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This week, the Trump administration moved to keep the federal prison camp in Duluth, Minnesota, open. The minimum security facility had previously been slated for deactivation by Biden administration officials who cited asbestos, lead and condemned buildings as safety concerns, alongside persistent staffing shortages that made it difficult to operate. In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, the decision earned applause from Democratic lawmakers who had strongly opposed the closure.
The reprieve means that roughly 90 staff members won’t have to relocate or find new jobs. Officials told The Star Tribune they expect that the incarcerated population — which had fallen from over 700 to less than 300 during the transfer process — will soon grow again. Democratic U.S. Sen. Tina Smith called the decision “a major victory for the workers, families, and community that have fought to keep these good-paying, union jobs in the region,” in a statement.
This dynamic, where taxpayer spending on prisons is pitched as economic activity for prison towns, has been dubbed by some academics as correctional or “penal Keynesianism,” a nod to the economic theory that promotes government spending to boost growth. Research varies on how much economic benefit prisons actually deliver to communities in the aggregate, but it often finds that prisons deliver much smaller long-term benefits to communities than promised, especially in rural towns banking on them as economic lifelines.
Of course, that big-picture view isn’t very convincing to people whose livelihoods are at stake. In Centre County, Pennsylvania, local officials have rallied to stave off the proposed closure of the Rockview state prison and the closure of the Quehanna Boot Camp in nearby Clearfield County. While the region’s economy is largely dominated by Penn State University, prison jobs remain an important source of blue-collar employment in surrounding towns.
Corrections unions have been out front in voicing these concerns. “In nearly every case, a state prison is the primary economic development engine of its area. Families in these communities deserve better,” John Eckenrode, president of a Pennsylvania corrections union, told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. County commissioners estimated the closure would result in nearly $120 million in economic losses in the tri-county area.
Reporting on the closures for Penn Live this week, Tirzah Christopher captured many of the themes that often emerge across the country when prisons are slated for shutdown. While corrections workers and local politicians worry about economic fallout, Gov. Josh Shapiro is touting projected savings in the hundreds of millions, and decarceration advocates see it as a chance to shrink the size of the system.
But those who wish to see fewer prisons also note that closures are not a panacea unless they are accompanied by broader reforms. Writing this week about a planned closure of Minnesota’s Stillwater state prison, organizer David Boehnke wrote that the process should be paired with investments in recidivism programming and diverting people with nonviolent offenses away from prison altogether.
In Minnesota, currently and formerly incarcerated people have also put together a coalition to demand a say in shaping what comes next. At a press conference in May, several men who had served time at Stillwater spoke candidly about their experiences and described a complicated relationship with the facility. Some said the culture of the prison was better than others, but that “the physical structure of the building didn’t reflect” that reality, reported KARE 11. But they also acknowledge that closures can be deeply disruptive. Some heard concerns from men inside that being transferred might leave them double-bunked with a cellmate who wasn’t on their same rehabilitative path, and who might set them back.
That tension is one commonly expressed by incarcerated people. Writing for The Marshall Project’s Life Inside series, Rashon Venable described how he worried about losing the relationships he had built when officials announced the closure of New York’s Sullivan Correctional Facility, where he’d been for three years. Similarly, Johanna Mills wrote that her first emotion was fear when she learned the FCI-Dublin prison in California, where she was incarcerated, was closing — even if the closure was in part due to a pervasive culture of sexual abuse. As a survivor of sexual violence, Mills wrote that “relocation can exacerbate that violence — even when the place you’re leaving is so toxic that you can’t stay there.”
Stateville Prison in Illinois is yet another that’s been deemed too toxic to continue operations. The state moved to close the century-old facility after a watchdog group declared conditions there “decrepit, unsafe and inhumane,” and a federal judge ordered it closed. This spring, the state finished transferring all the people incarcerated there to other facilities so they could begin work on a $900 million rebuilding project for Stateville, as well as Logan, the state’s primary women’s prison.
Already, the effort has some worried about how money is being spent. According to the Chicago Tribune in May, the Illinois Department of Corrections was proposing to spend more on the facility in the upcoming year than two years ago, despite the fact that it’s been emptied. Officials said it was because a minimum security unit and a reception center on the Stateville grounds are still operational.
It's indicative of how prison spending and cost-savings are often more complicated than they first appear. In California, for example, the state has closed several prisons in recent years as part of a plan to shrink its correctional footprint. This week, The Sacramento Bee reported that the state has claimed nearly $1 billion in savings. But the advocacy group Californians United for a Responsible Budget noted that the state has also spent about $300 million maintaining those shuttered facilities in a “warm shutdown” so that they don’t deteriorate further. The state has said that zoning, regulatory and liability issues limit its ability to sell, repurpose or demolish the structures.
Meanwhile in Wisconsin, prison closure advocates are having trouble getting their efforts off the ground politically. While there is widespread agreement that the 127-year-old Green Bay Correctional Institution is overdue for closure, disagreements over how to close it led to the effort being stripped from the state budget last month. The Wisconsin Examiner reported that criminal justice advocates in the state are frustrated. “You’re talking about a facility that was built in the 1800s… And you’re putting people in this facility in 2025, and you are expecting them to come home sane,” Sean Wilson, an advocate who was previously incarcerated there, told the Examiner.