‘Nothing Will Be the Same’: A Prison Town Weighs a Future Without a Prison
The New York Times, January 10, 2022: ‘Nothing Will Be the Same’: A Prison Town Weighs a Future Without a Prison
“In Susanville, at the edge of a valley hemmed in by the Sierra Nevada in remote northeast California, there are nearly as many people living inside the walls of the town’s two state prisons, roughly 7,000 people, as outside. About half of the adults work at the prisons — the soon-to-be shuttered minimal security California Correctional Center and a maximum security facility, High Desert, which will remain open.
“When the California Correctional Center was built in the 1960s, many people in Susanville, which cherishes its small-town way of life — ‘we’re not rural, we’re frontier,’ said one resident — relied on jobs at the nearby sawmills and on cattle ranches. Those jobs eventually disappeared, and now almost every aspect of the town’s economy and civic life, from real estate to local schools, depends on the prison. Over the years, the inmate population has counted toward political representation, and factored into the amount of money the town received from federal pandemic relief funds and state money to fix roads.”
Additional reading:
The New York Times, November 9, 2021: Why New York Is Closing 6 Prisons
Guernica, April 15, 2016: Brett Story: The Prison in 12 Landscapes
The Marshall Project: Prison Closing(s)
