Posted on January 25th, 2023

A prison camp bearing traces of the New Deal-era origins of the largest state park in Michigan’s the Lower Peninsula will soon be reduced to an open field next to a lake.

Demolition crews are currently chipping away at the facility at Cassidy Lake, roughly four miles northwest of downtown Chelsea, whose barbed wire boundary is tucked into the woods of the Waterloo State Recreation Area.

The camp most recently hosted the Michigan Department of Corrections’ Special Alternative Incarceration program, an alternative to prison where inmates — called trainees — awoke at 6 a.m. for boot camp-style work assignments and exercise.

The department shuttered the camp in 2020, after close to 80 years operating it in various forms, consolidating the SAI program at a Jackson-area facility. It’s now about to rejoin the park land that surrounds it.

“We’re waiting for the demolition to be completed before we assume responsibility for the land. We just want make sure everything is buttoned up,” said Ron Olson, Michigan Department of Natural Resources chief of parks and recreation.

As for what’s next, once the prison camp is reduced to rubble and carted away, Olson said nothing’s been set in stone.

“It’s an opportunity for an active area,” he said. “There’s not definitive plans at this time.”

In the meantime, examining the decades of history at the camp along Waterloo Road involves delving into the early days of the surrounding recreation area and a heated struggle over escaped inmates, who for years could just walk away and did so by the dozens.

First camp seeks to prepare men for ‘useful and happy living’

While Waterloo’s 20,000 acres across Jackson and Washtenaw counties today lure hikers, cyclists and outdoorspeople, much of the land was once cleared for farming.

As the Great Depression hit, many of those enterprises struggled, or folded altogether, and New Deal agencies got to work scooping up the farmland for recreational use. By 1936, some 12,000 acres had been purchased and turned over to the National Park Service, according to Waterloo’s present-day management plan.

Work on the Cassidy Lake camp began in September 1936 through the National Youth Administration, focused on providing work and education for young adults. The camp sought to “prepare young men for useful and happy living,” teaching woodworking, auto mechanics, welding and various trades, a 1937 publication reported.

Boys, many from urban areas, came to Cassidy Lake to work for 56 hours a month, earning wages between $18 and $24, according to the pamphlet, now housed in a collection at the University of Michigan.

They competed in “individual competitive sports,” with the highest point-getter every week awarded “a free ticket to the local picture show” and victory at the end of the month resulting in a ticket to a University of Michigan football game in Ann Arbor.

Sixteen cabins adorned the lake, along with a dining hall serving 160 people, a craft shop, first aid building and staff quarters.

In 1942, the camp was abandoned and taken over by the Department of Corrections to house inmates, the first of many examples in Michigan of work camps administered by the department, according to the Waterloo plan.

Escapees lead to rise of ‘Fence It or Close It’ committee

The Cassidy Lake Technical School, as the facility was called, by 1970 housed around 224 inmates, most young men between age 17 and 23, according to a Chelsea Standard article from the time.

Its administrators placed an emphasis on a “new trend” of education and rehabilitation in corrections, and the newspaper reported it had the minimum amount of security of any facility in the state for first-time offenders. There were no uniforms, fences or guns around.

Prisoners could — and did — walk away. In 1983, 48 escapes prompted vocal pushback from a committee of 1,200 area residents led by Ronald Olmstead, whose home had been broken into by three Cassidy Lake inmates.

“It’s an outrage that 43% of the Cassidy Lake prisoners, including 11 murderers, were placed in this so-called minimum-security institution where there really is no security,” Olmstead was quoted as saying in 1983, leading the “Fence It or Close It” group.

So frequent were the escapes that a dedicated “prisoner apprehension team” formed in 1985. It was described in news reports as an “unusual co-operative effort between law enforcement agencies” and the Corrections Department, who responded to as many as 30 walkaways per month from Cassidy Lake and another nearby correctional camp.

Prompting fear from residents was local reporting on inmates who went on to commit crimes after escaping, including one implicated in a double murder as far away as Tampa, Florida.

The frustration bubbled over in the pages of the Standard, which reported on multiple heated meetings over the Cassidy Lake facility.

“They’re not the kids from next door to us,” one resident said in 1979. “They’re not from our neighborhoods; they’re from a different kind of society.”

Rebutting inflammatory calls for the camp to be shut down was another resident who worked with inmates on a regular basis. “These boys are human beings, not animals,” she said.

The Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners eventually got involved, requesting the state take action at Cassidy Lake in 1987. In 1989, officials unveiled plans to fence off the facility.

Even then, frontpage news stories heralded concerns of potential escapes from outside work assignments through the SAI program, which began in 1988.

Alternative incarceration involves military-style discipline, ‘working stupid’

Before its closure in 2020, Cassidy Lake inmates underwent what the Department of Corrections describes as a “regimented 90-day intensive program that focuses on changing negative behavior into socially acceptable behavior.”

“The military discipline portion of the program is designed to break down streetwise attitudes, so staff can teach positive values and attitudes,” the description of the SAI program states.

The “trainees” rose early, marched in straight lines and repeated chants yelled by officers in boots and blue fatigues, a 2012 MLive/Jackson Citizen Patriot story reported.

The day a reporter visited, inmates were assembling picnic tables for nearby state recreation areas.

One participant incarcerated there and interviewed said trainees were frequently tasked with “working stupid,” jobs that seemed meaningless, like moving piles of wood.

Misbehavior might result in having to scrub for hours on a tile that has no chance of being shiny or use a toothbrush to clean a plunger, the trainee said, applauding the program for instilling self-discipline.

“If I can get through this, I can get through anything,” another trainee said.

From prison camp to mountain bike park?

The Cassidy Lake camp is not the first correctional facility inside a state recreation area to be decommissioned, Olson said.

Camp Brighton in Livingston County’s Brighton Recreation Area closed in 2007 and was later razed. And trainees from Cassidy Lake helped dismantle and cleanup Camp Waterloo, a prisoner of war camp during World Ward II in Jackson County. In both cases, vandalism at the deteriorating facilities frustrated nearby residents.

People have expressed interest in turning Cassidy Lake into a new kind of recreation facility within Waterloo, Olson said.

One idea would further develop mountain biking opportunities in the area, with Cassidy Road already serving as one access point to a trailhead for the DTE Energy Foundation Trail system.

Its director and trail advocate Jason Aric Jones said he’d like to see the prison camp transformed into a mountain biking skills area, and has floated the idea with local and state officials.

But Olson said nothing’s been decided.

“We haven’t got any funding set aside or any special pathway yet. It’s just an opportunity to take a look at and to assimilate it back into the park,” he said.

Source: MLive.