Shock camp closure cripples a community
Shuttering of Moriah incarceration facility takes away jobs, and advocates say, an effective alternative to state prison system
When he was a child waiting for the school bus, Eric Supernault would watch inmatepacked trucks cruise by.
Like other Mineville kids, he aspired to a career at the local shock unit, a state facility where nonviolent offenders were given a second chance in a world of early morning drills, militarystyle formations and work crews.
The institution promised good-paying state employment in an isolated Adirondack community hurting for jobs.
The sense of pride from correction officers — whose uniform creases seemed slightly crisper than guards elsewhere, their boots shinier, the spring in their step sharper — was evident to Supernault.
It was a sense of fulfillment, he said, instilled by a program that
delivered results. Instead of warehousing inmates, guards at Moriah Shock Incarceration Facility would mold their lives and shape offenders into productive citizens, according to prison staff, advocates and inmates themselves.
“This wasn’t a prison to me,” said Nicholas Clark, who graduated from the facility after being sentenced on a nonviolent drug offense. “It was a chance to get out in six months and get back to my daughter and family as soon as possible.”
Now the facility is closed, a casualty of the state’s push to shutter prisons statewide due to declining inmate populations and calls for reform by advocates to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
“It was the only time in corrections you could feel pride in what you’re doing,” said Supernault, who worked at Moriah Shock for nine years. “It was the first time in my career I was making a difference in people’s lives.”
Supernault, 36, put his house on the market and transferred to Washington Correctional, a mediumsecurity
prison located an hour south.
Now he’s just trying to make it through the day.
The job is darker. There’s a specter of violence lurking that wasn’t present at Moriah Shock, where guards and inmates largely had an even-keeled relationship, if not a mutually respectful one.
“We’re going from (guarding) drug dealers and drunks to murderers and rapists,” Supernault said.
In Moriah, a rugged community of six hamlets hugging the edge of Lake Champlain and butting up against the Adirondack Mountains, the closure of what many describe as the heart of the community has sent emotional and economic shrapnel through its citizenry. It has caused a crisis that many fear is irreversible.
“It’s a feeling of despair,” said Moriah Town Supervisor Tom Scozzafava. “We just lost our major employer.”
The debate unfolding in Moriah, a town of 4,700 located two hours north of Albany, is more nuanced and goes beyond the conventional argument carved along traditional contours — that closing prisons will cost a rural community good-paying jobs and is the result of a misplaced attempt
at reforms by progressive activists — but rather that the state is closing an inmate-endorsed program that results in a lower recidivism rate and costs less in the process.
“It’s something that works, costs less and is humane,” said Matt Simpson, a Republican state Assemblyman who represents the eastern Adirondacks.
It costs $69,000 annually to house an inmate at a state facility: It’s unclear if the cost was lower at Moriah Shock because the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision said it would only release the information under a Freedom of Information Law request.
But since the state’s shock program began in July 1987, DOCCS said it has saved the department more than $1.59 billion, with an average of 14 months saved off an individual’s sentence.
Moriah Shock closed March 10, three months after Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the facility would be among six to shut down statewide. The closures are the result of last year’s state budget. Altogether, more than 1,700 people worked at the six now-shuttered facilities
statewide containing more than 1,400 inmates.
At the time of the state’s announcement Nov. 8, there were 31,469 inmates housed in state correctional facilities, a 56 percent decline from the department’s high of 72,773 in 1999. That’s the lowest total incarcerated population in state prisons since 1984.
Moriah Shock housed 74 inmates, a quarter of its capacity of 300. The facility’s high-water mark was 299 inmates in 1996.
The state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision defended its decision by promising the closures would result in no layoffs.
The 107 staff members at Moriah Shock were offered new assignments, with the inmates dispersed to other facilities and the state’s lone remaining shock program, Lakeview Shock, seven hours away in western New York.
Now the waylaid correction officers have adapted by carpooling to either Great Meadow or Adirondack Correctional Facility in Saranac Lake. They said it’s not the long commutes that chew at them, rather the abrupt change in their professional missions.
“At the end of the day, you saw a result,” said Dylan Orr, a 29-year-old correction officer. “Now it’s like moving cattle.”
Wally Edwards, 29, recalled the strict regimen at Moriah, which started with morning exercises and drill formations before inmates attended skills training, treatment for substance abuse and work assignments.
