US Politics
The Unraveling Bargain: California's Abandonment of Its Prison Towns
California's decades-long experiment with using prisons as economic engines for remote towns like Susanville, Blythe, and Tracy has collapsed as sentencing reforms and population declines force closures, leaving communities scrambling for survival. It is a devastating moral failure that the state built economies on incarceration and now abandons the very towns it conscripted, sacrificing real people and their futures for political talking points about prison reform.
