As Michigan is in a full-blown budget crisis, the Department of Corrections and Governor Granholm proposed yesterday that Camp Manistique, a prison labor camp in the Upper Peninsula, be shut down.  Closing Camp Manistique, which is a minimum-security facility, would save the state $4.5 million per year.  It would also cost 45 prison employees their jobs (although according to The Mining Journal, both prisoners and employees would be transferred to other facilities).

The prison employees are unionized, and they tend to vote Democrat, therefore the Dems have undertaken a full-blown campaign to keep the prison open.  Prisoners currently incarcerated in Michigan, of course, cannot vote.  Although shutting down Camp Manistique would not actually reduce the number of prisoners in the state, Michigan, like other states, has a detention and corrections budget spiraling out of control.  Michigan’s annual prison budget is $1.9 billion, a fifth of the state’s general fund.  Tom Clay from Citizens Research Council of Michigan says that if Michigan didn’t have such high rates of incarceration compared to other Great Lakes states, the prison budget would be closer to $1.4 billion.  According to Families Against Mandatory Minimums, “States such as Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania have more residents than Michigan but incarcerate fewer inmates. Michigan's per-capita incarceration rate is the country's 11th-highest, ranks higher than seven other Great Lakes states and is fourth-highest among the 11 most populous states.”

As prison inmates are overwhelmingly working-class and/or people of color, the current battle over Camp Manistique is yet another manifestation of the vicious cycle of lackluster economic opportunity, tax cuts, and so-called “tough on crime” policy that pits oppressed people against each other.  Hard-working people should have secure and well-paying jobs, and unions should protect their members.  However, unions—not to mention the political party that purports to support organized labor—need to see the link between their struggle for fair labor practices and the struggle of the incarcerated and their families against absolutely insane “tough on crime” policy.  Unfortunately, this has historically not been the case.  For example, prison employee unions in California have been accused of blocking attempts at prison reform and investigations into corruption and abuse in attempts to protect union employees and their places of employment.

Of course, the solution to Michigan’s budget crisis and incarceration crisis is not to simply shut down prisons—this would only lead to more overcrowded prisons with even worse conditions.  Rather, both organized labor and the Democratic party need to wake up and realize that this country’s race to the bottom for incarceration rates can only be reversed by changing “tough on crime” dogma to “smart on crime” policy.  The last thing the Dems should be doing is fighting to keep a prison open.