October 14th, 2022
I'm on a one night layover in Prison Town, USA. No, I'm not staying in a 6 x 8 concrete studio, courtesy of the great State of California. I am a less than satisfied guest of the Super 8 Motel, in Susanville, California. It ain't all that super but we'll leave the details to the Yelpers and the Trip Advisors. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much. Accommodations are a lot more rudimentary a few minutes away at the lockup nearby.
(Prison Town, USA was the title of a PBS documentary about Susanville that aired in 2007)
From where I'm sitting, there isn't much to recommend Susanville. To be fair I haven't been downtown. The Super 8 is located on the bleak flats just outside of downtown, smack next to an entrance road to the Lassen County Fairgrounds. There's a tire shop/auto wrecker across the street, and kitty corner to the motel is a Walgreens. Make no mistake, there's no mistaking this place for Chicago's Magnificent Mile. If this is representative of the town as a whole then the Susan that the ville was named for must've been pretty damned ornery.
Maybe the "historic downtown" is quaint and interesting with the usual collection of a candy store, an ice cream shop, a family diner, and a divey bar where colorful, hard bitten, old timers in dirty ball caps grumble about Sacramento and DC into rocks glasses filled with cheap whiskey. There may even be one of those country stores that sells scented candles, kitchen gadgets, local jams, wooden signs emblazoned with pithy down home philosophy, and dish towels embroidered with Old Glory; the insulting part being that all of that Americana is made China (Except the local jams but who knows these days. Local might mean local to Shenzhen).
Like many of the small rural towns that sprouted in the mid-nineteenth century, Susanville started out as a logging and mining town. It was, at other times, a rail hub and an agricultural town.
Now the town's main industry is incarceration. Counting three prisons in the immediate vicinity (the High Desert State Prison, the minimum-medium security California Correctional Center, and the Federal Correctional Institution, in nearby Herlong), nearly one-third of the population of Susanville is realizing the dubious hospitality of the Golden State, complete with the proverbial three hots and a cot. (When I visited Susanville all three prisons were in full operation. Since then, the California Correctional Center has been deactivated)
