THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, February 24, 1995 TAG: 9502240016
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 47 lines
I question the value of a prison (or perhaps prisons) on the Eastern Shore. I am 76 years old. My ancestors were long-time Shore residents. The destruction of life as it is lived on the Eastern Shore is at hand.
The people of Accomack seem to me to ignore the situation. The people of Northampton County are held hostage by their board of supervisors. Yet the destruction of the Shore is proceeding with a high-handed, bureaucratic Department of Corrections and an unthinking governor marching in unison.
The proposed maximum-security prison will have more than its share of non-Virginia inmates. Most of those will come from the urban areas of the industrial North.
Drug trade put them in prison and drug dealers will sponsor their families' desire to live near the prison. Drug money will buy them homes and drug money may sustain them until these people, who are the successors of the inmates in the drug business, are themselves arrested and put in jail.
Then the money stops coming. Then the families of the inmates have no means of subsistence. Still, their children must be schooled, fed and clothed, all with welfare money from the county in which those people choose to settle. The citizens of the Eastern Shore will pay. Accomack will not escape.
In Northampton the sheriff's office will have to be increased. The commonwealth's attorney's staff will have to be increased. More judges will be needed. There will be other costs that Eastern Shore people will have to bear.
What of the drug traffickers who come to see their incarcerated friends? They will stay in motels in Northampton or Accomack. They will have nothing to do but sit around waiting to see their friends, and they will have ample opportunity to case areas. They will go to restaurants and bars, meet some residents of the Eastern Shore who need little encouragement to join in the drug traffic. Crime will increase substantially.
The state says prisons are good. But hundreds of questions remain unanswered. Why would the state make the counties of Eastern Shore a penal colony? A prison will destroy a way of life and an area of unspoiled beauty.
FREDERICK T. STANT JR.
Virginia Beach, Feb. 15, 1995 by CNB