Prisons: Economic Tonic for Rural Areas
In the rural counties of California, the boom of the 1980s didn’t happen. Mining and lumber, the industries that kept many of them going for a century, are in a slump that is now several decades old. Agriculture, the mainstay of others, has been shrinking.
The most telling evidence came last month when a last-minute state bailout prevented Butte County from being forced to file for bankruptcy. That Sacramento Valley county has suffered because its farming economy was overrun as cities grew and new ones incorporated.
So it should be no surprise that some of the other troubled rural counties in the state are delighted, finally, to have a new growth industry: prisons.
Take, for instance, Del Norte County on the North Coast near the Oregon border. Earlier this year, the state opened the Pelican Bay State Prison just outside Crescent City, the county seat. It may eventually house as many as 4,000 inmates.
Del Norte has suffered for years from the decline of lumber and fishing. The county’s unemployment rate has been more than 15%, almost triple the state average. Population growth has been small. One of its most troubling problems has been the flight of young adults leaving to seek work in places where the economy is robust.
But thanks to California’s high crime rate, all that is changing rapidly.
The state has projected that up to 500 local residents will have jobs at the prison. That represents about 10% of the county’s employment before the prison was built. Suddenly, Del Norte has a healthy employer again.
By the time you add in families and prison workers transferred from elsewhere and people moving in to take jobs created in service industries to serve the prison and its employees, it’s expected that Del Norte’s population may jump more than 15% in the next few years. For a county whose population was just above 20,000 until recently, that’s a lot.
“Prisons are functioning as a principal economic base for counties that used to depend on lumber or mining,” said Stephen Levy, economist and director of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto. “That’s why so many of California’s smallest counties want them.”
While the major urban areas of California and adjacent counties boomed in the 1980s, the less populated, more remote areas languished. Their economies were traditionally based on exploitation of their rich natural resources. But those industries have never recovered from successive recessions in the 1970s and increased competition from abroad, particularly low-wage Third World countries.
The result has been crushing unemployment and very slow economic growth in many rural areas while the rest of the state sometimes had trouble finding enough qualified workers to fuel rapid expansion.
To the rescue came the Administration of Gov. George Deukmejian, elected in 1982 on a tough anti-crime platform that promised to send more criminals to prison. That campaign promise has definitely been kept. The number of prison inmates in California rose from 34,640 on Dec. 31, 1982, to 95,653 as of Sept. 23, 1990. That’s a 176% increase during those eight years.
The state Department of Corrections has embarked on an unprecedented construction program. Since 1983, it has built eight prisons, expanded seven, added 16 new conservation camps (for those convicted of lesser crimes) and created 10 facilities for those returned to custody because of parole offenses.
Employment in the department has also skyrocketed. From roughly 10,000 full-time employees in 1983, it has grown to nearly 29,000.
Most of those new facilities and new jobs have landed in small places that most urbanized Californians may never have heard of. To name a few: Avenal and Corcoran in Kings County, Calipatria in Imperial County, Wasco and Delano in Kern County.
Such localities have eagerly sought state prisons to boost their economies. Officials quickly realized that a stable, relatively well-paid work force of state prison employees was far superior to the relatively low-paying service jobs that their areas had been able to attract in recent years.
The irony is that while small communities are competing for the prisons, there is considerable resentment that most of the prisoners being sent to the new, remote facilities are from California’s biggest cities. Los Angeles County alone accounts for almost 39% of all state inmates; San Diego County is next highest with 7%.
Deukmejian himself has expressed anger over the controversy that has held up construction of a proposed state prison in East Los Angeles. Opponents have said that the prison will adversely affect an already congested and troubled area.
The governor and others, meanwhile, have argued that Los Angeles County should carry a larger share of the burden of providing sites for new prisons because it has largely created the need for them. Philosophically and morally, that may make sense.
But viewed through the neutral prism of economics, the placement of prisons in depressed rural areas is a perfect solution. Increased prisoner populations are a sad fact of life in California. They represent society’s failure.
But as long as this population continues to grow, the state will have to find room for it. And it makes more sense to put prisons in areas where the economic boost is needed and wanted, even if those areas are far from where the criminals come from.
