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coal company dynamites a mountaintop in Central Appalachia in order to access coal from above. The decapitation, itself the product of legal maneuvers, renovations in production, and capitalism’s inherent quest for greater profit, sets into motion changes with catastrophic consequences. Massive tractors and draglines pulverize rock, razing the mountain and transforming sandstone and shale into silica dust particles, which settle into and blacken local lungs. Progressive Massive Fibrosis, otherwise known as complicated black lung disease, is only the most obviously violent result of mountaintop removal (Benincasa, 2022; Berkes and Lancianese, 2018). In addition, the practice displaces top soil and uproots trees and plants, forcefully discarding this “overburden” – as the coal industry calls it – into surrounding valleys, at once destroying natural water catchment on higher ground and clogging streams in the valleys below, a disruption to the landscape that can turn heavy rains into the kind of devastating 100 year floods that swept through Eastern Kentucky last summer (Ryerson and Schept, 2023). Mountaintop removal’s transformation of mountain peaks to flattened planes also has reverberations beyond public health and ecology. One miner working an MTR site can extract as much coal as 22 miners working underground, a vulgar efficiency that has contributed to the precipitous decline of coal employment; in Kentucky, coal jobs are at their lowest since the 1890s. In this particular conjuncture, there is a singular solution to the absent peaks and departed work: building prisons.
There are 16 prisons in Central Appalachia, including 8 in Eastern Kentucky, many built on or adjacent to old coal mines, coal slurry impoundments, or other markers of the extraction and disposal industries. The prisons, as well as region’s jails, constitute the state’s primary response to crises of both production, or work, and social reproduction, which is to say the delimited ways under capitalism that families, households, communities, and regions imagine, plan for, and try to make their futures. In the wake of the decline of the coal industry, the prisons have become central to both material and ideological efforts at social reproduction, from enabling county-level infrastructure upgrades for road maintenance, water line extensions, and waste water upgrades to being the focus of efforts to renovate educational programs and curricula around criminal justice. In other words, the prison and the jail are as much about budgets, revenue, deindustrialization, development, infrastructure, work, wages, education, and health care as they are about crime and punishment.
The essays here, authored by people I am honored to call colleagues and comrades, offer remarkable and generous reviews of Coal, Cages, Crisis. They also use the book as a point of departure for offering urgent insights into the current conjuncture of climate crisis, police repression, carceral humanism, prison expansion, and steadfast and visionary opposition, from city hall to tree tops in the fight against Cop City in Atlanta (Herskind, 2023) to Eastern Kentucky’s ongoing campaign against the Bureau of Prisons (Ryerson and Schept, 2023) to rural communities and small cities fighting jail expansion around the country (Norton, Pelot-Hobbs, and Schept, 2024). While coal to cages may constitute the specific terrain of carceral geography in Central Appalachia, the “creative destruction” analyzed by Christina Heatherton takes different shape elsewhere. As Naomi Murakawa deftly notes in her review, the “multiracial administrations” of many large cities have succeeded in “implement[ing] pro-police austerity agendas,” diversifying, rather than dismantling, police and carceral power. This crucial intervention demystifies the multiracial character of police expansion in a place like Atlanta. The attempt to bulldoze the Weelaunee Forest – one of the “four lungs” of the city – to build Cop City threatens ecology, health, and community in Atlanta. By insisting on a materialist and conjunctural analysis, rooted in what Craig Gilmore calls “a sectarian method” – which is to say, an approach grounded in struggle – the reviews here and my book on which they are based aim to help us scale out and in, at once identifying context-specific points of vulnerability for a given campaign to leverage and at the same time recognizing the shared patterns and technologies that connect seemingly different and even provincial fights, offering us insights into the forging of abolitionist geographies.
As a few of the reviews note, Coal, Cages, Crisis ends with a chapter focused on the campaign against United State Penitentiary Letcher (USP Letcher), a federal maximum-security prison that, if built, would have been the ninth prison in Eastern Kentucky and the fourth federal prison built since 1992. That chapter, co-authored with Sylvia Ryerson, details the work of local organizers and landowners, national activists and attorneys, and people in prison who came together to challenge the prison on multiple fronts. Their efforts effectively stalled the project until it lost credibility. The Bureau of Prisons officially withdrew the project in June 2019, granting the opposition an historic victory.
Since that time in Eastern Kentucky, however, carceral growth has continued. The state has reopened a decommissioned private prison as a state prison and is adding 1,000 new beds to a second state prison in the region. This is due in no small part to Kentucky’s exceptionally high rates of incarceration (Spalding, Bailey, and Pugel, 2023). In addition, jails in Eastern Kentucky operate at anywhere from 140% to over 200% capacity, a regional expression of the “quiet jail boom” that has been occurring nationally (Norton and Kang-Brown, 2020). This boom is not simply in response to the rising numbers of local people getting locked up, although that is no doubt part of it. Rather, jails expand in part because of their agreements with both state Departments of Corrections and federal agencies like ICE to hold prisoners and detainees for per diem payments, an arrangement that provides important revenue for rural counties in economic crisis. Finally, just two months after catastrophic flooding devastated much of Eastern Kentucky in the summer of 2022, the Bureau of Prisons announced it was resuming its efforts to site and build a prison in Letcher County, now referred to as Federal Correctional Institution Letcher, in the heart of the flood zone; the region is already home to the densest concentration of federal prisons in the United States. Estimates to rebuild the 9,000 homes destroyed or damaged by the floods range from between $400 million to $900 million; FEMA has allocated just over $100 million for emergency housing relief. It will cost over $500 million to build FCI Letcher. In short, even as anti-prison activists notched a significant victory with the defeat of USP Letcher in 2019, carceral state capacity remains expansive, dense, and multi-scalar, a concentration and congealment of abandonment and violence, as Christina Heatherton observes.
