How do they decide where to put a prison?

The Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York is an intimidating place. Off-white walls, imposing and impassable, seemingly modeled after the nearby shoulder blades of New York State known as the Adirondack Mountains, shoot up, hammered by the tectonic plates of justice, surrounding the more than 150-year old maximum security prison nicknamed Little Siberia.

“It gets cold up there in the Adirondacks; I’m sure when that was put there it was just, let’s get them as far from New York City as we possibly can,” says Roger Lichtman, senior vice president of justice design and planning at global engineering and design firm AECOM. “It really is the equivalent of Siberia.”

It’s housed the likes of Lucky Luciano and Tupac Shakur. It also, until recently, housed Richard Matt and David Sweat – two convicted murderers.

Now Clinton, its imposing walls and the neighbouring hamlets, towns and 30 km expanse north to the Quebec border, play host to 400 perspiring law officials wondering where in the hell Matt and Sweat are.

It plays out like a Hollywood-worthy prison break – dummy bodies, power tools used to cut pipes to crawl through, a crude drawing of Asian caricature with the words “have a nice day” and suspicions of an inside job.

But as time passes with the killers on the lam, it’s become clear they could have escaped into the easy-to-get-lost-in mountains and foliage of Vermont or headed north into the wilderness of Quebec.

To question why a prison would be built in what seems like a remote area befit for a glorious game of hide-and-seek (or hide and never find), is to ignore the fact that overall, escape is a rare thing.

According to the federal Bureau of Justice, an estimated 2,001 inmates were reported as “absent without leave (AWOL) / escape” in 2013. That’s a drop in the bucket for the 1.6 million behind bars in the U.S. In Canada, the numbers were significantly lower with Corrections Canada reporting 109 escapes between 2007 and 2012.

While threat risks, like physically escaping the facility, are taken into account when building a prison, surprisingly the nearness to that gleaming safety on the other side of a neighbouring country’s border, doesn’t usually factor in during the planning phase.

“The proximity to the Canada-US border is not a major consideration in this process,” says Brent Ross, spokesperson for Ontario’s Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services.

Not to say that a friendly heads up isn’t a part of the planning process.

“In the recent construction of the Southwest Detention Centre in Windsor for example, the Ministry advised the local police services and the Canadian Border Services Agency so that they might take the existence of the new institution into account when planning policing and border control activities,” he says.

Border aside, the process of “siting” for a prison takes into consideration a laundry list of other factors. Lichtman says the both the U.S. and Canada plan where to plunk their prisons in a similar way with the first element being whether the institute is provincial or federal. Convicts serving two years or longer in Canada will be housed in a federal correctional institute colloquially known as a prison. Under that, it falls on the province to play host to criminals in a provincial corrections institute also known as a jail.

“What the federal government will do is find a huge track of land, as much as 300 acres of land and it’s usually in the middle of nowhere,” he says. “They purchase it and build whatever they need to build there.”

Jails have different needs.

“You’ve got to be able to, for the jail portion, be able to move the inmates back and forth to court which could create a problem if they jail is too remote,” he says. “You need to be able to have visitors too because visitors are a big part of a therapeutic environment.”

Which is why no detention centre – jail or prison – is really an island unto itself, not even New York’s Siberia.

“They need to be able find the folks that can work there so you have to have a workforce – you’re very dependant on the population to come in and work and provide the services, not just the officers but you’ve also got teachers, doctors, nurses, dentists, nurses, administrators and everybody else who provides services,” says Lichtman. “In Dannemora, Clinton Prison, being over 100 years old, is also the largest employer in the area.”

Lichtman admits he’s encountered his fair share of opposition over the years when selecting sites next to communities, but overall, communities often recognize the economic benefits of having an institution like that drawing supporting the local businesses.

“So much of it is involved in education,” he adds. “Jails can actually make good neighbours.”