California’s prison towns made an uneasy bargain with the state decades ago, one that is now unraveling for communities like Susanville, Blythe and Tracy.
Their local economies grew up around an industry built on an ever-expanding inmate population, most of it shipped in from California’s big cities. But roughly 15 years ago, state lawmakers rewrote sentencing laws, shrinking the prison population and setting off a wave of closures. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown oversaw sharp reductions in the 2010s, and Gov. Gavin Newsom has shuttered five state prisons since taking office in 2019. Now several of the towns that once depended on those institutions are grappling with hard choices about their future. One is still fighting the closure of its prison. Another is banking on new businesses to fill the gap. And a third — Susanville, tucked deep in Lassen National Forest — is isolated, remote and arguably in the toughest spot of all.
Sitting near one of the last major stops before Reno and the high desert, Susanville has long been the kind of place California sends things it would rather not think about.
“Prisons in communities are not popular, so they tend to be located in areas that have severe economic distress,” said Dan Newton, who spent 20 years working for the city of Susanville and recently served as its city manager. “That describes this area perfectly.”
In 2021, city officials learned the prison would close. They went to court to challenge the decision, arguing the state’s environmental review process had failed to account for how the closure would devastate the local economy. Newsom’s response was a budget bill that exempted prison closures from that environmental review altogether.
“At first there was a lot of panic,” said Susanville Mayor Mendy Schuster. “Houses went up for sale. People left town. State jobs are good jobs with good pay, and people were going to leave.”
Since the closure was announced, Susanville’s population has slid from about 16,000 in 2021 to roughly 14,000 in 2024, the most recent year for which American Community Survey data is available.
Not all 1,100 former prison employees left town. Some transferred to a nearby facility; others retired and stayed. Still, the local elementary school lost 10% of its enrollment between 2021 and the 2025-26 school year.
The town’s isolation is also part of its charm. The surrounding landscape offers some of the most striking scenery in far Northern California — sweeping desert views framed by the Cascade Range, where it meets the Sierra Nevada.
This region’s history follows a familiar pattern: the state or federal government tells residents they’re needed — to mine gold, log timber, guard the people sent to prison — and then eventually shows up to say their services are no longer required.
Susanville the landscape remains unchanged, a striking mix of geological features. But Susanville the incorporated city is running out of time.
“We’re heading toward insolvency,” Newton said before stepping down as city manager to take a position with Tehama County government.
The prison-building boom
Back when California’s three-strikes law handed mandatory life sentences to repeat violent offenders, the state needed places like Susanville to house its swelling inmate population.
According to Brown University’s Prison Proliferation Project, state and federal governments operated 511 prisons in 1970. By the time the nationwide prison construction boom ended around 2000, that number had climbed to 1,663.
Correctional officers who settled in Susanville coached Little League teams and bought bread from the local bakery. They held stable jobs with strong health and retirement benefits — today, experienced correctional officers earn a base salary of $9,650 a month.
The city benefited from sentencing policies that shipped inmates hundreds of miles from their families, and Lassen County even counted those incarcerated individuals as residents until 2022, building its identity around a prison boom that seemed like it would never end.
Until, of course, it did.
In 2006, overcrowding forced some of the state’s 170,000 inmates to sleep in hallways and multipurpose rooms. But by the early 2010s, sentencing reforms shifted more people into county jails rather than state prison, and those who were incarcerated served shorter terms. Today, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation houses about 90,000 inmates statewide — with roughly 8,000 more beds than people to fill them.
Over the past 15 years, researchers have increasingly studied what’s become known as the era of “mass prison closure,” when shutdowns have outpaced new construction. Criminal justice policy experts have found that the economic benefits prisons were long assumed to bring to small, rural communities were probably overstated from the start.
“A large share of prison jobs were filled by residents of neighboring towns,” researchers wrote in a 2024 paper published in Punishment & Society. “Even those who relocated to work at the prisons often settled in adjacent communities, providing little direct benefit to the local economy.”
