The state was supposed to close the California Correctional Center in Susanville by this June.
But it has remained open because the town — where local officials say they face economic devastation if they lose more than 1,000 prison jobs — sued the state last year, and a Lassen County judge issued a preliminary injunction halting the closure while the case moved through the court.
In a ruling issued Wednesday in Lassen County Superior Court, Visiting Judge Robert F. Moody dissolved the injunction.
Judge Moody wrote:
The legislature and the CDCR both have had and have expressed policy reasons for closing prisons: there is a paucity of inmates, and the population of inmates is in continuous decline and the resultant reductions in required staff and physical plant make it fiscally imprudent to continue to maintain all or our expensive prisons.
The wisdom of such legislative or political policies are not and have never been the province of the courts.
1 comment:
This is something I spoke about during one of my previous blog posts where I discussed how rural jails and prisons don't help rural communities. It's interesting to see this small town sue over keeping this prison in town so that they don't suffer from economic devastation. This just got me thinking about what alternatives there are to this sort of problem. With industries such as steel, mining, and coal that used to dominate some rural towns exiting, leaving people without jobs and cash flow, prisons seem like the answer. However, prisons continue to entangle people in a vicious cycle of poverty and don't do much good to any community they impress themselves upon. I think about how there are jobs out there and there are resources that could be put into rural communities that alleviate some of these economic problems that don't work to put people of that community into cages as a primary way of operating. I think that the redistribution of wealth and actual economic stimulation can help communities so that prisons don't become something to rally behind but rather something to work to get rid of.
Post a Comment