What can we learn from these iterative and dialectical processes of construction, expansion, and opposition? First, they suggest both the extent of the crisis and the ongoing role of carceral capacities as purported solutions, whether to address infrastructure or revenue declines, unemployment, hospital closures, or school enrollment concerns. Second, these patterns underline the importance of paying attention to the politics of scale. I mean this in two ways. As Sylvia Ryerson and I detail in the last chapter of Coal, Cages, Crisis, the defeat of USP Letcher was a temporary victory against one scale of the carceral state; at both the state and municipal scales, carceral capacity expanded. In addition, applying the politics of scale enables analyses attuned at once to the rootedness of prison building in specific geographies with specific histories (i.e. built on mountaintop removal sites, themselves the product of a long history of class struggle) as well as broader patterns of uneven development, violence, and resistance, such that we can think Cop City and Letcher County together. Or as Sylvia notes in her review of the importance of Craig Gilmore’s and Rose Braz’s foundational article “Joining Forces” to our analysis, we can think about what connects the Central Valley with Central Appalachia.
The politics of scale, set within movement-based or sectarian research, also enable us to identify points of leverage. For example, recent research by a number of people in a newly formed coalition against Federal Correctional Institution Letcher has revealed that state actors we might assume to be in a fortified and aligned position around the prison are, in fact, immersed in numerous contradictions. The original proposal for USP Letcher enjoyed support from the Obama Administration, the Bureau of Prisons, local politicians, and congress, which appropriated $444 million in funding for construction in 2016. Since that time, however, and due in part to the work of opposition forces to delay and eventually defeat the prison, the project lost momentum even as it was re-proposed as FCI Letcher in the fall of 2022. For example, in every year since 2017, both the Trump and Biden administrations proposed federal budgets that withdrew the appropriated funds. The Bureau of Prisons itself is simultaneously attempting to build the prison and admits, as it has since 2017, that the facility is unnecessary. U.S. Representative Hal Rogers, who wields considerable power, has forcefully been able to keep the money allocated and preempt various legislative maneuvers that could conceivably dislodge the funding. The point is that while at times there are cohered power blocs that may, in a given context, include federal, state, and local officials, developers, state and federal agencies, carceral non-profits, academics, and others, in this moment it would appear that the proposal for FCI Letcher rests on a more fragmented and even incoherent set of actors, in contradiction with each other at and across scales; studying and strategizing around that disorganization opens up important points of leverage.
In May 2023, 20 people gathered in Letcher County to spend a weekend together to cohere and align a strategy against FCI Letcher. Several people came from Letcher County. Others arrived from elsewhere in Eastern Kentucky, like Harlan and Prestonsburg. Others drove up from Lexington and Louisville, and still others flew in from Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cambridge, New Haven, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. We were brought together by shared commitments to making change: to defeat a prison; to demand the kinds of infrastructures and development that don’t require or rely on extraction, expropriation, and incarceration; to plan something different. It was, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, an example of people building “energetically stretched solidarities, connecting issues and people across space and sector” (Gilmore, 2024). These solidarities – against a proposed prison on a former mountaintop or a proposed cop city on a forest – demonstrate that the global fight for abolition is nothing less than a fight for a breathable, and therefore livable, future.
References:
Benincasa, Robert. 2022. “Researchers say they've linked silica dust directly to severe black lung disease,” National Public Radio, April 13, available here.
Berkes, Howard and Adelina Lancianese. 2018. “Black lung study finds biggest cluster ever of fatal coal miners’ disease.” National Public Radio, February 6, available here.
Gilmore, Craig and Rose Braz. 2006. “Joining Forces: Prisons and Environmental Justice in Recent California Organizing.” Radical History Review 96: 95 – 111.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2024. “Foreword,” in Norton, Jack, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs and Judah Schept (eds.) 2024. The Jail is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration. New York: Verso.
Herskind, Micah. 2023. This is the Atlanta Way: A Primer on Cop City, Scalawag Magazine, May, available here.
Norton, Jack, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept (eds). 2024. The Jail is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration. New York: Verso.
Ryerson, Sylvia and Judah Schept. 2023. “Eastern Kentucky Needs Flood Relief, Not Another Federal Prison,” March 29th, available here.
Spalding, Ashley, Jason Bailey and Dustin Pugel. 2023. Facts Don’t Support Economic Argument for Proposed Federal Prison in Letcher County. KY Policy Report. May 19, available here.
Judah Schept is a Professor in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. He is the author of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia (New York University Press, 2022) and Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion (New York University Press, 2015.
