When Chris Kaiser steps outside his indoor cannabis grow on Maverick Lane, in the small rural town of Ordway, Colo., he’s struck by the weight of what was left behind. The sunbaked, dirt road — once the industrial staging ground for the county’s cannabis launch — is sparsely traveled, lined by half-finished buildings and shuttered warehouses.

“There are buildings down here where people just stood up and walked out mid-build,” he said. “It’s like the lights are still on, tools left on the table, and now it’s just cobwebs and dust.”

Cannabis was supposed to save Crowley. For years, the county leaned on its prisons to prop up the local economy. But more recently, it has been battered by a shrinking workforce, an aging population, and a stagnant business sector. So in 2021, when dozens of cannabis cultivators flocked to the county of 5,600—drawn by a pandemic-fueled surge in cannabis demand—Crowley appeared on the cusp of a rebirth. And yet, like so many boom-and-bust cycles before it, things collapsed almost as fast as they grew. 

Across the country—from Colorado to California to New York—rural towns and cities once reliant on prisons are turning to the cannabis economy as an unlikely path to economic renewal. In some places, that shift has paid off.

Coalinga, in Central California, dug itself out of crushing debt by turning its shuttered Claremont Custody Center into a multimillion-dollar deal with a cannabis extraction company. Meanwhile, in Warwick, New York, part of the former Mid-Orange Correctional Facility now houses a large-scale cannabis grow operation.

But for others, no amount of ambition, desperation, and high hopes has outpaced reality. In Adelanto, California, wealthy investors descended on the desert prison town with promises of a cannabis boom—until their plans unraveled in a cloud of scandal and corruption. Hundreds of miles north, Susanville—still reeling from the closure of its minimum-security prison—is courting cannabis businesses with no guaranteed success.

As states move to reduce inmate populations and shut down facilities, the push to pivot away from an economy of incarceration has taken on a new urgency, particularly in rural communities where prisons have long served as a buffer against harsher demographic and economic trends.

Towns in stable economic shape rarely rush to host prisons, said Andrea Morrell, an associate professor of anthropology at Guttman Community College. Historically, prisons offered a quick fix for towns left behind by collapsing industries and teetering on the brink of financial ruin.

“These prisons target poor places that need work,” said Morrell. “What they’re offering isn’t economic development like retail or industry, it’s incarceration. And for communities struggling to survive, that can look like a lifeline.”

The twist today is that cannabis may be offering the same lifeline prisons once did—especially in communities where land is cheap and where loose regulations beckon investors and cannabis growers alike. But not every town hoping to reinvent itself through cannabis has managed to jumpstart the kind of broader growth needed to offset decline beyond prison walls.

Prison towns’ caged economy

Crowley’s economic fallout offers a valuable case study. The county’s fertile grasslands once supported a variety of crops like sugar beets and cantaloupes, and relied on jobs like cattle grazing.  But its agricultural economy took a hit in the 1970s and ’80s, when many landowners sold off their water rights to growing cities.

By the late 1990s, as irrigated farmland dried up, businesses disappeared, and poverty surged, Crowley County was on its last economic legs. In a bid for survival, two correctional facilities were built, bringing jobs and, most importantly, tax revenue.

Taken together, the county’s two prisons — Crowley County Correctional Facility, run by the corporate prison giant CoreCivic, and the state-run Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility — house nearly a third of the county’s population behind prison walls, roughly 1,955 inmates. Of the two, the privately run Crowley facility accounts for nearly half of the county’s total property tax revenue.

But in recent years, a financial chill has blown through prison towns nationwide amid a broader push to see them gone in the name of criminal justice reform. States like California, Illinois, and New York have reduced inmate populations and cut ties with private prison operators.

In places like upstate New York, the fear of economic collapse has led some communities to fight to keep their facilities open.

Private prison corporations have found a way to buck the trend thanks to the Trump administration’s aggressive mass deportation agenda — inking lucrative contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to house immigrant detainees. These deals have gone forward even in states that formally banned federal detention partnerships. GEO Group, for instance, landed a 15-year, $1.2 billion contract to reopen Newark’s Delaney Hall detention center, which had sat dormant since 2017.

A similar windfall isn’t expected to come to Crowley. Instead, there has been increasing pressure for the community to find a replacement for the private prison. Four years ago, local officials successfully lobbied state lawmakers to walk back a 2025 deadline to close Colorado’s private facilities. But even with its prison still operational, Crowley struggles to hold onto its working-age residents and to retain, much less recruit, businesses to keep its economy churning.

A state-funded prison replacement study pointed them toward cannabis as a step toward diversification. The blueprint encouraged a pivot to marijuana cultivation startups and for Crowley to offer incentives like a testing lab, innovation hub, and shared-use greenhouse —  though the county lacked the funds to make any of it real.

Still, by 2021, the promise of cheap land, minimal oversight, and low licensing fees drew a wave of cultivators. Power REIT, a New York-based real estate trust, poured more than $25 million into turning old farmland into tailored cannabis grow sites, signing long-term deals with many local growers. But a glut in supply, falling wholesale prices, and stricter state enforcement gutted profits. Most operators folded or fled.

“What we saw in Crowley was likely over-licensing, driven by the ‘green rush,’” said Xavier Jaillet, Colorado Chair of the Cannabis Chamber of Commerce. “People got caught up in the excitement without doing the economic due diligence to understand real market demand.”

Cannabis Wasn’t the Cure

As communities look to diversify their economies with new industries like cannabis, some economists warn that government efforts to favor certain industries over others often lead to problems.  

“It’s insane for cities, counties, or states to try to promote one industry over others for economic gain,” said Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist. “They’ll be much more successful if they simply get out of the way.”

Creating a business-friendly environment, he argues, is far more effective than picking winners and losers. Roy Elliott, a Crowley County commissioner, is trying to salvage what’s left by focusing on fostering a small-business-friendly climate rather than leaning hard on any one industry, to help Crowley County bounce back.

The county now has several vacant greenhouses available, including former indoor grow facilities, and they could potentially be repurposed for other businesses or activities.

“Probably one of the best things that for Crowley would be more small businesses than big businesses,” he said. “We have some indoor growers that do really well, and we have some outdoors that do really well…They both have their little niche.”

Yet falling cannabis prices are still undermining the local economy. “$100 a pound doesn’t equate business-wise when you’re paying $20,000 in electric bills,” says Elliott. Of the roughly 70 cannabis businesses that once operated in Crowley County, only 24 remain, most of them cultivators.

Elliott is willing to accept whatever new business he can to shore up the town’s diminishing workforce, knowing that not enough young people are staying.

“Young people tend to leave as soon as they graduate,” he said. “They don’t stick around, really. There’s not a whole lot of reasons for them to.” 

With fewer than ten employees, Kaiser’s operation has managed to stay profitable. But each passing summer—the peak growing season for cannabis growers—feels quieter than the last. He has no plans to leave Crowley, but he knows there’s no room to slow down.

“We’re not getting rich,” he said. “But we love the work. We run efficiently. All we can do is keep our heads down and keep at it.”