Town fears bleak fate without prison
SUSANVILLE >> The Mauldin family loved their house. They bought it during the financial crisis and spent a lot of money to upgrade the tan, farmhouse-style home. New landscaping and fencing so the two kids would have a nice place to play. An entirely new kitchen and new floors. Rows of lilac bushes lining the driveway.
But when word came down last spring that the prison in the town of Susanville would close, the family made a decision they never wanted to make: They put their home up for sale.
“We put our heart and soul into this house and this area,” said Jessica Mauldin, 39, whose husband works as a prison guard. “We have built our village here.”
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 mini
mal 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.
The story of Susanville is not unlike that of countless rural communities in America that in the back half of the last century welcomed correctional facilities to replace dying industries at a time when the country was undergoing a prison-building boom. But now, California and other states are moving to reduce inmate populations and close prisons amid a national movement to address racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
“It will affect the whole town,” said Mendy Schuster, Susanville’s mayor, whose husband works as a corrections officer. “I don’t want to imagine what it would be like.”
With so much at stake, Susanville is fighting back, trying to halt the closure through legal means, rather than seeking out new industries to replace the prison. Last year, the town filed a lawsuit against the state that is still pending, arguing that officials violated environmental codes in deciding to close the prison and did not
give local officials any prior notice.
The fight has been front and center for residents for the past several months, but the issue has also drawn attention across the state amid divisive debates about the future of the state’s penal system. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has promised to close two prisons — the one in Susanville, and another in Tracy, a town about 60 miles east of San Francisco, which has already closed — the culmination of years of work by activists, as well as the steady decline in the state’s inmate population.
It’s a trend playing out in other states too, especially in New York, where the inmate population is at its lowest level in decades. After former Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced a slate of prison closures, a backlash erupted upstate that was similar to what has unfolded in Susanville, with protests over job losses. More recently, New York’s current governor, Kathy Hochul, said she planned to close six prisons, which drew condemnation from Republican officials who said the move would make the public less safe and cost too many jobs.
On Main Street in Susanville, “Save our rural communities,” reads the sign that greets breakfast customers at the Courthouse Cafe. The street connects the city’s past and present: On one end sits the cluster of Old Weststyle
buildings of the historic center, and on the other, the sprawl of fast food outlets and big box retailers.
“We have it good,” said Kerri Cobb, a local mortgage broker, about the prison. She has organized fundraising for the lawsuit. “That’s why we’re fighting to keep it. These facilities gave us the ability to rise up. And now they are pulling the rug out from under us.”
The lawsuit has achieved an early victory: A local judge has issued a temporary injunction halting plans for closing the prison while the case moves through the courts.
‘Enlightened efforts’
It was 1963, and it was July. The governor of California, Edmund G. Brown, had come to Susanville to showcase, as a reporter on the scene put it, “the nation’s newest concept in correction.”
With curious officials from other Western states in attendance, the governor ceremoniously laid a cornerstone of the California Conservation Center and proclaimed the fulfillment of “enlightened efforts to make responsible citizens out of the delinquent and the criminal.”
This was years before the era of mass incarceration in America, and California believed it had a new concept for dealing with lawbreakers: redemption through hard work and connection with nature. Among the green forests and pristine mountain air, inmates wearing blue shirts and bluejeans would learn to battle wildfires, domesticate wild horses and clear trees for hiking trails.
Susanville’s transformation was underway.
“When the prison started, there was just so much growth,” said Susan Couso, who moved here as a schoolgirl in 1962. “Everyone was excited. Before the prisons, after high school young men would either go work in the sawmills or go elsewhere.”
Today, Susanville, the seat of Lassen County, is Republican country in a deep-blue state. In the 2020 presidential election, 74% of voters chose Donald Trump, and more recently, 83% of voters, the highest percentage of any county, elected to recall Newsom, who ultimately survived the challenge.
Perhaps inevitably, then, the plans to close the prison have become political. Most of the town’s leaders say they believe the plans are a vendetta from Newsom to punish them for their conservative politics, rather than the fruition of efforts over many years to change the criminal justice system, some approved by voters through ballot measures.
The state’s prisons became so overcrowded that the Supreme Court intervened in 2011 and ordered them depopulated, ruling that the lack of medical care and adequate food and sanitation violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
‘No option’
The announcement that California would close two prisons was hailed as a milestone by activists, the culmination of years of new sentencing laws and the work of liberal prosecutors that sharply reduced the number of people in prisons across the state. At their most crowded, California prisons housed more than 160,000 people. Today, they hold just under 100,000.
The decline in the state’s inmate population that was fueled by the pandemic, as officials ordered early releases for thousands of prisoners to contain the virus, and by changes to California’s sentencing laws in recent years that were approved directly by voters through ballot measures, has allowed Newsom to fulfill a promise to start closing prisons.
Brian Kaneda, an activist in Los Angeles who has organized campaigns to close prisons, said he believed the state has a “moral and ethical obligation” to help communities like Susanville invest in new jobs to replace the ones in prisons. “No one dreams of being a prison guard,” said Kaneda, the deputy director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, which has campaigned for California to spend less on prisons. “It’s because they have no option.”
Top salaries for prison guards can approach six figures, but the work can be traumatizing, with violence a constant threat.
“It’s a hugely dysfunctional place,” said Randall Wagner, 72, a retired corrections officer in Susanville. “People in the general public have no idea what it’s like.”
The Mauldins, meanwhile, pulled their house from the market after they didn’t get the offer they wanted, underscoring the difficulty some families may have in selling their homes if the closure goes through. Mauldin’s husband considered getting a new prison job in Blythe, in California’s eastern Riverside County, which would allow the family to live in Arizona, where housing is cheaper. But for now, they have placed their hope in the legal effort to save the prison.
“What now?” Mauldin said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen and we don’t know what our next step is.”
As to Susanville’s future, she said, “Nothing will be the same.”