Yes, In My Backyard
Directed by Tracy Huling
Galloping Girls Productions, Inc.
1998

A RAIL comrade was fortunate to attend a screening of the 
new documentary,  Yes, In My Backyard  on the prisons 
industry. Tracy Huling, who directed the film, attended the 
showing as well and answered questions after. This film is a 
valuable resource for anti-prisons activism because it 
describes the extent to which prisons have become an asset 
to the u.$. economy. The film's strength is in showing the 
extent to which the prisons industry encourages its 
employees, their dependents, and players in regional 
economies to think of prisons only as an economic boon. 
People whose families bills have always been paid by the 
prisons have no incentive to question the rehabilitative 
value of the prisons, or to ask if increased imprisonment 
has any effect at all on the crime rate for which it is 
supposed to answer.

 Yes, In My Backyard  is about Coxsackie, a small 
Hudson River-side community in New York whose local economy 
is based on two state prisons. Describing the character of 
Coxsackie and towns like it, Huling said part of the reason 
she wanted to make this film is that the prisons are central 
to the town's existence - everybody knows people who work 
there, and most families depend on the prison for their 
livelihood - but nobody will talk about what this means in 
public. A young womyn interviewed in the film said there is 
nothing special about living in Coxsackie, living in this 
prison town is just how she was raised and it's no different 
from living in any other town.

The major difference is that twenty or thirty years ago, 
there were not nearly as many prison towns in this country. 
And half a century ago, prisons were not a central growth 
industry in the united snakes. Amerika's status as an 
imperialist country gives its citizens the luxury to work in 
non-productive jobs. But the 1970s brought the beginnings of 
a boom in prisons, and with it tremendous growth in the 
number of people directly employed in the business of 
military control of the oppressed nations. A retired 
Corrections Officer interviewed in the film quoted and old 
C.O. saying "the worse things get out in the world, they 
better they are in jail." He was speaking of course of the 
good employment - prisoner living conditions in the u.$. 
have become notoriously brutal.

Coxsackie has a relatively long history as a prison town - 
Coxsackie Correctional Facility was opened as a reform 
school for boys in 1935, and became a maximum security 
prison during the 1970s. The state built Greene Correctional 
Facility in Coxsackie in the mid-1980s with a planned 
capacity of 750, the medium-security prison now has a 
capacity of 1630 inmates. According to the warden, almost 
1,000 of those inmates are under age 21.

Prisoners at Greene are shown doing farm work in  Yes, In 
My Backyard ; the prison has a milk and dairy farm run 
by a local farmer. In one unnarrated scene, an unseen guard 
yelled at a Black prisoner working in the dairy farm to pull 
his pants up. The same scene was repeated without the 
yelling one or two more times during the film. Our best 
guess is that this scene was evidence of the general 
harassment of the oppressed nationalities that goes on in 
the prisons. In Michigan where RAIL saw this film, wearing 
sagging pants and other Black urban styles is classified as 
the mark of a gang or Security Threat Group (STG) member. We 
assume the white rural guards in New York State are as 
intolerant and repressive of Black culture as the white 
rural guards in Michigan.

Coxsackie opened its first prison early to replace the 
town's dwindling commercial economy. A local historian 
explains in the film that as a river-town, Coxsackie saw a 
lot of commerce from the Hudson River traffic 100 years ago. 
But once the highway was built and goods transportation 
switched to road vehicles, the town needed some new 
enterprise. As a long-term prison town, Coxsackie has a lot 
of history of the social issues and problems that run 
through many prison towns. The vast majority of wimmin in 
the town's domestic violence shelter are C.O.s' wives and 
girlfriends. A domestic violence official in Albany is 
quoted in the film saying that the level of danger of 
domestic violence in corrections and criminal justice 
families is markedly higher - not only because corrections 
and police officers are more likely to be violent but 
because they are trained in methods of physical force that 
do not leave visible wounds.

The fact of domestic violence in Correction Officer families 
underscores the sick nature of imprisonment in this country. 
Prisons are supposed to be places of rehabilitation - 
corrections employees should live by higher standards of 
patience, self-awareness and responsibility for others than 
people in other professions. Yet they are trained to inspire 
terror in prisoners and in their own families. To RAIL, this 
illustrates the fact that u.$. prisons will not be reformed 
to the point of being genuine institutions of correction and 
rehabilitation. While it is true that some people who are in 
prisons today have committed crimes by proletarian 
standards, this does not mean they should summarily be 
subjected to abuse and torture. Those who carry out the 
abuse have committed far greater crimes and so are in no 
position to exact any form of justice.

Huling spent a lot of camera-minutes on an interview with 
the Chair of the New York State Legislature's Corrections 
Committee, who spoke both about the tremendous growth in 
prisons in New York and about how little good this has done 
for the state. The legislator said that New York's prisoner 
population grew from 12,500 in 1972 to 70,000 in 1998, and 
that this growth in the population was fuelled by arrest and 
sentencing demands of the so-called War on Drugs. He 
referred to the hardship for prisoners and their families - 
the majority of whom come from New York City and other urban 
areas in the southern part of the state, and are then 
incarcerated in lily white northern New York. Most 
importantly, he spoke about the fact that crime rates have 
risen and fallen through the past twenty years, marking no 
particular relationship to the steady explosion of prisons 
throughout the country.

Toward the end of the film, Coxsackie's mayor talks about 
his own lobbying to bring another prison to the town so that 
the town can increase its income by selling water and sewer 
service to a third prison, and increase the number of 
available prison jobs. The film's final interview is with a 
teenager who says he looks forward to a prison job in his 
future, because the money in prisons is good.

RAIL is happy to see people like Tracy Huling making honest 
films about prisons and their proponents. Working as anti-
imperialists, from the vantage point of the people who are 
oppressed under imperialism, RAIL sees that building more 
prisons is in the interests of many people in this country. 
Employing people to work in the prisons, paying money to 
towns for service to the prisons - these are methods of 
bribing Amerikans to support prisons and other forms of 
imperialism. There is broad support in this country for 
greater imprisonment because the majority benefits from it. 
 Yes, In My Backyard  documents this support in 
government, and in the eyes of corrections employees and 
their community.