A landmark 2010 study by researchers at Washington State University found that prisons may not have driven meaningful economic growth at all — and might have actually discouraged other industries from developing nearby.
John Eason, an associate professor of sociology at Brown University and author of “Big House on the Prairie,” which examines a rural Southern prison town, found that a prison town’s economic fate has more to do with when it built its prison than where.
“Towns that embraced prison construction early in the boom saw a short-term benefit compared to those that didn’t, but the effects weren’t lasting,” Eason wrote.
Communities that built prisons early in the boom saw median home values and incomes rise, along with dips in poverty and unemployment — but those gains faded within about a decade, something Eason called “a decay effect.”
Residents and city leaders in Blythe, however, where the now-shuttered Chuckawalla Valley State Prison opened in 1987, are convinced their economic troubles began — and ended — the day the prison closed in 2022.
A desert town’s failed fight
“To be honest, I don’t think they care,” said Blythe Mayor Joseph DeConinck. “We still haven’t gotten anything from the state. It pains me to say it, but Blythe is in the middle of nowhere. We’re the farthest from Sacramento, and again, we’re just a handful of votes.”
The mayor of this small Riverside County desert town near the Arizona border watched Susanville’s lawsuit over its prison closure fail, and chose not to pursue similar legal action after Newsom ordered Blythe’s prison shuttered just before Christmas 2022.
Instead, Blythe took a different approach — leaning into diplomacy rather than confrontation, launching a lobbying push to convince state lawmakers and the governor that the city needed some form of economic assistance.
So far, that effort has produced nothing.
“We took on these prisons when nobody else wanted them,” DeConinck said. “And we adapted around them because they became a major economic driver for our area.”
Blythe’s population, which stood at 18,000 in 2022, dropped to about 17,400 by 2024, the most recent year with census data available. A 3% population decline might not sound dramatic, but Blythe was already struggling well before the prison closed.
The city’s population has been shrinking since it peaked at roughly 20,000 in 2010. A Riverside County civil grand jury investigation in June 2022 found that Blythe couldn’t keep up with its bills, that residents were leaving for Phoenix or the Coachella Valley, and that neither the city nor its people had especially promising prospects ahead.
Six months after that investigation, Newsom announced the prison closure.
DeConinck said city leaders traveled to Sacramento seeking help, without success. He recalled a meeting between Blythe’s city manager and the governor’s representatives in which, he said, the city was promised direct financial assistance.
The era of trying to charm the state into helping is over, DeConinck said.
“They wouldn’t even talk to us,” said Vice Mayor Johnny Rodriguez. “They’re not doing anything to help us because they’ve got this political mantra that all prisons are bad.”
Rodriguez said the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the Department of General Services sent representatives to a meeting about the shuttered prison’s future. It didn’t go well.
“We only had one meeting with a potential developer who showed some interest, and all the state told us was what can’t be done and what they won’t do,” Rodriguez said. “They won’t even give us a timeline to start talking about it, so what good is that?”
Newsom’s office referred questions to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Will Matthews, a spokesperson for the department, said after this story initially published that the state sent $995,000 to the Riverside County Workforce Development Division in August 2024.
“In July 2024, state representatives met with local leaders to discuss these resources and other available assistance,” Matthews said. “There was no commitment to provide direct financial assistance to the city of Blythe.”
Matthews said that until the Blythe prison’s infrastructure is separated from the neighboring Ironwood State Prison and outstanding bond obligations are resolved, the property cannot move through the state’s surplus property disposal process.
At a March hearing before a state Senate budget subcommittee, corrections secretary Jeff Macomber said he’s eager to relinquish his agency’s oversight of closed facilities.
“I don’t want to maintain closed facilities,” Macomber said. “Believe it or not, I have to provide some staffing. It’s unpopular, there are security risks. People break in — because who wouldn’t want to break into a closed prison?”
Newsom began shutting down prisons with the closure of the Deuel Vocational Institution near Tracy, followed by the Susanville facility and then the prison near Blythe. The state also ended its contract with a private prison in Kern County, a site that now operates as an immigration detention facility. A prison in Norco, also in Riverside County, is scheduled to close in October.
