{"id":462485,"date":"2026-09-13T11:06:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T11:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/462485\/"},"modified":"2026-09-13T11:06:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T11:06:09","slug":"california-prison-towns-grasp-for-new-jobs-after-closures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/462485\/","title":{"rendered":"California prison towns grasp for new jobs after closures"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

California prison<\/a> towns made a grim bargain decades ago.<\/p>\n

They built their economies around an industry that relied on an ever-growing prison population, mostly from California\u2019s major metropolitan areas. Then, about 15 years ago, legislators changed sentencing laws<\/a> in ways that caused the prison population to drop, and the prisons started going away.<\/p>\n

Gov. Jerry Brown oversaw massive reductions in California\u2019s prison population in the 2010s. Gov. Gavin Newsom has closed five prisons<\/a> since taking office in 2019. Now, some of those towns face difficult choices<\/a> if they\u2019re going to survive. One prison town is still fighting the closure, one is betting on businesses to make up its losses and a third \u2014 the town of Susanville \u2014 is remote, isolated and in deeper trouble than the rest.<\/p>\n

Perched on one of the last major stops before Reno and the desert deep in the Lassen National Forest, Susanville has always been the kind of place California puts the things it doesn\u2019t want to see, hear, smell or really even think about.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrisons in communities are not popular, so they tend to be located in areas that are desperate economically,\u201d said Dan Newton, who worked for the city of Susanville for 20 years and was its city manager until recently. \u201cThat would describe this area.\u201d<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s management was informed in 2021 that the prison was scheduled for closure. They went to court to challenge the closure, arguing the state\u2019s environmental review process hadn\u2019t taken into account the prison closure\u2019s impact on the town. Newsom had a solution: A budget bill<\/a> that exempted correctional facility closures from the environmental review process<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was initially a lot of panic,\u201d said Susanville Mayor Mendy Schuster. \u201cHouses went on the market. People left town. State jobs are good jobs with a good income, and they were going to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since the closure announcement, the population of Susanville has fallen from a peak of about 16,000 in 2021, the year Newsom announced the prison would close, to 14,000 in 2024, the last year for which American Community Survey data were available.<\/p>\n

Not all of the 1,100 former prison employees left town. Some transferred to a nearby prison, and some retired and stayed in the area. The elementary school lost 10% of its enrolled students between 2021 and the 2025-2026 school year.<\/p>\n

The town\u2019s remoteness is also one of its attractions. The surrounding area offers some of the most stunning vistas in far Northern California, sweeping views from highway lookout points over miles of desert rimmed by the mountains of the Cascade Range where it meets the Sierra Nevada.<\/p>\n

The history of this area is one of the state or federal government telling its residents that it needs them \u2014 to mine for gold, to cut down trees for timber, to guard all the people they sent to prison \u2014 and then coming along later to tell residents that their services are no longer needed.<\/p>\n

Susanville, the spot on the map, is an immutable intermingling of unique geologic formations. Susanville, the incorporated city, is running out of time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re heading toward insolvency,\u201d Newton said before he resigned as city manager to take a position in Tehama County government.<\/p>\n

The prison building boom<\/p>\n

When the state\u2019s three-strikes law still imposed mandatory life sentences on anyone with two or more prior convictions for violent felonies, California needed places like Susanville to put its skyrocketing prison population.<\/p>\n

According to Brown University\u2019s Prison Proliferation Project, states and the federal government operated 511 prisons in 1970. By the end of the prison building boom in 2000, that number had risen to 1,663.<\/p>\n

The prison guards who lived in Susanville coached Little League and bought bread at the bakery downtown. They had steady jobs with top-tier health and retirement benefits; today experienced correctional officers earn $9,650 a month in base pay<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The town benefited from carceral policies that pulled prisoners hundreds of miles from their families, even as Lassen County counted those inmates as residents<\/a> until 2022 and built around a prison boom that showed no signs of ending.<\/p>\n

Until, of course, it did.<\/p>\n

In 2006, overcrowding forced some<\/a> of the state\u2019s 170,000 prisoners to sleep in hallways and multipurpose rooms. But sentencing policies changed in the early 2010s to put more people in jail than prisons, and when people went to prison, they went for shorter sentences. Now, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is down to 90,000 prisoners, and has 8,000 more beds available than it has people in custody.<\/p>\n

An emergent field of research in the last 15 years has focused on the era of the \u201cprison bust,\u201d when prison closures have outnumbered prison openings. Criminal justice policy researchers have found that the proposed economic benefits of prisons to small, rural communities were probably overstated to begin with.<\/p>\n

\u201cA large portion of prison jobs (were) filled by residents of neighboring towns,\u201d wrote the authors of a 2024 article in the journal Punishment & Society.<\/a> \u201cEven those who moved to the area for prison jobs often settled in adjacent communities, providing little direct benefit to the local economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not only might prisons not be engines of economic growth<\/a>, according to a seminal 2010 study from researchers at Washington State University, they might have stymied the development of other industries warded off by the presence of the prison.<\/p>\n

