Recipe for New York State politics:
1. Take a rural county where almost a fifth of residents are under the poverty line.
2. Extract from it the nation's second-highest tax burden, preferably with a citrus reamer.
3. Stuff with massive prisons. Re-inject with tax dollars in the form of correctional officer salaries.
4. Repeat steps 1 through 3 until most of the region's natural economic juices have been thoroughly replaced with recycled porky broth.
5. Add thousands of inmates imported from New York City. Be sure to measure them carefully, as they will later be used to inflate upstate population estimates when drawing congressional districts.
6. Set sentencing laws to "extra tough."
7. Bake forever. Seriously. It can never come out of the oven.
Whenever you think things are tough around here, just think: We could be Ogdensburg. A Times-Union reporter talked to Melody Burns, a businesswoman from the area:
“There’s really nothing else up there but the prison,” said Burns.
