The big house in a small town: prisons, communities, and economics in rural America

Abstract

This paper is about the nuts and bolts of local politics, something not studied enough in our discipline. Studies of politics and prisons at the higher levels of government abound, but very little has been done to understand these entities on the micro level. To just discuss the prison building boom writ large is to forget that these prisons are actually built in towns. Although some large cities may be able to absorb a large facility with very little impact on the community as a whole, this is not the case in a small rural community, where the prison population may equal the population of free citizens. This is a study of two of these new prison towns: Beeville, Texas and Florence Colorado. Both are small rural communities who began the lobbying process in the late 1980's. Beeville had fallen on hard economic times with the decline of the Texas oil boom and Florence, though never an economic hot spot, lost a significant number of jobs and residents with the decline of the mining industry. Both communities worked hard to land a facility, Beeville from the Texas Department of Corrections (now Texas Department of Criminal Justice or TDCJ) and Florence from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and both have since become the site of multiple facilities. They are both examples of the new rural prison towns that have cropped up all over the country over the past 25 years. This paper is a study of the institutional relationships that develop after the prison opens.