With Montana choosing the location for its new women’s prison and Jefferson County planning to toss its hat into the ring, this seems a good time to examine how the arrival of a correctional facility tends to impact a small town.
Before 1980, U.S. prisons were mainly built in cities, with just a quarter of correctional facilities in rural areas. Since then, however, prisons have largely been a rural phenomenon, with nearly three out of four built in small towns – and even more so in the West, with its vast open spaces.
This shift was largely driven by rural economic decline starting in the mid-1970s, due to a sharp drop in manufacturing and mining followed by the farm crisis. By the 1980s, small towns across the country were desperate for an economic lifeline, and with available urban land rare and costly, many states jumped at the idea.
