California prison towns grasp for new jobs after closures: No one is coming to save us
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Set us as preferred California prison towns made a grim bargain decades ago.They built their economies around an industry that relied on an ever-growing prison population, mostly from California’s major metropolitan areas.Then, about 15 years ago, legislators changed sentencing laws in ways that caused the prison population to drop, and the prisons started going away.Gov.
Jerry Brown oversaw massive reductions in California’s prison population in the 2010s.Gov.
Gavin Newsom has closed five prisons since taking office in 2019.Now, some of those towns face difficult choices if they’re going to survive.
One prison town is still fighting the closure, one is betting on businesses to make up its losses and a third — the town of Susanville — is remote, isolated and in deeper trouble than the rest.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’t want to see, hear, smell or really even think about.“Prisons in communities are not popular, so they tend to be located in areas that are desperate economically,” said Dan Newton, who worked for the city of Susanville for 20 years and was its city manager until recently.“That would describe this area.”The city’s management was informed in 2021 that the prison was scheduled for closure.
They went to court to challenge the closure, arguing the state’s environmental review process hadn’t taken into account the prison closure’s impact on the town.Newsom had a solution: A budget bill that exempted correctional facility closures from the environmental review process.“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...