What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

The most profound example I can give you of how the past, present, and future collide in Appalachia is to tell you about the prison industry here, and about the individuals who fight it. After the mines closed, the prisons came. People desperate to replace their only source of employment opened their communities and tore apart the mountains to imprison people deemed the most violent and dangerous offenders. Like in times past, local people saw the degradation of human dignity and the exploitation of labor and land and fought against it using familiar methods. In the prison industrial complex, inmates are commodities. They are bought and sold and transferred according to the cost of beds and the cost of land and the cost of the labor required to imprison them. In the 1990s, two prison systems opened in southwest Virginia. Their construction offered state and federal prison officials a captive and compliant workforce contained in a location that would torment inmates with bleak and alien geography. Most inmates, of course, would be African American, arriving from the Northeast or lowland South. Central Appalachia would soon become one of the most concentrated areas of prison growth in the country.

Letcher County congressional representative Hal Rogers, the former Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, believes the prison will transform the area’s economy. But there are fifteen prisons within a one-hundred-mile radius and local economies have not been transformed. Local labor fills the lowest paid positions, offering starting salaries of just $16,000 to $24,000 a year. Transferred employees with seniority take the better compensated roles, but in anticipation of their next transfer, they are reluctant to purchase homes or put down roots in the community. In some rural prison communities, only 10 to 20 percent of the workers, who all have to pass stringent background and credit checks, are local. Most of the counties that house prisons remain among the poorest parts of the state.

Tarence Ray, an organizer with the Letcher County Governance Project, a community group that formed to oppose the proposed prison, believes that bringing prisons to rural, predominately white communities fits an established pattern of pitting poor white individuals against African American people by convincing them that their economic survival depends on supporting structures that harm and oppress.