Those who refused to participate would get bounced.
Now, he said: “You’re not teaching them anything.”
DOCCS said it decided to close Moriah Shock after reviewing operations at its 50 correctional facilities statewide, resulting in a $142 million cost savings.
The decision to close the facilities, the state agency said, was based on numerous factors, “including physical infrastructure, program offerings, facility security level, specialized medical and mental health services, closeness of other facilities in the area to minimize the impact to staff, potential re-use options and areas of the state where prior closures have occurred in order to minimize the impact to communities.”
But local officials say Moriah Shock ticks off all of those boxes for keeping the facility open. And while the facility employed 107 at the time of its closure, the jobs packed an oversized punch in a town still reeling from generations of economic decline, including the closure of Republic Steel in 1971, which many still remember.
“That devastated our town,” said Timothy Breeyear, 69, a lifelong resident. “There was always hope the mine was going to reopen. Of course, it was always a false hope for everybody and it just never happened.”
Those navigating the fallout are also coming to terms with the fact that the decision seemed pre-ordained. Attempts to save the camp — the rallies, protests, furious letterwriting campaigns to Hochul and Anthony J. Annucci,
the state’s acting DOCCS commissioner — were futile and the community wasn’t given the chance to make their case.
Even the delivery of hundreds of letters from current and former inmates endorsing the program failed to change things, advocates said.
“It was three months and done,” said Chloe Orr, Dylan’s mother and the local postmaster. “Nobody seemed to want to listen ... it has left a horrible taste in a lot of people’s mouths.”
Billie Jo Simpson, a former inmate record coordinator, sifted through hundreds of letters — many addressed directly to drill instructors — that she compiled to save the facility.
“With your rigorous (physical training), constant strict nature, in time, you eventually broke us like a herd of wild horses,” one wrote. “In the end, we grew to respect and trust you.”
Simpson recalled one letter made a drill sergeant well up.
“When you have grown men reading that and tearing up, it means something,” she said.
DOCCS acknowledged the recidivism rate is lower than at other state facilities: 28 percent of shock graduates returned to custody within three years of release compared with 43 percent of all releases.
Signs reading “Save Moriah Shock” dot the town’s landscape, including along Main Street in Port Henry, which is pockmarked with empty storefronts. The former village, which dissolved in 2017 following years of rising taxes and a plummeting population, even had trouble keeping a local grocery store. The last food outlet in the 70-mile lakeside stretch between Ticonderoga and Platts
burgh closed in 2019 and was later razed, giving way to an expanded Stewart’s.
Scozzafava, the town supervisor, said it’s just the latest bruising.
“The decision was purely political,” Scozzafava said. “They’d rather put (inmates) in a concrete jungle and surround them with razor wire than do something productive.”
Scozzafava said he and other county leaders received no warning about the closure, finding out by text message just hours before the announcement in November.
Moriah Shock was slated for shutdown under thenGov. David Paterson’s budget proposal in 2010. But a series of meetings between Adirondacks officials and Paterson spared the camp. Yet 20 other state prisons have closed in the past decade, whittling away at the nearly three dozen former Gov. Mario Cuomo saw built under his tenure — including Moriah Shock.
Last week, Scozzafava traveled to a conference of county officials in a lastminute attempt to catch the governor’s ear.
“When you’re ignored at this level, that pisses me off,” Scozzafava said.
Hochul’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Mineville has seen pain before. When Republic Steel closed for summer vacation in July 1971 and never reopened, it took 500 jobs with it, reordering the local economy and way of life in the town.
A half-century later, the parallels are not lost on local residents.
Thelma Gaddor, a worker at Grover Hills Deli, fought back tears when discussing the closure.
“It’s just like the mines closing when I was growing up,” Gaddor said, recalling a once-bustling strip in the hamlet of Witherbee.
Gaddor estimated a 20 percent decline in morning business since the camp closed. Correction officers used to stop by for coffee and breakfast sandwiches and the phone would ring with daily lunch deliveries.
Aslam Muhammad, the owner of Mineville Rexall, cited the evaporation of visiting families.
“We’re not happy at all,” Muhammad said. “Maybe we’ll shut down sometime.”
