The US public pays about $500 a night for each of the 25 beds in the Auburn Residential Centre — a place for teenagers who have gotten into lower-grade trouble with the law, a junior-varsity jail. For the last two weeks, the beds in Auburn have been empty. And state officials expect them to remain empty, permanently.

But even with no one under the sheets, each bed will continue to cost as much as $2,00,000 a year, officials say. Auburn, near Syracuse, is one of the three state facilities for teenagers that are becoming high-priced ghost jails. Brace Residential Centre, in Delaware County, with 25 beds, has just two teenagers staying there, watched over by a staff of 24; Great Valley in Cattaraugus County has 10 young people and a staff of 24. Soon, Brace and Great Valley, like Auburn, will no longer have teenagers staying there. Yet if the state Senate has its way, all three will remain open until at least January 2010.

“I believe the number of juveniles was deliberately reduced this year and the kids sent elsewhere to justify closing Great Valley,” said Senator Catharine M Young, from Cattaraugus County. The Senate has passed a resolution that requires Great Valley and the others to remain open.

Nearly all politicians fight to keep jobs in their districts. Prisons, jails and juvenile facilities have been a source of political and economic power to upstate areas that have little industry. Most of the inmates came from the five boroughs and the metropolitan area.

In the battle over the ghost jails, though, the fight is not simply about the local economy, but also about a system of juvenile corrections that has been in a quiet state of collapse for nearly a decade, particularly for teenagers who are not in trouble for serious offenses.

New York City has found better, cheaper ways to move teenagers onto safer ground, said Ronald E Richter, the city’s family services coordinator.

For offenders whose home lives are filled with problems, the city now provides intense programmes for the entire family, buttressing the role of adults in the lives of the teenagers. Last year, about 275 teenagers and their families were sent into these programmes rather than the state juvenile system.

So instead of sending the teenagers off to state facilities that cost $1,40,000 to $2,00,000 a year per person, the city is spending about $17,000 a year, Richter said.

The prison economy is a central feature of New York’s political economy. The state Public Employees Federation, which represents some of the employees in the juvenile centres, has bought advertisements in small newspapers in towns near the centres, arguing that the state is jumping the gun.

Young said that the community-based programmes like the one in New York needed to be studied before the existing system was shut down. The current data, she said, is not adequate.

The New York Times