Connecticut’s Commissioner of the Department of Corrections, John Armstrong, told state legislators last week that he would like to add 1,700 prison cells at existing facilities in the state with money already budgeted by the Rowland administration. Here in Newtown, relations with state agencies have been slowly warming since the state forced a prison upon the town a decade ago. So Mr Armstrong’s comments sent a chill of recollection down the spines of those who remember how Newtown was selected as the best site for the Garner Correctional Institute based on a wildly inaccurate demographic study of the town. When the state starts scheming about prisons, the town – to borrow from the wit of Will Rogers – gets the same feeling as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

First Selectman Herb Rosenthal has already notified the corrections commissioner that Newtown stands ready to fight any plan to increase the size of Garner prison. While Mr Armstrong has said that decisions on which prisons to expand have yet to be made, it is a safe bet that Garner is high on the list. The commissioner’s comments last week were made at a legislative hearing March 2 on the controversial transfer of Connecticut inmates to a Virginia prison. A large percentage of those inmates have come from Garner. Of the 480 inmates shipped to Virginia from Connecticut since last October, 119 have come from Garner. The state may feel that it has a certain amount of leverage with Newtown right now, because of pending negotiations between the state and town over the prospective sale of the 185-acre Fairfield Hills campus to Newtown.

As we saw 10 years ago, when it comes to prisons, the state can pretty much get what it wants – especially when it owns the property. It’s just a matter of how much political currency it is willing to spend to force an unpopular facility on a town. We trust that Newtown’s officials and state representatives will make that price sufficiently high so that if Garner is expanded against our collective will, there is a commensurate reduction in the price the town will be expected to pay for Fairfield Hills and the decontamination of the toxic hazards the state has left behind at the campus.

A decade ago, the town negotiated a “jail agreement” that brought us a bypass road and the preservation of hundreds of acres of state land. If the state is going to insist on housing more dangerous felons at Garner, a new jail agreement is in order.