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orgive me for opening with James Baldwin and Angela Davis, two Black intellectuals whose sentences get thrown around like memeified units of moral currency. Their pearls of wisdom are treated like actual pearls — stripped from the source and strung together in the current fashion. Reading Judah Schept’s Coal, Cages, Crisis reminded me of a particular Baldwin quote, presented here in bite-sized form but perhaps difficult to swallow. In An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis, James Baldwin (1970: 210) wrote:

Only a handful of the millions of people in this vast place are aware that the fate intended for you, Sister Angela, and for George Jackson, and for the numberless prisoners in our concentration camps — for that is what they are — is a fate which is about to engulf them, too. White lives, for the forces which rule this country, are no more sacred than black ones, as many and many a student is discovering, as the white American corpses in Vietnam prove.

Presumably the Vietnamese corpses in Vietnam also prove Baldwin’s point — that there is no refuge from the “carnivorous economy” of capitalism, militarism, and policing. And presumably the communists, abolitionists, and de-colonialists the world over, including and perhaps especially Angela Davis, would find zero controversy in Baldwin’s declaration (1970: 210, italics mine): “We know that we, the blacks, and not only we, the blacks, have been, and are, the victims of a system whose only fuel is greed, whose only god is profit.”

But try to imagine, for just a minute, everyone today who might recoil from the expression White lives, for the forces which rule this country, are no more sacred than black ones. Who would chafe? Liberals with “In This House” lawn signs? Radicals touched by Afro-pessimism? You? Me? (Carby 2022; Younis 2022)

Perhaps the question is not who would chafe, but why is the conversation so brittle? Why are discussions of the prison economy so angular, so routinely forced into false dichotomies of race versus class, reform versus revolution?

Judah Schept’s magnificent study of Central Appalachia is rigorously local, but it imparts bigger lessons about the hows and whys of carceral expansion—and these help us to understand the who of disposability. Schept’s method might be called historical materialism or abolitionist geography or conjunctural analysis. Regardless of the term, he walks the ground of Appalachian political economy and delivers some tough reality checks.

National incarceration rates might obscure more than they reveal. Since 2000, New York, Texas, and Missouri have decreased the number of people living in prison and jail. California, North Carolina, and Indiana have decreased prison but increased jail populations. And then there are states where prison and jail populations keep going up and up and up: Oklahoma, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Kentucky. And, regardless of whether state prison admissions are rising or falling, there is “an almost universal urban-to-rural shift in prison admissions” (Kang-Brown et al. 2018: np).

Of Kentucky, the state that Schept documents and Jill Frank photographs in the most devastating detail, we learn this projection: if Kentucky’s incarceration rate continues to rise as it has since 2000, then every person in the state would be behind bars in 113 years (Schept 2022: 121; see also Norton and Schept 2019). It is an overwhelming projection, perhaps one that lends itself to big ideas about cultures of vengeance or smug elegies of southern dysfunction. But Schept does not hover above the ground and curse the ideas, as if they are the driving forces of reality.

Coal, Cages, Crisis delivers something else: a history of how municipalities hustle after coal leaves town. In 1949 there were roughly 76,000 miners in Kentucky’s coal fields; in 2016, there were only 3,760 coal jobs in the state (Schept 2022: 181). Jobs disappeared; the revenue dried up. For example, in 1972 a broad coalition of Appalachian environmental-justice and welfare-rights organizers won a major legislative victory: the Coal Severance Tax This taxation structure delivered to state coffers a 4.5 percent fee on the gross value of coal extracted, that is, “severed,” from the state. Indexed to coal production levels, severance tax revenue fell as companies depleted coal reserves and turned to greener pastures, so to speak, chasing profits to Wyoming’s Powder River Basin and renewable energy markets. And so went the tax base. After a decade of steady decline through the 2000s, Kentucky’s severance money fell off a cliff in the 2010s, dropping from $311 million in 2011 to $191 million in 2014, a 38 percent drop in just four years (Schept 2022: 165). Recent and rapid revenue drops sit on a longer history of corporate tax dodging. A 1983 report titled Who Owns Appalachia? found that coal, oil, and gas companies owned 43 percent of the land across 80 Appalachian counties, but these companies avoided paying most of the required property taxes.

