Some students will remember that Professor Williams was visiting faculty member in 2007-08, filling in for Professor Haltom when he was on sabbatical. Since then he's gone on to teaching at Sonoma State, and has continued to work on prisons in small town America. And this resulted in a recent editorial he penned for the LA Times. Excerpt:
The public's surprise that small towns are vying for Guantanamo inmates just demonstrates how little urban and suburban Americans understand about rural America. For the rural communities, prisons and prisoners are about the promise of more jobs and more money.
For more than 25 years, rural towns have been lobbying, cajoling and nearly bribing governmental institutions to give them prisons. I lived in and studied two such towns for more than a year. One was Florence, Colo., where some of the current controversy is focused. It is the home to ADX Florence, the so-called Alcatraz of the Rockies, where the federal government houses its most disruptive inmates under supermax conditions. It is home to "Unabomber" Theodore Kaczynski, would-be shoe-bomber Richard Reid and 9/11 co-conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, among others. And the town of Florence actually raised money to pay the federal government for the privilege of housing these inmates.
Stories like this have become commonplace in rural America. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation used to refer to the process of selecting a community to house a new prison as DAD (decide, announce and defend). Today's process would better be described as LLC: lobby, lobby and celebrate.
In the past, the government bore the burden of convincing towns of the benefits of having a prison. Today, communities must show the government why they are the best location for a prison.
Read the whole thing here:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-williams29-2009jun29,0,4331225.story
