported outbuildings will “service the debt?”  Yet “completed” reevaluations on your homes will.

Tragically, the greatest cost to Polk County will not be financial but social.  Our majority county commissioners literally will have approved a costly new jail as they walk out the door, abandoning the very people who supported them the most, those who don’t have stables, pools, and club memberships.  The burden of new taxation will impact them the most, not those who live on ridge tops and horse farms.  Where will the new jail be placed?  Somewhere in Tryon or Saluda?   In some rural area?  Not a chance.  Let’s plop it down by the 4-H Club in Columbus.

Remember the movie Monster’s Ball?  It centered on the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana and graphically illustrated its long-term effects on the life of those around it.  Indeed, the baleful effect of the prison on the community made Billy Bob Thornton’s role in Sling Blade look like a Saturday night live skit so great were the repercussions.  Look closely at Angola and at towns like Parchment in Mississippi for what might happen in Columbus and Polk County.  Both have become flyover backwaters of institutional nastiness.  That’s not Columbus.  Polk County teeters on the edge of that divide.

Polk’s idyllic towns and smaller closely knitted communities personify family and traditional values.  Those unnecessarily will be at risk.  Almost certainly to be populated largely by those with drug-related offenses, the new jail assuredly will attract like monsters who inhabit that crime-ridden world.  We’re going to need lots more policemen and jailers.  With intersecting freeways that fast-track criminals straight into Columbus, expect burglaries, theft, assaults, robberies, and, yes, even murders to increase.  Polk County will have invited all to a monster’s ball.

Milton Ready
Tryon, N.C.