Abstract
Judah Schept’s Coal, Cages, Crisis has one primary goal: to explain why new prisons are being built on former mountain top removal coal mines. Schept’s exceptional methodology explores this phenomenon in light of the history of the Appalachian coal industry, the war on poverty and drugs, and mass incarceration.
At the heart of this book’s inquisition about the connected trends of coal mining and mass incarceration is an ongoing effort to build a federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky. If built, this prison will be the ninth prison in Eastern Kentucky, but community members, local organizations, and national legal groups have put up a strong fight against the prison since it was first proposed a decade ago. Most simply, the Letcher County proposal is a case of local elites recruiting a federal prison contract in the name of revitalizing regional economies, securing federal funding for social service providers like hospitals and schools, and enriching themselves along the way. The first official proposal for the United States Penitentiary (USP) Letcher was released in 2013, and it eventually received a $444 million appropriation from the federal government. After constant opposition through years of public comment and agency reviews, the Bureau of Prisons withdrew the proposal in 2019. This struggle is a prescient application of Schept’s insights about disinvestment in the region, the “commonsense” economic solution of prisons, and grassroots groups’ refusal of this reasoning.
Schept directs our attention beyond the well-versed talking points of private corporate enrichment from prisons, toward the role of public-private planning commissions in cosigning these projects. Early in the site selection process for the Letcher County prison, the Kentucky River Area Development District registered in their 2012–2013 annual report that they would be building an improved wastewater system to support the prison bid. Additionally, only with the promise of the prison was Letcher County able to secure federal funding from the Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization program for the construction of nine miles of water line and a sewage plant that would benefit 200 nearby residents. One of the people whose land was chosen as the site for the prison, Mitch Whitaker, pointed out the distorted logic of the “basic need” for water lines: prior to the coal industry’s pollution of water tables in Letcher County, residents had been able to safely drink from their own wells free of charge. Only after the coal industry had contaminated regional water tables did people need water lines, which many local governments could not afford to install. The Letcher County proposal for an extended water line was approved for the Abandoned Mine Land program after years of failed applications when it was in service of “economic revitalization” through the prison proposal.
Equally as important to Letcher County and the dozens of prisons like it in Appalachia are the larger political economic forces encouraging residents to think of their future within the terms of the carceral government apparatus. The mantra “jobs, jobs, jobs” is the commonsense argument in favor of these prisons, which Schept tackles head on. Prison jobs are understood as a recession-proof replacement for employment in the coal industry, yet only 6,640 worked in corrections in Kentucky in 2019. Around 70,000 coal mining jobs remain unreplaced in the state and contribute to a large part of the surplus population of Appalachia, people whose labor is rendered unnecessary under the current mode of production. Thus, the carceral state has expanded in order to manage the growing surplus population who are locked out of employment, and often pushed into underground economies. Schept argues that the prison guard jobs are not a wholesale replacement of those in coal mining. Instead, the position of the prison guard has fused coal miners and coal guards into deputies of “racialized class war” to manage rural and urban crisis with prisons and their attendant violence, which explicitly hinders political alliances between prison guards and unemployed people.
Critical to understanding this “racialized class war” that the prison manages, Schept theorizes how racial capitalism defines Appalachia and its inhabitants as waste. As Schept critically evaluates the political history of the region, he notes that Appalachia has been made white through the brutal removal of Indigenous and Black communities, and that throughout the 150-year literature of the region, it has been described by outsiders as “a place for trash.” Many of Appalachia’s majority white counties suffer from a host of locally unwanted land uses like waste sites and incinerators that benefit urban and wealthier regions of the country. Schept goes to great lengths to drive home the point that locating federal prisons in suffering white towns is not a case of misfire within US society, but that racial capitalism has caused the ills of disinvestment and poverty here as well. Workers in these towns had once been a crucial link in the national economy, as Schept shows us with WWII propaganda about coal, at great cost to the health of people and the environment. However, after the coal supply decreased and the energy market changed, these towns and workers were no longer necessary for capital accumulation and instead were politically defined as dumping zones. Communities in Appalachia, Schept notes, are familiar with their position on the rough edge of development with “undervalued lives and premature deaths.” (p. 18)
One of the most important contributions of Coal, Cages, Crisis is in its fusion of prison history and environmental justice scholarship. While all the Appalachian water, sewage, coal, and incineration struggles predating the prison are certainly environmental justice causes in their own right, it is critical to draw out and explain the features of environmental risk that incarcerated people face. Environmental justice scholarship has undergone a transformation in recent decades, from positioning the state as the arbiter of environmental regulation to understanding the collaborative role that state agencies play in environmental injustice. In the past several years, scholars like David Pellow have sought to expose the layered environmental injustices that incarcerated people confront as quotidian elements of life in prison at the hands of state agencies.
Within the genre of prisons and environmental justice, Coal, Cages, Crisis zooms in on the trend of construction and siting in relation to the runoff of the former industries in the area. Scholars are increasingly drawing connections between the location of prisons on Superfund sites, contaminated former military sites, and other areas with hazardous waste and heavy industry, but spatial analyses fall short when it comes to the historically contingent factors that connect polluting industry to prison sites. Schept goes deeper into the history of incinerators, hazardous waste, strip mines, and mountain-top removal sites in Eastern Kentucky and reveals that Kentucky officials did not have a long-term plan to place prisons on contaminated land. These toxic sites and nearby abandoned regional economies resulted in prison siting decisions that “make use” of surplus toxic land and surplus workers. The decades-long debate over whether racism or classism are better predictors of environmental risk is resolved in this type of analysis, as Schept’s work illustrates that it is the combination of the two in racial capitalism that define environmental injustice.
Schept’s book serves as a rich and evocative historical work for scholars and members of the public interested in environmental justice research. It is also urgently needed as the fight against the prison in Letcher County continues, given the November 2022 revival of the federal project. This book is a first-rate activist history that will deepen the commitment of those rejoining the opposition efforts, but Schept reminds us that defeating the prison isn’t a comfortable win on its own. This fight must be bigger than just the new prison. It must be a part of a larger struggle for the wellbeing of working people in Appalachia and for an end to the cycle of misery that capital creates in the form of coal, cages, and crisis.