According to an empirical study, siting a private prison in a rural county
does not increase employment.
(Big Prisons, Small Towns:
Prison Economics in Rural America
by Ryan S. King, Marc Mauer and Tracy Huling,
February 2003.)

Their Key Findings:

Overall, over the course of 25 years, we find no significant difference or
discernible pattern of economic trends between the seven rural counties in
New York that hosted a prison and the seven rural counties that did not
host a prison. While prisons clearly create new jobs, these benefits do
not aid the host county to any substantial degree since local residents
are not necessarily in a position to be hired for these jobs. The most
significant findings are as follows:

They go on to detail effects on unemployment during
economic recovery, downturn, and boom, and in each period

unemployment
was slightly worse in counties that hosted a prison.
They looked at per capita income and concluded that:

Counties that hosted new prisons received no economic advantage as
measured by per capita income.

Remember, the justification for a private prison in Lowndes County
is supposed to be

“jobs, jobs, jobs”.
According to this study, it won’t even increase jobs.
And the study didn’t even look into

dirt-cheap prison labor competing with local labor.

-jsq