More closures are likely. This year, the Legislature approved a budget anticipating the shutdown of at least one more facility, reflecting Democratic lawmakers’ push to save roughly $150 million annually per prison by eliminating underused facilities.
Some state prisons also carry massive deferred maintenance bills. Last week, the state auditor released a report estimating that five facilities need $2.4 billion in repairs.
Rodriguez continues pushing for a new prison to be built on the closed site. He hopes to pitch the federal government on opening a women’s facility there, as a form of compensation for the closure of FCI Dublin, which shut down after 10 correctional officers were charged with sexually abusing female inmates.
“Closing Chuckawalla was a mistake,” said Assemblymember Jeff Gonzalez, a Coachella Republican. “For our rural communities, these facilities are critical sources of employment that sustain families and local economies.”
Ready for change on the edge of the Bay Area
If any town was prepared for a prison closure, it was Tracy.
Optimism runs high there — even the city’s website touts it as “one of the fastest-growing suburbs in the San Francisco Bay Area.” For decades, Tracy has served as a bedroom community for commuters heading into the East Bay and San Jose.
According to San Joaquin County Supervisor Robert Rickman, who served as Tracy’s mayor from 2016 to 2020, interest in redeveloping the closed prison site has been steady.
“We’ve been in contact with people in agriculture, in education, and even some interested in opening a casino,” Rickman said. “I’d say the prison closure was neutral. The property isn’t sitting abandoned. The southern part of the county is a thriving area.”
Rickman said correctional officers and support staff were largely transferred to the California Health Care Facility in Stockton.
“I guess you’re never really ready for a closure,” Rickman said, “but the good news is nobody lost their job.”
Tracy has advantages Susanville lacks — proximity to Interstate 5, a busy commercial corridor, and a growing, populous region of the state. It also avoids the extreme heat and water uncertainty that plague desert communities like Blythe.
Rather than fighting the state the way Blythe has, Rickman has focused on courting business prospects.
Back in Susanville, getting any company to return a phone call has proven to be a struggle.
Hard choices in Susanville
“Over the last two years, we’ve adopted deficit budgets,” said Newton, the former city manager. “We’re spending more than we can cover to fill public safety vacancies, and rising expenses are outpacing our revenue growth.”
“This is going to start eating into our cash reserves.”
The city is hoping some industry — any industry — will come in and turn things around. City leaders hold out little hope for state assistance. But Susanville also faces its own built-in obstacles.
For one, Newton said it’s difficult to persuade companies along the California-Nevada border to choose the California side, given higher taxes and stricter regulations — a dynamic economists call regulatory arbitrage.
Second, industry needs power, and Susanville doesn’t have much capacity on its electrical grid or the infrastructure to support heavy use. A strong thunderstorm can knock out power to half the town. The city’s transmission lines simply can’t handle the demands of heavy industry.
Third, the area’s small population works against it. Prisons bring in workers and the state supplies the labor force — but there’s no broad pool of workers to draw from for other industries. When prisons close, guards are transferred elsewhere or retire and leave a remote, geographically isolated area behind.
The pandemic didn’t help either. Downtown businesses were already struggling as more shopping moved online, a trend that never reversed once lockdowns ended, Schuster said.
These days, some of the city’s biggest tax revenue sources come from online sales tax and fuel taxes — drivers stop in Susanville to fill up because it’s home to the only gas stations within 20 miles in any direction.
Last year, a baseball grandstand burned down. In March, a lumber mill that employed about 30 people caught fire. No one was hurt, but the mill was destroyed.
Now, the roughly 8,000 people who call this remote corner of California home are left asking what else the land can offer, what else can be built, what else might sustain them. One idea under consideration: a new truck stop.
Whatever rescue eventually comes for the town, Newton said, likely won’t come from the same state government that built the prison and then walked away from it.
“Nobody’s coming to save us.”
Original source: CalMatters