Brown University associate sociology professor John Eason, whose book \u201cBig House on the Prairie\u201d focused on a prison in the rural South, found that the economic fate of prison towns is most closely correlated to when they were built, more than where they were built.<\/p>\n

\u201cTowns that adopted prisons earlier in the prison boom received a short-term boon compared to those that did not build, but the effects were not lasting,\u201d Eason wrote.<\/p>\n

Towns that built a prison early in the boom saw increased median home values and median income, Eason wrote, with reduced poverty and unemployment, but those effects did not last longer than a decade, which he called \u201ca decay effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the residents and leadership of the city of Blythe, where the shuttered Chuckwalla Valley State Prison was built in 1987, are certain that their economic problems began and ended on the day in 2022 when the prison closed down.<\/p>\n

Desert town tried to keep prison open<\/p>\n

\u201cWe still haven\u2019t got nothing from the state,\u201d said Blythe Mayor Joseph DeConinck. \u201cI hate to say it, but Blythe\u2019s in the middle of nowhere, we\u2019re the furthest from Sacramento, I just hate to say it again, we\u2019re only a few votes out here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mayor of the small desert city in Riverside County near the Arizona border watched the failed lawsuit over the Susanville prison closure and decided against filing their own litigation after Newsom ordered the Blythe prison closed just before Christmas 2022.<\/p>\n

Instead, Blythe chose honey over vinegar and launched a lobbying effort<\/a> to convince state legislators and the governor that the town needed some kind of economic rescue.<\/p>\n

It has, so far, failed to produce results.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe took these prisons when nobody else wanted them,\u201d DeConinck said. \u201cAnd we adapted to them because they became a strong economic generator for our area.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blythe\u2019s population of 18,000 in 2022 had fallen to 17,400 by 2024, the last year for which census statistics are available. A drop of just 3% of the population might not sound drastic, but Blythe was in trouble long before the prison closed.<\/p>\n

The population has been dropping since a peak of about 20,000 in 2010. A Riverside County civil investigation in June 2022 found that the city can\u2019t pay its bills, its population is fleeing to Phoenix or the Coachella Valley, and neither the city nor its residents have bright prospects.<\/p>\n

Six months after that investigation, Newsom announced the prison closure.<\/p>\n

DeConinck said city leadership flew to Sacramento and tried, in vain, to get any traction. He recalled one meeting between the Blythe city manager and representatives of the governor in which he said the city itself was promised direct financial assistance.<\/p>\n

The era of sweet-talking the state is over now, DeConinck said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey wouldn\u2019t even have a conversation with us,\u201d said Vice Mayor Johnny Rodriguez. \u201cThey\u2019re not doing anything to assist us because they have this political mantra that all prisons are bad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rodriguez said the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the Department of General Services sent representatives to a meeting on the future of the shuttered prison site. It didn\u2019t go well.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had just one meeting with a potential developer who had some interest in it, and all the state provided was, what you can\u2019t do, what they won\u2019t do,\u201d Rodriguez said. \u201cThey won\u2019t give a timeline when they would start talking about it, so what\u2019s that going to do?\u201d<\/p>\n

Newsom\u2019s office referred questions to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.<\/p>\n

Will Matthews, a corrections spokesperson, said in a statement after this article first published that the state sent $995,000 to the Riverside County Workforce Development Division in August 2024.<\/p>\n

\u201cState representatives met with local leaders in July 2024 to discuss these resources and other available assistance,\u201d Matthews said. \u201cThere was no commitment to providing direct financial assistance to the City of Blythe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthews said until the Blythe prison site\u2019s infrastructure is separated from neighboring Ironwood State Prison and its bond obligations are resolved, the property can\u2019t move through the state\u2019s process for dispensing with surplus property.<\/p>\n

In a March hearing<\/a> before a Senate budget subcommittee, Corrections Secretary Jeff Macomber said he\u2019s eager to end his agency\u2019s control over closed prison sites.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to hold on to closed facilities,\u201d Macomber said. \u201cBelieve it or not, I have to provide a little bit of staffing. It\u2019s unpopular, there\u2019s security risks. We have people break in because who doesn\u2019t want to run in, to break into a closed prison?\u201d<\/p>\n

Newsom began closing prisons with the deactivation of the Deuel Vocational Institute in Tracy, followed by the prison in Susanville, and then a prison in Blythe near the Arizona border. The state also ended its contract with a private prison in Kern County, a site now being operated as an immigrant detention center<\/a>. A prison in Norco, also in Riverside County, is scheduled to close in October.<\/a><\/p>\n

