The prison on Boyer Road

At 10274 Boyer Road, on the southeast edge of Montcalm County, one of the biggest workplaces around is a prison. The Carson City Correctional Facility opened in 1989, in the middle of a stretch when Michigan was throwing up new prisons as fast as it could to ease crowding in the older ones. The state runs it through the Department of Corrections, holding adult men at security Levels I, II, and IV, with room for around 1,246.

For a city this size, a state prison is a quiet economic engine. It brings hundreds of benefited state jobs — corrections officers, nurses, kitchen and trades and clerical staff — to a rural county where steady, year-round work with a pension can be hard to come by. The paychecks don’t stay behind the fence; they spread out into the grocery stores, the rentals, the school enrollment. When a small town in mid-Michigan turns out to be doing fine, there’s often a prison, a hospital, or a factory underneath it, and out here it’s the prison.

It’s the kind of place that doesn’t show up on a postcard, but everyone local knows where it is. Ask in Carson City and someone will tell you a cousin works out on Boyer Road, or used to, or is about to. The walls and the towers read as forbidding from the road, but for a lot of families here the building means something simpler and steadier than that: it means a job.