Down the reverberate channels of the hills

the suns declare midnight, go down, cannot ascend,

no ladder back; see this, your eyes can ride through steel,

this is the river Death, diversion of power,

the root of the tower and the tunnel’s core,

this is the end.

­­– Muriel Rukeyser, “Power,” Book of the Dead (1936)

T

he first chartered copper mine of the “New World” was also the first state prison of the US Republic. Accordingly, the Old Newgate Prison in Harford County, Connecticut was an exceptionally brutal site. From 1705 on, hundreds of feet of tunnel were carved into the base of the Talcott Mountain. For nearly 40 years, investors mined the ore, sinking one million dollars into the project. The cost of removal, transport, and refining ultimately proved too expensive for colonial speculators, and the site lay largely untouched for decades. In 1773, the state legislature took over the mine’s lease. The abandoned landscape of extraction was darkly reimagined as a site of confinement. Under General George Washington’s orders, military prisoners were incarcerated alongside Indigenous, Black, “mulatto,” and poor white captives. In the early days of US state formation, it was war that formally consecrated the mine’s carceral function.

The mine shaft became the sole entrance and exit to the prison. A 40-foot rope ladder was dropped into the hole then pulled back up after the prisoners’ descent. Locked below in the dank underground caverns, the prison became a boundless unlit “hell” for its captives. In “the damp and filthy air of the dungeon,” a nineteenth century Connecticut journal recalled, “it is said, the clothing of the prisoners grew mouldy and rotten, and fell away from their bodies while their limbs grew stiff with rheumatism” (quoted in Carrington, 1895). Escape attempts often had ghastly outcomes. In one instance, prisoners set fire to a drainage hatch. Guards watched smoke rise through the grates as prisoners asphyxiated in the toxic fumes below. Old Newgate’s reputation was so notorious, men were said to recant under the mere threat of being sentenced there. In 1781, prisoners successfully clambered out and overpowered their captors. Before they fled, they made sure to bring every guard ­­– even those asleep at the time – down into the same abyss from which they had escaped.  

Old Newgate was named after England’s most notorious prison. The original Newgate, a macabre London landmark­, stood near the Old Bailey courthouse where working-class prisoners received death sentences, and close to the Tyburn gallows where their hangings were publicly staged. Newgate’s name referenced its original location, one of the Seven Gates in the Roman Walls that encircled the City of London in the twelfth century. Newgate was a literal new gate opening on to the city, a site of defense from foreign forces that also served as a prison for domestic enemies. As both gate and jail, Newgate became a portal through which the City of London was built and the word capital was defined, a term Peter Linebaugh notes, refers simultaneously to the accumulation of wealth and to crimes punishable by death. His book The London Hanged considers Newgate in the eighteenth century to show how the punishment of capital co-evolved with capital punishment. From Newgate to its Connecticut namesake, the vision of the New World passed through the portal of the old. Throughout this passage, the contradictions of accumulation and destruction have been ceaselessly and relentlessly conjoined (Linebaugh, 2006).

Creation and destruction are not oppositional processes. In the logics of global capital, they are imagined in tandem, dialectically abetting one another. Joseph Schumpter’s concept of “creative destruction” (2013 [1942]) (or more precisely, in its popular interpretation), the productive forces of capital a Joseph Schumpter’s concept of “creative destruction” (1942) reimagined as inexhaustive sources of creative dynamism; the new endlessly breaking through the shell of the old. The annihilation of the current order is understood as freeing resources and clearing ground for new innovations: Typewriters to computers. Electricity to solar power. Mines to prisons. Ecological limits appear to pose only temporary barriers to growth. “Creative destruction” thereby carries the illicit promise of infinity in a fragile and finite world. Looking out over the bleak twenty-first century landscape, dynamism and infinity are not the words that come most readily to mind, particularly to the people whose lives are sacrificed daily to it.

Judah Schept’s Coal, Cages, Crisis is a reckoning with the promises of creative destruction and the rural geography of twenty-first century sacrifice. This imaginative study traces a topography of class struggle in the carceral landscapes of Central Appalachia. From violent colonial settlement, speculation, mining war devastation, to the “war on poverty,” and the disappearance of the coal economy, Schept demonstrates how Appalachia has been violently rendered anew across successive historical crises. Deep in former coal country, Schept analyzes the relationships between resource extraction and the punishment of capital. Like Old Newgate, Schept’s story concerns the interrelated geographies of depleted mines and prisons. In narrating prisons as the latest resolution to crisis, his book raises provocations about destruction as an oft-neglected circuit of accumulation and exhaustion at the terminal limits of capital.  

