[NYAPRS Enews] NYT: Cuomo Considers Prison Closures, Preserving MH Services

[Harvey Rosenthal]

Cuomo Visits Sing Sing And A Psychiatric Center

By Nicholas Confessore And Elizabeth A. Harris  New York Times  November
10, 2010

 

It was, some might argue, an apt dry run for the New York
governor-elect.

 

Andrew M. Cuomo visited a state prison and a state-run mental ward on
Wednesday, the first stops in what aides billed as a postelection tour
of the state government that Mr. Cuomo has pledged to tame and revive
after he takes office.

 

The visits - first to the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining,
N.Y., then to the Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Wards Island - marked
the second day of formal transition activities for Mr. Cuomo, who also
released a video in which he thanked New Yorkers for voting for him and
pledged to make state government less secretive.

 

While there were no jokes about corrupt officials or the madhouse
atmosphere that has prevailed in Albany in recent years, the visits were
rich with practical and symbolic significance for Mr. Cuomo, the state
attorney general and a Democrat.

 

Sing Sing was the scene of the first major test faced by Mr. Cuomo's
father, Mario M. Cuomo, after being elected governor almost three
decades ago: In 1983, shortly after Mr. Cuomo took office, inmates
rioted and held 17 guards hostage for two days. Governor Cuomo was
intimately involved in the negotiations, and the hostages emerged
without serious injury.

 

"In some ways, this comes full circle for me; when I first started in
state government, I was working for a fellow named Mario Cuomo," Mr.
Cuomo, who served as an adviser to his father at the time, said at a
news conference on Wednesday outside the prison.

 

"This was the first incident, first episode," Mr. Cuomo added. "He'd
just been governor literally a few days, and this was the nightmare
scenario," he explained. "It was very frightening."

 

The agencies that run prisons and mental health facilities also employ
the largest number of state workers of any departments of government
under direct control of the governor, part of a work force that Mr.
Cuomo may be forced to trim, or demand significant concessions from, to
plug the state's projected $8 billion deficit for next year.

 

Mr. Cuomo used his visit to lay out some of the budget challenges that
he will face in the months ahead, particularly when it comes to the
billions of dollars a year that New York spends to run its own
operations, a major component of the state budget.

 

More prisons were opened under Mr. Cuomo's father than under any other
governor in New York history, as high crime rates and 1970s-era
mandatory sentencing laws drove significant growth in the state prison
population. On Wednesday, Governor-elect Cuomo argued that with the
prison population now shrinking, it was time to think about shrinking
the number of prisons, too.

 

"On the prison side, the census is dropping; that's good news," Mr.
Cuomo said. "We are locking up fewer people. But then you need fewer
facilities. And the shrinkage of that system is going to be something
that has to be thought through and managed."

 

He said the state could not afford to have on its payroll state workers
who have no real duties.

 

"I understand the economic consequences of losing state jobs," Mr. Cuomo
said. "The answer can't be we are going to employ state workers who
literally have no function."

 

Govs. David A. Paterson, whom Mr. Cuomo met with on Tuesday, and Eliot
Spitzer tried, with mixed success, to close correctional facilities,
which provide much-needed jobs in some rural, upstate counties.

 

Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New
York, a prisoners' advocacy organization, said he would welcome a new
push by Mr. Cuomo to reduce spending on prisons, especially in the wake
of legislation passed last year that reduced sentences for many
nonviolent drug offenders.

 

"My guess is, those kinds of efficiencies are available," Mr. Gangi
said. "He can really accomplish something for the state both in terms of
improving the criminal justice system and in bringing down the costs."

 

Mr. Cuomo used his later appearance, at the psychiatric center, to
strike a different note. Standing directly underneath the Robert F.
Kennedy Bridge, Mr. Cuomo said the state must balance the reality of
scarce state dollars against the need to provide services, like mental
health care, to the most vulnerable New Yorkers.

 

Balancing the budget is "a priority for me," he said, but "the flip side
of that equation is balancing that budget with the very necessary,
important services that the state is providing, the services where you
are literally taking care of human beings."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/11/nyregion/11cuomo.html?_r=1&partner=rss
&emc=rss&pagewanted=print 

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