ABSTRACT
Depressed rural areas in New York, Texas, California, and other states have turned to prisons as an engine for local economic development. The trend was driven, in part, by changing public policies toward drug abuse, crime, and incarceration that resulted in an explosion in the number of state and federal prisoners after the mid-1970s. The chapter presents a cautionary tale against an outdated approach to economic development that remains all too common. Prisons have turned out to be unreliable engines of rural economic development at best. The pursuit of prisons is a variation of the traditional "smokestack-chasing" approach to economic development, wherein communities compete to attract any business that is likely to produce jobs. Public policy toward crime and punishment has swelled prison populations and generated a flood of spending on new prison construction by state and federal governments.
