Jill Frank’s powerful cover photograph for Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia by Judah Schept (2022) is of a mine site turned prison site in Wheelwright, Kentucky, in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Frank took this photograph with Schept, as they stood together in the middle of the road next to the prison yard. Yet rather than pointing the camera toward the prison, Frank focuses on the road itself; a narrow lane that once led to the entrance of a deep mine, and now leads to the prison security check-in. The rock cliff of the old mine entrance looms on our left, as the curved barbed wire fence enclosing the prison yard bends away to the right, designed to keep those inside apart.
This separation by design, between the geography of the prison site and the world created within it, is exactly what Schept’s book refuses to obey. And so, as viewers and readers, we too find ourselves on the road – in the space in between – connecting deep histories of differential dispossessions. Schept’s brilliant chapter on the history of Wheelwright, Kentucky (Chapter 4) delivers one of many incisive accounts of the complex relations under contemporary racial capitalism. Wheelwright is a former coal company-owned town built by the Elkhorn Coal Company in 1916. For over sixty years, from 1916 until it achieved its “independence” in 1979, the entire town was owned by four successive corporations. The prison site is carved into the side of a mountain, surrounded by steep rock walls on three sides. The site first served as a place from which to descend into the earth to access and extract the rich Appalachian coal seams below. After the deep mines closed, the location was used as a garbage dump. And then, in early 1992, US Corrections Corporation, a Louisville-based private prison company, built a prison.
This photograph depicts the logo of the Otter Creek Correctional Center, as painted on the wall inside the prison lobby. I took this photo in 2009, while conducting research for my undergraduate thesis on prison expansion in Central Appalachia (Ryerson 2010). It is of the iconic coalminers’ helmet, pick and shovel, placed underneath the state of Kentucky, which is locked up from east to west behind bars. At that time, the facility was operating as a women’s prison, and the starting wage for a correctional officer was between eight and nine dollars an hour. Over a third of Floyd County, where the prison is located, was living below the poverty line.
When I took this photograph, the Hawaiian Department of Public Safety (DPS) had a contract with the private prison company, and nearly one-third of the prison’s population was composed of women from Hawai'i, who had been sent over 4,000 miles from home to serve their time in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. After immediate and sustained mobilizations in Hawai'i to bring the women home, and over a dozen charges of sexual assault brought forward by women incarcerated in the facility, the Hawaiian DPS ended their contract with the private facility 2009. The Kentucky Department of Corrections was pressured to follow suit, and then-governor Steve Beshear ended the Kentucky state contract with the facility in 2012. In 2020, the facility reopened as the Southeast State Correction Complex, a medium-security state prison that is operated by the Kentucky Department of Corrections yet remains owned by the private company, formerly the Corrections Corporation of America, now renamed CoreCivic.
As Schept writes, “Rather than as punishment or economic development, this book argues, prisons in the coalfields are best understood as a central mechanism for the ongoing need to manufacture capitalist social order amidst very real crisis in the region” (2022: 15). Through his tracing of carceral social reproduction, Schept’s work gives us powerful analytic tools to grapple with the complexity of these overlapping layers of extraction, disposal, and abandonment. His careful attention to how prisons function to manage the poor and working classes in the places where they are constructed, is a crucial part of the architecture for building frameworks that are capacious enough to confront these facilities and the multiple, incommensurate extractions that they uphold, perpetuate, and enact.
We need these guiding frameworks now more than ever. On September 28, 2022, just two months after a catastrophic flood in Eastern Kentucky that resulted in a housing crisis and a major loss of infrastructure, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) posted a notice in the Federal Register announcing a “Notice of Intent” to build a new medium-security correctional institution in Letcher County, KY, just a 45-minute drive from Wheelwright. This is the latest episode in a nearly twenty-year attempt to build a prison in Letcher County. If constructed, it will be the fourth federal prison built in Eastern Kentucky since 1992. The “scoping period” has begun, and with it, the deluge of pro-prison promises: hundreds of jobs; a path forward amidst the deepening crises laid bare by the coal industry’s final departure.
This long fight against the previously proposed – and defeated – United States Penitentiary (USP) Letcher, is the focus of the final chapter of Judah’s book “The Plot of Abolition: Solidarity Politics across Scale, Strategy and Prison Walls.” We wrote this chapter together built on our foundation of ten years of collaborative writing and organizing. In undertaking this account, we turned to two foundational works of collaboratively authored movement scholarship. One is the landmark volume Fighting Back in Appalachia, and Mary Beth Bingman’s (1993) “Stopping the Bulldozers” therein. Bingman composed the piece from a group conversation among women, herself included, who had participated in a direct-action protest against a strip mine operation in Eastern Kentucky in the 1970s. The other was “Joining Forces: Prisons and Environmental Justice in Recent California Organizing,” by Rose Braz and Craig Gilmore (2006) in which they document and reflect on the coalition against prison building in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Guided by these works’ attention to how liberatory knowledge is produced in the collective process of study and struggle, our aim was to honor and document the strategies and coalitions created in the fight against USP-Letcher, to inform future fights yet to come. We didn’t know that next fight was going to be in Letcher County again. As devastating and enraging as this news is, the political terrain in Letcher County has also shifted dramatically since the time USP-Letcher was first proposed, nearly twenty years ago. As we hope the final chapter illuminates, activists in Eastern Kentucky are now experienced anti-prison organizers. The logic of this latest proposal has been deeply shaken. Alternative ideas and demands abound, and community members working alongside national allies are ready and determined to defeat the proposal a second time.
Schept’s close study of such politics on the ground in Eastern Kentucky makes clear his deep investment in building and sustaining ongoing relationships in the region, his commitment to learning from, centering, and citing the insights and analysis of community organizers, and his aim of creating work that is not only accountable to, but more so, useful to, the movements out of which it grows. This labor – social, emotional, intellectual, and activist – is what makes his analysis so cutting and is what will ensure its wide circulation both inside and outside of the academy. Not only to defeat this latest Letcher prison proposal, but to continue building an abolitionist infrastructure to confront all prisons and jails in Central Appalachia and beyond, in solidarity with other geographies of dispossession.
References:
Braz, R and Gilmore, C (2006) Joining Forces: Prisons and Environmental Justice in Recent California Organizing. Radical History Review 2006(96): 95–11.
Bingman, MB (1993) Stopping the Bulldozers. In: Stephen L. Fisher (ed) Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.
Ryerson, S. (2010) Prison Progress … Neocolonialism as a Relocation Project in ‘Post Racial’ America: An Appalachian Case or Listening to the Canaries in the Coal Mine. Honors Thesis, Wesleyan University, CT.).
Sylvia Ryerson is a radio producer, filmmaker, and PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. Prior to graduate school she worked as an independent journalist and as a community media maker and reporter at the Appalshop Arts & Education Center in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
