Thread by @CraigOGilmore

This NYTimes story about a planned prison closure is the latest public relations success of prison guards, the real estate business, & the Chamber of Commerce to convince us that we should keep people in cages to maintain jobs & real estate values & commerce. 1/

The LATimes ran basically the same story last year: 2/

‘…many people in Susanville, which cherishes its small-town way of life — “we’re not rural, we’re frontier,” said one resident — relied on jobs at the nearby sawmills and on cattle ranches.’ AND many relied on jobs with the state or Fed govts in Forestry or Fish & Wildlife. 3/

Or jobs at the Sierra Army Depot in Herlong (1/2 hour south on Hwy 395) and later at the new Federal prison in Herlong. That “frontier” was & is dependent on a lot of government jobs in addition to jobs at the 1 of the 3 (not 2) prisons in the country. 4/

It is telling that the NYTimes reporter quotes @RichieReseda, formerly locked up in CCC: “Susanville is described as a ‘happy little prison town’ that has created a pastoral life for many of its residents. I had a different experience.” But... 5/

The reporter leaves out how exactly @RichieReseda 's experience was different. I recommend his short essay on his time in CCC Susanville & what he thinks the state should be doing. The headline gives you a clue:
blavity.com/the-new-jim-cr… 6/

These reporters and their editors who are basically printing the “keep the prison open” stories that the prison guards & Chamber of Commerce have written for them might have looked at other stories about what this idyllic prison town is really like... 7/

You’ll get a different vision of Susanville from Po Kutchins & @KatieGalloways 's remarkable film Prison Town, USA: amdoc.org/watch/prisonto… 8/

And another version, very critical of what the prisons have done to the town’s culture, from Joelle Fraser’s great An American Seduction: Portrait of a Prison Town : quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/tex… 9/

Why do these stories insist that maintaining decent lives for some is dependent on locking up others? Why is the press so insistent that we not envision ways of life that don’t depend on caging humans? 10/

If the state could spend hundreds of millions to build those prisons & dozens of millions a year to run them, surely we have alternatives? #FreeThemAll 11/

Here's a road sign in Susanville: you'll note the lack of non-prison alternative routes here, identical to visions of the town's future the NYTimes & LATimes are selling. 12/