Municipal managers scrambled. Some counties hustle for per-diem dollars, filling their jails with people transferred from state prisons or federal immigration prisons (Schept 2022: 14).  Some counties bid for a US Penitentiary (USP). Consider Kentucky’s Letcher County, where severance tax revenue fell from $2 million in 2011 to $637,000 in 2016. Municipal managers navigated the fiscal crisis by closing senior centers and laying off county workers. They also spent fifteen years trying to woo federal officials to build a new prison USP Letcher (Schept 2022: 166). The history of how capitalists and lawmakers turn Appalachia into a national sacrifice zone is perhaps best illustrated by Kentucky’s Martin County, where coal severance revenue fell 80 percent in under a decade, and where James Booth, so-called “King James” of Booth Energy Group, owns much of the land but owes $3 million in back taxes Martin County.  

Coal, Cages, Crisis leans into the mundane, the ordinary ways that strapped municipalities manage when faced with capital abandonment and few federal lifeboats. In a passage worth quoting at length, Schept (2022: 170) concludes:

In at least some cases, these actors are responding to the shifting ground, quite literally, occurring in their communities and look to the prison in order ‘to set the stage for ordinary working people to accept extraordinary measures in hope of securing livelihoods’ [quoting Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag]. These efforts and collaborations suggest that the prison is not foundationally a form of profit-making tied, like slavery, to commodified human beings, but rather a racialized mechanism for managing, and altering, the conditions of profit outside the prison. In these instances, prison building is not necessarily nefarious, it is even worse: it is insidiously quotidian.  

This “even worse” banality gives us something more to consider, something even better: If prison building is insidiously quotidian, then abolition can and should be quotidian, too. Mundane liberation work also fills the pages of Coal, Cages, Crisis, as Schept documents the anti-austerity, anti-extractionist, anti-prison organizing of the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition, of Appalachian media projects like Appalshop and WMMT-FM 88.7’s Calls from Home show, and of the Letcher Governance Project (LPG) and their #our444million campaign to defeat the new federal prison, USP Letcher. They won in 2019. The Department of Justice announced new plans to consider USP Letcher again in 2022. The work continues.

We repeat ad nauseum that “race is socially constructed,” but we stick to habits of identifying racism through ratios (racial disparity) and representation (racial diversity). But what do these metrics illuminate, especially during these strange days of rising authoritarianism mingled with DEI? Two decades of modestly declining racial disparity are partially due to rising white incarceration rates, especially among white women. And racial diversity across carceral elites is hitting new highs: in the fifty largest cities more than half of all police chiefs are Black, and Black mayors in New York City, Atlanta, and San Francisco have assembled admirably multiracial administrations to implement pro-police austerity agendas. Are we supposed to read these as measures of progress?

By focusing on Appalachia and rural prison economies, Schept interrupts these superficial tallies of disparity and diversity. The idea that Appalachia is white, Schept explains, entails a “double erasure” of, first, the legal and extralegal violence that killed or pushed out Native and Black people; and, second, the ongoing erasure of multiracial southern movements, especially the militant internationalism of southern workers who challenge capitalist exploitation (Schept 2022: 19). That is, Schept reviews the social construction of “white Appalachia” — and he explains why this racial construction undercuts the people’s history of an organized South.  

Further still, Schept reminds us of the white Appalachians who live outside of hegemonic whiteness, their “not quite white” status seemingly confirmed and codified by structural unemployment and rising criminalization. As Schept reminds us — and as Craig Gilmore and Ruth Wilson Gilmore have written — racism is not always indexed to phenotype, and it is best understood as partitioning in the service of an unequal social order.

References:

Baldwin J 1970[2010]. An Open Letter to My Sister Angela Y. Davis. In Randall Kenan (Ed.), The Cross of Redemption (pp. 206­–211) (2010). New York: Pantheon Books.

Carby H. (2022). We Must Burn Them: Against the Origin Story. London Review of Books.

Kang-Brown J. et al. (2018) The New Dynamics of Mass Incarceration. Vera.

Norton, J and Schept, J.  (2019) Keeping the Lights On: Incarcerating in the Bluegrass State. Vera.

Younis M (2022). To Own Whiteness. London Review of Books.

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Naomi Murakawa is an associate professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.