COALINGA, Calif. — Halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles, baking in the 100-degree heat of the Central Valley, a former prison is in the midst of an unlikely second act.
Inside its cinderblock walls, a company is growing the very product that led some prisoners to be locked up there.
Longtime music manager Dan Dalton and Casey Dalton, his sister, bought the 20-acre site in 2016 for $4.1 million, choosing the location because its dry and sterile environment would provide a secure place to store marijuana.
The purchase also allowed their cannabis company, Evidence, and others that have bought shuttered prisons to come face to face with the lasting effects of the war on drugs, particularly on people of color, as they try to shape the role the industry will play in confronting that legacy.
“We’re moving thousands of pounds of flower now, and I’m going to go home to my family tonight,” Dan Dalton said. “You know … there are people sitting in jail cells right now for personal possession of flower. And the hypocrisy makes no sense to me.”
Evidence grows its plants in the back garden of the former Claremont Custody Center, where prisoners once tended vegetables. Employees cook edible gummies in the prison kitchen and stuff pre-rolled joints in the mess hall. [Read More @ Yahoo.com]
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