Moriah Shock is located above a former iron mine. It took 18 years for the facility to open on its footprint in 1989.
Breeyear recalled when the state began making acquisitions and chatter rippled through the community.
People initially balked at a fenceless prison.
“Many were very skeptical,” Breeyear said, citing what he said were nowmisplaced thoughts of crazed escapees roaming through town.
But residents’ doubts were assuaged once officials briefed them on the concept of a shock program, a facility with no walls where qualifying, nonviolent inmates could swap out longer sentences for six months of a regimented schedule.
Breeyear, a former football coach, recalled his athletes were overjoyed about the prospects for working in their hometowns. Like other local residents, he cycled through the names of Moriahreared men and women who found careers at the facility.
Moriah Shock has also been a lifeline for cashstrapped localities unable to pay large workforces not only in Essex County but throughout the Adirondacks.
Inmates were assigned to work crews that spread out across the region. An average day could see them clearing brush, performing trail and campsite maintenance on state Department of Environmental Conservation infrastructure or working on the Essex County Fairgrounds.
But crews were also dispatched to fight wildfires, assist with breaking up ice jams — and even building the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival ice castle.
Clark, the Moriah Shock graduate, said the labor was a point of pride among inmates, giving them a chance to present themselves to a community that eventually came to appreciate their contributions.
“They didn’t look at us like criminals,” Clark said.
A hiring freeze has limited DEC’s ability to add staff in the Adirondacks.
When asked if the agency conducted a cost estimate placing a monetary value on the labor, DEC didn’t answer the question. DOCCS said it could not estimate the savings for local municipalities from the work of Moriah Shock participants.
The loss of labor, local officials agreed, comes with a near-incalculable fiscal cost. Civic organizations have also lamented the disappearance of crews they came to rely on to bolster their ailing ranks.
The Sherman Free Library and the Mineville
VFW Post 5802 will now struggle to fill the void, said Sue Nephew, a retired librarian.
“Our aging members simply cannot do the work that a group of young men can do,” Nephew said. “(Moriah Shock) provided the inmates a way to become a productive member of society instead of them just draining the taxpayers with their expenses.”
DOCCS said it would find a way to repurpose the closed facilities — which also include Ogdensburg, Willard Drug Treatment Campus, Southport, Downstate and Rochester — but has not elaborated or provided an update.
In the North Country, Clinton Correctional Facility Annex closed last March. Camp Gabriels in 2009; Lyon Mountain in 2011, and Chateaugay and Mount McGregor in 2014. Lyon Mountain was sold to a private buyer for $140,000. Many others remain vacant despite the best efforts by local economic development agencies to market them to prospective buyers.
Officials fear the same future awaits Moriah Shock.
Essex County Board of Supervisors Chairman Shaun Gillilland said the state inked a “social contract” with the Adirondacks during its prison-building spurt. As such, it is obligated to swiftly find a use for the decommissioned facility, he said, and not saddle local officials with a husk left to deteriorate.
“It has no future now because nobody thought about it when they decided to close it,” Gillilland said, cycling through the list of other Adirondack prison closures. “We’re determined not to let that happen with Moriah Shock.”
At present, the facility is idling. The power remains on and a security crew remains, giving the community the glimmer of hope for a prompt resurrection.
Closure of the facility has united an unlikely coalition of people: Pro-prison advocates and supporters of alternatives to incarceration.
Among the allies is the Albany-based Center for Law and Justice.
Alice Green, executive director of the Center for Law and Justice, said she was torn about taking a position on Moriah Shock’s closure. (“We’re in the business of closing prisons and prohibiting prisons from being built in the first place,” Green said.) But the civil rights activist, who was born in Mineville, acknowledged the facility played a key role in job training and reducing prison sentences, both of which are key platforms of the nonprofit’s mission.
Green is among those who want to see the facility reused to fulfill those objectives.
“We certainly hope that something positive could develop from it,” Green said. “The facility could be used for education, training — whatever type of program — that allows people to get out of (state) facilities sooner.”
Until then, the community waits. Just over a week after its formal closure, an attitude is calcifying that it’s too late, and the town is resigned to weather another kick in the teeth, alone and forgotten by Albany.
Simpson, the records keeper, said it’s never too late.
“I will not give up. I write letters to (Governor Hochul) constantly.”