This California town was already dying. Then the state moved to close its prison
Stay up-to-date with free briefings on topics that matter to all Californians. Subscribe to CalMatters today for nonprofit news in your inbox.
BLYTHE – Two things bring people here, prisons and water, and this tiny desert town is losing both.
The locals interested in keeping Blythe afloat have ideas: They’ll build a logistics center, or they’ll develop better recreation opportunities on the Colorado River, or they’ll reopen their soon-to-be shuttered state prison as an immigration detention center.
But they don’t yet have answers.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration late last year announced their community would be one of the next hit by the unwinding of California’s sprawling prison system, a dismantling made possible by the steep decline in the state’s inmate population from some 160,000 people a dozen years ago to about 96,000 today.
His corrections agency named Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe, where about 18,000 people live in 27 square miles of desert pressed up against the Colorado River, as one of the next two institutions to close, along with California City Correctional Facility. Shutting Chuckawalla will cost the community hundreds of jobs.
“We know it’s going to be a ripple effect across all sectors,” said Interim City Manager Mallory Crecelius. “But we don’t really have a grasp of just how much it’s going to impact.”
The early signs for Blythe’s future don’t bode well.
“The City of Blythe is Dying” was the unsubtle headline of a Riverside County civil investigation in June 2022. The report found that the city can’t pay its bills, its population is fleeing to Phoenix or the Coachella Valley, and neither the city nor its residents has bright prospects for the future — and that was before Newsom announced the planned closure of one of the area’s largest employers.
Riverside County investigators “found hard-working people who care deeply for their community, but most city officials are in denial about the future Blythe faces,” they wrote in the report.
Blythe leaders fumed over the report – “I thought it was bullshit,” said City Councilmember Joe Halby – but they had few answers for its findings.
The one solution they do have: Just don’t close the prison.
They call their publicity campaign “Save Chuck.” The city hired a PR firm, the first time it has ever taken that step.
Their charm offensive implored the state to leave the prison open. If anything, Blythe leaders say, close a prison somewhere else.
They even have a participant willing to take the fall, the California Rehabilitation Center in neighboring Norco, an older facility that’s closer to a population center that isn’t as economically reliant on the prison.
“As soon as we learned of the closure, we submitted over 40 public records requests,” Crecelius said. “We wanted to know how they chose Chuckawalla, just a lot of information to help us understand how we got here.
“Those requests have been denied. The state was not giving us that information. They either don’t have it or they just refuse to provide it to us.”
The city’s latest disappointment came in May, when the governor’s proposed budget kept Chuckawalla Valley State Prison on the list of prisons Newsom wants to close.
Then there’s Blythe’s water, which feeds fields of alfalfa taken out of town by the truckload as bales of hay, and is increasingly going to large farm conglomerates. The Metropolitan Water District, which sends water to Los Angeles and other Southern California cities, pays Blythe farmers to leave their fields fallow as competition for Colorado River water gets increasingly desperate.
So if there’s no prison and very little water, what becomes of this place? And what does the state owe a town it saved with a prison in 1988, and is abandoning with the removal of that prison 35 years later?
Budget savings in California state prisons
Newsom so far has identified four prisons for closure, with three of them in the small towns of Susanville, California City and Blythe. They banked on the state’s prison construction boom of the late 1980s and 1990s and built their economies around the government jobs the institutions provided.
But what the state gives, the state can take away. The Democratic majority in the Legislature that once championed harsh sentences has long since changed its mind on criminal justice.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: