Roughly 15 years ago, both towns were relatively stable, propped up in large part by steady state jobs at nearby correctional facilities. Prison employment brought reliable paychecks and benefits that helped sustain local businesses in these remote pockets of California. But as sentencing reforms reduced the state’s prison population, Gov. Gavin Newsom moved to shutter facilities across the state — five so far, with a sixth in Norco set to close this October. Lawmakers also approved budget language this year calling for at least one more closure, a move that could save the state roughly $150 million annually, though that provision has not yet become law.

The fallout in these smaller communities has been significant.

In Blythe, a desert city near the Arizona border, Newsom ordered the closure of Chuckwalla Valley State Prison in 2022. The announcement came as the city was already struggling — its population was shrinking as residents moved toward Phoenix or the Coachella Valley, and a county audit that same year found Blythe couldn’t keep up with its own bills.

City officials have pressed state lawmakers and the governor’s office for economic assistance, but so far nothing has come through.

“Be honest with you, I don’t think they give a shit,” Blythe Mayor Joseph DeConinck said. “We still haven’t got nothing from the state. I hate to say it, but Blythe’s in the middle of nowhere, we’re the furthest from Sacramento … we’re only a few votes out here.”

Susanville, tucked into the Lassen National Forest in far Northern California, is facing similar strain. After its prison closure was announced in 2021, Mayor Mendy Schuster said residents began listing their homes and leaving town almost immediately. The city’s population dropped from about 16,000 in 2021 to 14,000 by 2024.

“We’re heading toward insolvency,” said Dan Newton, Susanville’s former city manager.

Neither town has received a clear plan from the state for economic recovery, raising questions about what long-term support — if any — will be offered to communities left behind by California’s shrinking prison system.

In other statewide news, the race for California insurance commissioner is drawing attention for its ideological divide. Former San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who has proposed a state-backed natural disaster insurance program and expanded access to low-cost auto insurance, topped the June primary field — a sign her progressive platform is connecting with voters frustrated by rising insurance costs. Her opponent, state Sen. Ben Allen of El Segundo, finished second and has earned the state Democratic Party’s endorsement, positioning himself as the more institutional choice. UC Irvine law professor Shauhin Talesh said the contest reflects a broader split within the party nationally over how aggressively government should intervene in the insurance market.

Meanwhile, a high-stakes trial got underway this week in an Oakland federal courtroom, where Meta faces accusations from California and dozens of other states that it deliberately engineered Facebook and Instagram to hook young users, despite internal awareness of the potential harm to their mental health. States also allege Meta unlawfully collected data from children under 13. If the tech giant loses, damages could reach as high as $1.4 trillion, along with mandated changes to how its platforms operate. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement that “exploiting our most vulnerable residents to boost corporate profits is not only morally wrong, it’s also illegal.” Meta maintains the lawsuit misrepresents its efforts, saying it has made “real changes to protect teens online.”

Closer to home for Inland Empire families, a state-funded database that gave California’s K-12 schools free access to research materials, encyclopedia entries, PBS videos and academic journals has lost its funding after lawmakers made cuts this year. CalMatters and PBS SoCal have produced a video segment examining the impact on classrooms that relied heavily on the resource, which aired as part of the SoCalMatters series on PBS SoCal.

Original source: CalMatters

The post Prison Closures Left Small Towns Reeling. Here’s How They’re Coping appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

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

The post As Prisons Close, California Towns Search for What Comes Next appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.