More prisons probably will close. The Legislature this year passed a budget that called for the state to shut at least one more. Its passage reflected Democratic lawmakers\u2019 desire to save money \u2014 about $150 million a year per prison \u2014 by eliminating underused correctional facilities.<\/p>\n

And some state prisons have astronomical deferred maintenance bills. The state auditor recently released a report estimating that five of them need repairs<\/a> that would cost $2.4 billion.<\/p>\n

Rodriguez is still fighting for a prison on the shuttered site. He has plans to pitch the federal government on opening a women\u2019s prison there to account for the closure of the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, which closed after 10 guards were charged<\/a> with sexually abusing the prisoners.<\/p>\n

\u201cClosing Chuckawalla was a mistake,\u201d said Assemblymember Jeff Gonzalez<\/a>, a Coachella Republican. \u201cFor our rural communities, these facilities are critical employers that support local families and local economies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ready for change on edge of Bay Area<\/p>\n

If any town was prepared for a prison closure, it was Tracy.<\/p>\n

Optimism abounds, even on the city website, which promotes it as \u201cone of the fastest growing suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area.\u201d The city has for decades been a bedroom community for commuters to the East Bay Area and San Jos\u00e9.<\/p>\n

The offers are pouring in to fill the abandoned prison site, said San Joaquin County Supervisor Robert Rickman, who was mayor of Tracy from 2016-2020. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been in contact with folks in the agricultural industry, the education industry and even some of them who are interested in opening a casino,\u201d Rickman said. \u201cI would say [the prison closure] was neutral. The property isn\u2019t sitting forgotten. South county is a very prosperous portion of our county.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prison guards and support staff mainly transferred to the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, Rickman said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI guess you\u2019re never really prepared for a closure,\u201d Rickman said, \u201cbut the good thing is that nobody lost their jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tracy has the advantages that Susanville does not: It\u2019s next to Interstate 5 along a busy commercial corridor in a populated and growing section of the state. Tracy also doesn\u2019t have the drawbacks of Blythe and the Inland Empire desert \u2014 the weather never gets too hot, and there is reliable access to water.<\/p>\n

Instead of challenging the state government like Blythe, Rickman gets to play host and pitch man to businesses.<\/p>\n

Back in Susanville, it\u2019s been a struggle to get any business to return calls.<\/p>\n

Hard choices in Susanville<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the last two years, we\u2019ve adopted deficit budgets,\u201d said Newton, the erstwhile city manager. \u201cWe\u2019re deficit spending in order to fill public safety vacancies, and expenditure increases are outpacing our revenue increases.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to start eating at our cash reserves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The town is hoping some industry \u2014 any industry \u2014 can come in and save it. City leaders have little hope for state assistance. But the city also has its own limitations.<\/p>\n

First, Newton said, it\u2019s hard to make a businesses on the border of California and Nevada choose California, with its higher taxes and stern regulatory environment. That choice in finance terms is known as regulatory arbitrage<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Second, industry needs power, and Susanville doesn\u2019t have a lot of power on the grid, nor the infrastructure to support it. A bad thunderstorm can knock out the lights to half the city. The city\u2019s transmission lines can\u2019t handle the wattage demanded by heavy industry.<\/p>\n

Third, the city and county\u2019s limited population is working against it. Prisons force people to work and live in an area, and the state supplies the workforce. But there is no big workforce base on which to draw for any industry. When the prisons close, the guards transfer to new locations or retire and leave the rural, geographically isolated area.<\/p>\n

The pandemic didn\u2019t help. Downtown businesses were already struggling when people started buying more retail goods online, a trend that didn\u2019t abate when lockdowns ended, Schuster said.<\/p>\n

Now, some of the largest tax generators in town are on sales from online shopping and fuel taxes \u2014 people stop in town to get gas because Susanville has the only gas stations for 20 miles in any direction.<\/p>\n

A baseball grandstand burned down last year, and in March, a lumber mill that employed about 30 people caught fire. No one was injured, but the mill burned to the ground.<\/p>\n

Now the 8,000 people in this remote corner of California have to ask themselves what more they can wring from the land, what more they can take and what more it can yield. One idea includes a new truck stop.<\/p>\n

Whatever salvation comes for the town, if any salvation comes at all, won\u2019t be at the hands of the state government that built a prison and then took it away, Newton said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one is coming to save us.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article was updated to include information that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation shared after publication.<\/p>\n

Duara<\/a> writes for CalMatters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"California prison towns made a grim bargain decades ago. They built their economies around an industry that relied…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":462486,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[599,92935,7,9,8,1409,7862,3290,592,5967,2901,182201,288,225,67096,40264,72],"class_list":["post-462485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-area","tag-blythe","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-city","tag-closure","tag-newsom","tag-people","tag-population","tag-prison","tag-prisoner-hundred","tag-resident","tag-state","tag-susanville","tag-town","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=462485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462485\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/462486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=462485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=462485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=462485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}