12 Texas Towns That Would Vanish Without Their Prison

Texas has been quietly funding its forgotten towns with one industry that never follows the market, never moves to another state, and never shuts down in a recession. What that looks like on the ground is not what the policy debate suggests. This video ranks twelve Texas towns by how completely their economies have been shaped by prisons and immigration detention facilities. The list runs from Teague in Freestone County, where the 2018 shutdown of the Big Brown lignite mine left the William R. Boyd Unit as the dominant payroll, through Woodville in Tyler County, where the Gib Lewis Unit replaced what the East Texas timber industry used to promise. It covers Karnes City and its GEO Group ICE detention contract, the multi-unit psychiatric and corrections complex in Rusk, and the James V. Allred Unit in Iowa Park, a maximum-security facility that nearly matches the town in population but cannot find enough staff to run at full capacity. The list reaches into unincorporated territory at Rosharon in Brazoria County, where the Ramsey, Stringfellow, and Terrell units sit on more than 14,000 acres of land that predates any recognizable civilian community. It examines Dilley in Frio County, where the CoreCivic-operated South Texas Family Residential Center closed under an ICE contract in 2024 and then reopened in 2025, giving that town a specific and permanent knowledge about federal policy risk that the others only fear. Livingston holds Texas death row at the Allan B. Polunsky Unit. Gatesville in Coryell County holds five separate TDCJ women's units in or beside a city of 16,000. Lovelady's population of 594 sits next to the Eastham Unit's workforce of 423. Tennessee Colony in Anderson County, an unincorporated community of roughly 300 free residents, is surrounded by the Coffield, Beto, Michael, Powledge, and Gurney units holding more than 10,000 incarcerated men. At the top sits Huntsville, seat of Walker County, home to the TDCJ's headquarters, the Walls Unit, the busiest execution chamber in the country, and approximately 6,744 state corrections employees, with Sam Houston State University as a secondary economy that softens but does not replace what the agency provides. 0:00 Introduction - Prison Towns as Local Economies 0:43 Teague - Mining Bust Replaced by State Corrections 2:36 Woodville - Timber Industry Decline and Prison Employment 4:22 Karnes City - Immigration Detention and Volatile Federal Revenue 6:19 Rusk - Double State Institution Dependence 16:54 Gatesville - Five Women's Facilities, One Town 18:56 Tennessee Colony and Lovelady - Extreme Population Ratios 22:55 Huntsville - TDCJ Headquarters and Company Town Paradox