It was couched in terms of rural economic development, but the prison-building frenzy of the 1970s and 1980s carried a hidden cost - social disruption of urban families and a gross distortion of rural economies.

As the prison-industrial complex began to take on form at the planning tables of Corporate America and its political allies of both major parties, it seemed that nothing could stop its forward motion.

Until the 1960s, New York, for example, had just seven major prisons. In 2010, the state has 67 prisons holding 58,000 inmates, not counting federal prisons and county or city jails.

That’s a lot of people - prisoners and those who are paid to watch them. What’s probably more important, it’s a lot of money that the taxpayers are shelling out for something that’s not being done very well - rehabilitating the inmates and returning them to life among their fellow citizens.

Thus, we have the designation, “correctional facility,” instead of prison. For the amount of money spent, however, there has been little rehabilitation or correction accomplished. The recidivism rate in American prisons is high. Some of the most successful programs for keeping former inmates from a return trip to prison are those operated by private, non-profit groups, most of which do not receive much government money.

Before the prison boom, New York’s major prisons - maximum security - were relatively close to population centers, from which the bulk of prisoners came, the one major exception being Clinton Prison at Dannemora, built in 1845 and known for generations as “Little Siberia.”

By 2008, the U.S. had 2.3 million prisoners and 70 percent of them were “non-whites,” according to a paper, “Resisting the Prison-Industrial Complex,” from the State University of New York at Binghamton. In all, 7.3 million were in prison, jail, on parole, or on probation in 2008, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The explosion of incarceration in America is largely attributed to the so-called war on drugs, another failed “war” that America embarked upon and continues to this day. Mandatory sentencing was a major factor in the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands or millions of non-violent offenders.

At an estimated annual cost of $18,000-$31,000 per prisoner, you can do the math and get a hint of the massive cost of laws gone awry. But, underneath it all, there was the opportunity for fortunes to be made. In New York alone, this year’s costs at the high end of incarceration would be about $1.8 billion. And, that’s a bare-bones estimate just for those placed in state prisons, not in the lesser facilities or in parole or probation systems.

When New York and the other states started their boom in prison building, it was not - and still is not - clear whether it was seen as a giant money-making scheme or as economic development for the rural parts of the state, of which there are many and they are remote. That’s how state officials sold the “prison in your backyard” concept over the past 30 years.

They pointed out that each prison would provide 200-300 jobs that were well paying. That was kind of tricky, because in the cities, officials sought support for massive prison projects on the basis of fear of crime (including non-violent possession of marijuana), while they sought to overcome the fear in the rural areas of having a large population of offenders right in their neighborhoods.

It was a kind of tightrope walk for officials looking to sell incarceration as rural economic development, no matter how it was viewed. However, there were few escapes, even from the medium and minimum-security prisons and people settled into having prisons between their homes and the supermarket where they shopped every week.

This could be considered by some as an aside, but it is something to be considered: it was during this same period that Corporate America and its assorted agribusinesses were busily forcing small farmers off the land (and this continues) and inexorably forging the path to giant food production operations that were (and are) more industry than family farm. Something had to be done to replace small farms, which dispersed income throughout the entire community, rather than the current giant industries which take the money away from the local economy before midnight.

A case in point is a farm couple in Washington County, New York, where there is an old maximum-security prison, Great Meadows. In the prison construction rush, a few more prisons were built nearby about 20 years ago. The couple, who had produced milk on their farm all of their adult lives and raised a family there, had only one child who showed any interest in farming. The reason was straightforward. In one year in the early 1990s, this couple, working 365 days a year, showed income of $12,000, their school and property taxes were $8,000, and their trucking bill (to this day, dairy farmers still have to pay for shipping their milk after it leaves their farm and their possession) was $19,000.

One of their sons went to work at one of the local prisons and, in his first year, he was being paid about $30,000 in base annual wages, plus benefits. Looking at how his parents had worked and how the manipulated milk “market” compensated them, it was not surprising that he would not be staying on the farm.

According to a Nov. 8 report in The Boston Globe, America spent a total of $33 billion on the criminal justice system in 1980. In 2010, that amount rose to $216 billion, making the criminal justice system the third-largest employer in the nation. Lots of that money went toward an attempt to rebalance the damage done to rural economies by U.S. agricultural policies.

At the beginning of this new century, there is no solution in sight for the twin problems of crime-and-punishment failure and the failure of agricultural policies that have driven small farmers off the land in record numbers, because of the manipulation of “agricultural markets,” which are seen increasingly as being under the control of anonymous (and some not so anonymous) power brokers. Likewise, the courts and the legislatures - as well as the Congress - are seen as dealing with problems by creating fear, then addressing those fears by literally throwing money at them.

Politicians have been very generous in spreading that wealth over the state as evenly as possible, satisfying to some degree the cries for rural economic development, but prisons have proven themselves to be a dead end in that regard, since there is little rehabilitation. The money that might have gone for education and programs is used just to lock the gates and pay the people who keep watch. And, prisons are notable for not being healthy places to live or work.

Racist drug laws and other racist aspects of the justice system have put urban citizens in prisons far from their own homes, so that families find it difficult or impossible to maintain relationships. That makes it tough to reintegrate into one’s community and does nothing to help ex-inmates stay out of the system.

For a few decades, the prison-industrial complex (rife with privatization of prisons, in which the bottom line is the first and sometimes only objective) gave cover to the failure of government and corporate policy regarding the rural areas of the entire country. But the result of those problems and the half-baked and ill-conceived “solutions” to the problems are now becoming evident.

The U.S. cannot lock up a significant proportion of its people and expect a healthy outcome, either for those imprisoned or the population as a whole. It makes the society sick and there doesn’t seem to be a cure in sight. The vast rural areas of America are suffering economically and no amount of prison building will make up for the elimination of small farm agriculture.

In both our prison system and agriculture, there needs to be an admission that modern policies have failed and that the crisis is here. What America needs now is a fully funded project that restores millions of small farmers to the countryside and promotes revolutionary changes in the justice system, such as the rescinding of laws like the drug laws, which have filled our prisons mostly with people of color.

Locating prisons in the rural areas was not economic development. It was a sign that leadership in both major parties failed in two of the most important areas of our national life. The reassessment of agricultural policies and the justice-and-prison system needs to begin immediately. As with our endangered physical environment, we don’t have much time.

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.