For decades, a handful of California towns tied their futures to the state’s prison system, welcoming correctional facilities that other communities didn’t want in exchange for steady paychecks and economic stability. Now, as the state closes prisons in response to a shrinking inmate population, some of those same towns are struggling to figure out what comes next — and two of them sit within Southern California’s reach.
Blythe, a Riverside County city near the Arizona border, and Susanville, in the far northeastern corner of the state, both lost their prisons in recent years. A third community, Tracy in San Joaquin County, appears to be weathering its own prison closure with far less pain. The contrast between the three offers a stark lesson in how geography, timing and existing economic conditions determine whether a town survives losing its largest employer.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has shut down five state prisons since taking office in 2019, continuing a decline in the incarcerated population that began under former Gov. Jerry Brown. California’s prison system once held more than 170,000 inmates and forced overcrowded facilities to bunk people in hallways. Today, the population has fallen to roughly 90,000, leaving the state with about 8,000 more beds than prisoners. Lawmakers this year approved a budget calling for at least one more closure, citing the roughly $150 million in annual savings each shuttered prison represents.
For Blythe, the closure of Chuckwalla Valley State Prison in late 2022 compounded problems that were already building. The city’s population had been sliding since 2010, and a Riverside County investigation completed just six months before the closure announcement found Blythe struggling to pay its bills as residents left for Phoenix or the Coachella Valley.
Blythe leaders chose not to sue the state, unlike officials in Susanville, and instead pursued a lobbying campaign asking Sacramento for economic assistance. City officials say that effort has largely gone nowhere.
“We took these prisons when nobody else wanted them,” said Mayor Joseph DeConinck. “And we adapted to them because they became a strong economic generator for our area.”
Vice Mayor Johnny Rodriguez said state officials have offered little beyond restrictions on what can’t be done with the vacant site. “They’re not doing anything to assist us because they have this political mantra that all prisons are bad,” he said.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement that nearly $1 million was directed to the Riverside County Workforce Development Division in 2024 and that state representatives met with local leaders that July, though no direct financial assistance to the city was promised. Officials said the property can’t be released for redevelopment until infrastructure tied to the closed prison is separated from the neighboring Ironwood State Prison and related bond obligations are settled.
Rodriguez said he’s now pursuing a long-shot idea: pitching the site to the federal government as a potential women’s prison, following the shutdown of the scandal-plagued Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin. Assemblymember Jeff Gonzalez, a Coachella Republican, has called the Chuckwalla closure “a mistake” that stripped a rural community of a critical employer.
Corrections Secretary Jeff Macomber told lawmakers in March that the agency wants to relinquish control of shuttered prison properties as quickly as possible, citing security risks and the cost of maintaining empty facilities.
Susanville’s experience has followed a similarly rocky path, though its remote location in the Lassen National Forest, hundreds of miles from major population centers, presents different obstacles than Blythe faces. When the state announced in 2021 that it would close the prison there, city officials went to court, arguing that California hadn’t properly studied the closure’s impact under state environmental law. Newsom’s administration responded by pushing through budget legislation that exempted prison closures from that review process altogether.
“There was initially a lot of panic,” said Susanville Mayor Mendy Schuster. “Houses went on the market. People left town. State jobs are good jobs with a good income, and they were going to leave.”
The city’s population dropped from about 16,000 in 2021 to 14,000 by 2024, according to Census data, and elementary school enrollment fell 10% over roughly the same period. Former City Manager Dan Newton, who left the position recently for a job in Tehama County, said Susanville has been running deficit budgets for two years just to keep public safety positions filled.
“We’re heading toward insolvency,” Newton said.
Attracting new industry has proven difficult. Susanville sits near the Nevada border, making it easy for businesses to choose lower-tax, lighter-regulation Nevada instead. The local power grid can’t support heavy industrial use, and the area lacks the workforce base that large employers typically need. A recent lumber mill fire and the earlier loss of a baseball grandstand have only added to the sense of decline. One idea now under discussion: a new truck stop.
“No one is coming to save us,” Newton said.
Tracy, by contrast, has barely stumbled. The Deuel Vocational Institution near Tracy closed in 2021, but the city’s position along Interstate 5 in a fast-growing corridor of the Bay Area’s outer suburbs has drawn interest from agricultural, education and even casino developers eyeing the vacant property. San Joaquin County Supervisor Robert Rickman, who served as Tracy’s mayor from 2016 to 2020, said most displaced prison staff transferred to the California Health Care Facility in Stockton without losing their jobs.
“I guess you’re never really prepared for a closure,” Rickman said, “but the good thing is that nobody lost their jobs.”
Researchers who study rural prison economies say the pattern playing out across these towns tracks with what they’ve found elsewhere: the economic benefits of hosting a prison were often overstated from the start, since many jobs went to workers commuting from neighboring communities rather than local residents. Studies also suggest that towns which built prisons early in the state’s decades-long prison boom saw only short-lived gains in income and housing values before those effects faded — what one researcher called a “decay effect.”
More closures may be coming. Beyond Blythe, Susanville and Tracy, the state also ended its contract with a private prison in Kern County — now operating as an immigration detention facility — and a prison in Norco is scheduled to close this October. A state audit released last week found that five aging prisons statewide would require a combined $2.4 billion in deferred repairs, adding financial pressure that could accelerate the state’s exit from more communities that once depended on the industry to survive.
Original source: CalMatters