The history of prisons, Schept demonstrates, is always a history of their interfaces, the political economies that both surround and condition their existence. Coal, Cages, Crisis therefore opens with a poignant panorama of the region. Schept describes a drive he and photographer Jill Frank took through Eastern Kentucky after a tornado devastated the area. Passing through downtown, they observe main streets reduced to debris and buildings destroyed by flooding. The prisons, by contrast, stand “fortress like,” humming amidst the destruction. Here Schept contrasts the two faces of the carceral state, what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as the organized abandonment that facilitates forms of industrialized punishment (Gilmore, 2008; Harvey, 1989). In Central Appalachia, Schept shows us the carceral world being built while a world of everyday life is abandoned and criminalized; one world subdued in service to the other.

Central Appalachia, notes Schept, is “twice positioned as a disposable geography” in the popular imaginary, “a wasted place and a place for waste” (87-88). Through Frank’s photographs and his own ethnographic descriptions, Schept vividly illustrates the production of “wastescapes,” regional landscapes marked by trash incinerators, exhausted coal mines, and what is poetically termed “overburden.” Through a process of strip mining, mountain tops are blasted off with explosives, allowing mining companies to directly access coal seams from above. The effluent or “overburden” is subsequently dumped into the surrounding areas, filling valleys and burying streams. The ancient rises of hill country are thereby razed, making the land as level as landing strips. It is upon these deforested and artificially flattened sites that prisons are both imagined and constructed.

Since 1980, over 350 prisons have been built in rural communities with 15 in Central Appalachia alone. Among exhausted mines and diminished local economies, prisons purport to resolve several overlapping crises: of unused land, unemployed labor, un-circulating capital, and under-utilized functions of the state. In Gilmore’s formulation, prisons appear to “fix” these surplus crises in both senses of the term: as political solutions to economic problems and as physical sites embedded in the landscape (2007). Prisons have been promoted as anchors for economic revitalization plans, qualifying municipalities for state and federal funding, and purportedly creating new jobs. But as Schept demonstrates, prisons barely recover a fraction of those lost to coal. Instead, they primarily serve as warehouses for masses of unemployed people in the region. At the center of so-called “wastescapes,” people deemed “trash” or in some cases “poor white trash,” are managed by police, and are duly disposed of in jails and prisons.

In Schept’s narrative, it is the people of Central Appalachia, as much as the land that serve as primary vessels for the movement of capital. It is not only their labor that powers the economy, it is their debts, their criminalized existences, and their vascular systems. When the economy centered on coal extraction, it blackened both skies and lungs. The effluents of mountaintop removal and deforestation continue to poison both ecosystems and bloodstreams. Lead, cadmium, and mercury released through trash incineration comingle with chemicals leaching into water systems. They accumulate in the cells of plants, fish, and warm bodies. They express themselves as cancer, disease, and foreshortened lives. Within the hum of the prison, life atrophies. The “wastescapes” of Central Appalachia represent a potential terminal limit against creative destruction’s imagined infinite growth.

By tracing the biological and ecological wreckage of the prison economy, Schept underscores an oft neglected aspect of capital accumulation: destruction. While some processes of capital accumulation like extraction, transportation, consumption, and production are more readily legible, the realm of destruction is often excluded to our detriment, particularly in confronting economies of militarism and the hard ecological limitations of capital. An analysis of destruction is urgently needed. Twenty-first century global capital has externalized its costs with existential consequences. The land is tired. The people are tired. Mountains that once held the sky are now buried. They lay underfoot in grim compression, trampled by prison guards wearing state-issued boots. The abandonment and carceral infrastructures that concentrate in regions like Central Appalachia threaten to become generalized. But what more can be extracted from exhausted land and exhausted people? The knife has struck bone.

Crucially, Coal, Cages, Crisis is grounded in struggle and motivated by an alternate imaginary of the world. It reflects upon Schept’s own involvement in a historically successful campaign to stop the construction of a federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky. It highlights fellow activists and organizers like documentarian Amelia Kirby; Appalshop radio shows like “Holler to the Hood” and “Calls from Home”; and groups like Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. Schept uniquely co-authors a chapter with scholar-activist Sylvia Ryerson, drawing attention to the collective labor of knowledge production. In these ways, the book analyzes the Central Appalachian carceral regime while also documenting the creative, defiant, and organized community bound in struggle against it. It depicts people who have become undeterred by the agenda of the prison economy and unmoved by its dismal vision of the world. This is, above all, a movement text, written in, with, and for social movements. Against the ceaseless destruction and capitalist nihilism of the present, this powerful book enables readers to look at the carceral landscapes before them, and also imagine otherwise.

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References:

Gilmore RW (2007) Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gilmore RW (2008) Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning. In Charles Hale (ed.) Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship (pp.31-61) Berkeley: University of California Press.

Harvey D. (1989) The Limits to Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Linebaugh P (2006) The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. London: Verso Books.

Rukseyer M. (2018) The Book of the Dead. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press.

Schumpeter J.A., (2013) [1942] Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Routledge.

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Christina Heatherton is the Elting Associate Professor of American Studies and Human Rights at Trinity College. She is the author of Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution (University of California Press, 2022). With Jordan T. Camp she edited Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter (Verso Books, 2016).