Lassen County’s fight to keep a California state prison open reveals epic GOP hypocrisy

You’d think removing 2,064 felons from their backyard, downsizing a bureaucracy and saving taxpayers $122 million would delight California conservatives. Yet not so in this state’s most die-hard Republican county — Lassen — where the partisan politics of the penal code is colliding with the dire economics of rural California.

About 300 miles northeast of San Francisco, this county of 30,500 on the Nevada border is so different it might be occupying an un-parallel universe. It’s landlocked. It’s rural. It’s white. It’s in love with Donald Trump.

Three out of four Lassen voters supported him in November. In fact, of 58 counties statewide, they backed Trump by the largest margins in both elections.

Problem is, California’s most conservative county basically has a weaker private sector than North Korea. Of Lassen’s 9,890 workers, 6,120 are bureaucrats. So three in five people with jobs in this Republican mecca get above-market salaries paid by taxpayers, not business owners.

Thousands of others in Lassen work, too, just at way-below-market wages — when they get paid at all — because they’re among the more than 5,000 total prisoners locked up in one of the county’s prisons, jails, and detention centers.

But now, facing the loss of its $122-million-a-year prison and one-tenth of its jobs, this county’s right-wing representatives are acting like the big-government-loving liberals they loathe. They are threatening litigation, extolling the virtues of government spending and fighting to provide their constituents a de facto socialist safe space from the free market these conservatives have demonstrably failed to foster.

Anxiety’s rising, along with epic hypocrisy.

It all started April 13. That’s when, per Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pledge to cut California’s $16 billion prison budget, his administration announced plans to close Lassen’s California Correction Center in June 2022 and move — not release — its shrinking population of incarcerated firefighters to consolidated camps in Tuolumne County. (Facilities in Tehachapi and Soledad will close then, too; Tracy’s state prison closes this September).

Located in Susanville — Lassen’s only incorporated city — the 58-year-old prison’s number of inmates fell by half in 2020 to a little over 2,000.

That’s why Newsom’s administration said the CCC is closing. Newsom also pledged to help the CCC’s 1,080 prison guards “transition,” including helping them relocate to other cities with state prisons.

But Lassen’s leaders see economic devastation and partisan payback from a big-city Democratic governor, not the benefits of consolidating a duplicative, exorbitant bureaucracy.

With “For Sale” signs popping up all over its city of 9,000 free citizens and 5,000 indentured, Susanville’s City Council anticipates collapse and, last month, authorized its attorney to sue the state to stop it.

The county appears likely to follow with its own suit, especially after its own report showed the value of government spending — an inconvenient finding for a county of uber-Republicans whose party’s sole purpose revolves around savaging government spending.

And Lassen’s state and federal legislators? Are these capitalist-loving conservatives letting the invisible hand of the free market do its thing? Hardly.

Rather than save taxpayers $122 million, rock-ribbed Republican Congressman Doug LaMalfa, R-Richvale, said in June, “The state budget is flush.” No need to cut LaMalfa’s conservative constituents’ government gravy train.

Besides, LaMalfa says, “expanding good time credits” to let prisoners out early is the real problem.

Turns out, freeing prisoners isn’t popular in a county where half the people get paid to lock them up.

Then there’s state Sen. Brian Dahle, R-Bieber. Channeling his inner Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, this small-gov Republican’s solution is — here it comes — steering “state programs” to his constituents.

You know, it’s almost as if these California conservatives actually like big government a lot, as long as they’re on its payroll.