Iowa town's future may depend on keeping prison

Since 1839, Fort Madison, Iowa, has benefited from being home to a major prison. If a new state prison is built elsewhere, the southeast Iowa town could be in trouble. Gov. Chet Culver, a Democrat, pledged to bring the new $121 million maximum security to Fort Madison, where the penitentiary was founded as a territorial prison, but Republicans want to consider other sites, reports William Petroski of the Des Moines Register.

Fort Madison's location on the Mississippi River made it the perfect spot for a prison in the 1800s, but critics say its rural, isolated location is too far from hospitals, inmates' families or pools of professional workers. Built in 1870, the current prison (at left in a Register photo by Harry Baumert) is showing its age and in 2005 two prisoners made an escape by scaling a 30-foot wall.

"The possibility that Fort Madison could lose the Iowa State Penitentiary sends chills through the town's 11,476 residents, who have already witnessed the loss of several major employers," Petroski writes. "This includes Fruehauf Trailers; Sheaffer Pen, which will be fully closed in March; and the Catfish Bend Casino riverboat, which shut down in November after 13 years docked in Fort Madison. The unemployment rate in Lee County in November was 5.6 percent, fourth-highest among Iowa's 99 counties." A bipartisan legislative committee voted 7-2 in November to recommend Fort Madison for the new 800-bed prison, but the deal is not done. (Read more)

According to The Daily Democrat, the 5,000-circulation newspaper in Fort Madison, the new prison is not going anywhere else. State Sen. Gene Fraise, D-Fort Madison, told the Democrat's Joe Benedict that the prison has the governor's backing and will be built after work on a prison in Mitchellville is finished. (Read more)