Judah Schept’s first book, Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Politics of Carceral Expansion (which is the best book-length abolitionist account of a campaign to stop carceral growth) and Coal Cages Crisis are both rooted in organizing work he did. First, to stop the so-called “justice campus” in Bloomington, Indiana and later, a federal prison in Eastern Kentucky. How were these books shaped by the author being part of the campaigns he’s writing about?

Schept’s method reminds me of what Negri called “sectarian and particular” (2014: 8) – one that is “internal and participative in the process” (2014: 5). A sectarian method is not simply the result of having chosen a side – the incarcerated against the jailers or Michael Brown against Darren Wilson. Rather, it is a method that is grounded in struggle. What sorts of questions arise in the course of an abolitionist campaign, either with the urgency of needing to know the answers yesterday or with regret at not having figured it out months ago? What do we need to know to win? Or as Negri (2014: 8) writes:

“it is a standpoint that does not simply wish to define the relation that from time to time is established between the working class and capitalist power, but that also aspires to become the ability to turn the relation it is grounded in upside down, to identify, at each stage, the chance to put the adversary in a crisis, to ruin its means of domination, the chance of setting into motion a violent destruction of those mechanisms.”  

The questions that shape both books are how we put the PIC in crisis, how we ruin carceral means of domination and how we destroy those mechanisms. Those produce more questions – the sorts that Judah and other abolitionist sectarians have worked on.

Schept’s work shows us that struggling against the prison industrial complex (PIC) forces organizers to confront what sectors and class fractions are part of the carceral bloc, how they find common cause, and that differences exist among them that might be expanded to weaken, if not destroy, the carceral state.

One of the ways he uses partisan methods most effectively is his turn to interviews with organizers and published accounts of earlier struggles as critical expertise of the region and the problems facing it. The book’s first chapters excavate what Thulani Davis calls “a long history of local organizing [that] left progressive veins” (2022: 3), to articulate the ways already existing identities and relationships might be forged into abolitionist organization. The point of his long and rich recovery of the region’s traditions of resistance seems driven by the organizer’s need to find connections – among people, organizations, identities, struggles – in order to present, however temporarily, enough grassroots power to defeat the latest prison building plan. His archeology of resistance in Appalachia reminds me of Toni Cade Bambara’s Those Bones Are Not My Child, her great novel as inventory of the resources Black Atlantans were able to mobilize to defend their children. Schept shows us how the organizer works to shape a place “where memory could become theory” (Pirri & Caminiti 1979: 564).

When Gramsci wrote that certain classes in crisis struggle “to conserve and defend the existing structure,” (1971: 178) he argues that some classes have a stake in maintaining much of the existing set of social relations (“within certain limits”). If much of the system is being defended, such crises are deniable – at least to some groups. The powers that be are divided between ‘nothing needs to change’ and ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

How do crises look different when everyone understands the depth of the crisis? How do the politics of social reproduction work, when as Clyde Woods wrote of some Black Delta towns, “rural communities move from a permanent state of crisis toward social and financial collapse” (1998: 270)? What happens when the crisis is no longer deniable? And, therefore, that certain reforms are no longer reasonable responses? Many of our ideas about social reproduction and non-reformist reforms are based around the idea of essential workers, whether those workers are paid for their work or not. How do we understand social reproduction and reformism in situations when that labor is no longer essential? When what is surplussed is not some fraction of the working class, but a region? What happens to a place when most of its labor as labor is no longer useful to capital?

One of the most shocking things I found in the book is a quote from Tom Gish, founder of the local newspaper, The Mountain Eagle. Fifty years ago, Gish wrote that the Appalachian Regional Commission was “planning genocide in the mountains…” [“No mountain residents, no mountaineers, no mountain poverty, no problem.”] (as quoted in Schept 2022: 162). This from the owner of a paper that Schept later reminds us is reliant on “county elites for advertising revenues” (2022: 206). This disposability of a region and its people is echoed at about the same time by Pirri & Caminiti (1979: 285):

“We are still in the realms of that tradition in which, in both war and peace, the farmer and farm laborer are killed off by an almost natural event. If he’s not cannon fodder, at the very least a 9-mm caliber bullet should make its way into his head every now and again: this is the only way to resolve the agrarian contradictions. Or to put it another way, the Southern Question.”

As the Federal Bureau of Prisons has revived the Letcher prison scheme, Coal Cages Crisis forces us organizers to ask what we could have done better in winning the fight against the project detailed in the book and how we might build on those efforts to secure more democratic, more equal, and greener Appalachia such that not only will this proposal be beaten again, but that it won’t rise from the grave again. The local and regional organizing a campaign to stop a prison demands suggests to me a sort of mid-term political horizon between stopping this prison and destroying racial capitalism.

What would an abolitionist municipalism look like? What can we build at the scale of counties or watersheds or towns that would make a new prison unthinkable? As Pirri and Caminiti write “We had to turn the illusion of development inside out” (1979: 565). Who might those we’re organizing with be ready to see the need for more radical, structural changes? What would it take for a town or county or region facing genocide to mobilize around the sorts of radical experiments offered up by Jackson, MS? Or by the MST? Or the settlements and occupations in South Africa?

How does a more general understanding of the depth of the crisis (Woods 1998) force or enable discussion about how simple preservation is impossible? What happens when the discussion turns to what will we sacrifice (to preserve what or whom)? What happens when parts of the local petty bourgeoisie see, as Tom Gish did, that the region becoming a sacrifice zone will destroy them as well? Schept’s work on the roles that Letcher County’s petty bourgeoisie have played in relation to both coal and cages is stunning. Building on the work of Jack Norton, he shows us how their dependence on extra-local sources of power and income have left them both vulnerable and dangerous. Local boosters have seized funding generated by the work of grassroots organizers, proclaimed the need for “laissez-faire economic arrangements” (2022: 161) while planning to “trigger new funding streams” (2022: 175). What would it take to flip some of those local power brokers away from trying to land another prison and re-articulate them, however temporarily, away from absentee landowners, transnational capital or the carceral state and towards a local liberatory politics?

How might a broad local understanding of the depth of the crisis allow an expansion of political horizons? At what point do unrealistic abolitionist ideas like municipally owned housing or local land trusts become more widely thinkable? Does the crisis in Appalachia force us to move deeper into what Simone & Pieterse called the “insurgent” dimension of politics in which our organizing work has pushed “the formal system as far as it can bend” allowing us to open “new, formerly unthinkable possibilities to become visible and debatable – properly political” (2017: 154).

I’ll give Cabral (2016: 77) the last words:

We want, therefore, to destroy everything that would be an obstacle to the progress of our people, all the relations that there are in our society (in Guinea and Cape Verde), be they against the progress of our people or against the liberty of our people. At the end of the day, we want the following: concrete and equal possibilities for any child of our land, man or woman, to advance as a human being, to give all of his or her capacity, to develop his or her body and spirit, in order to be a man or a woman at the height of his or her actual ability. We have to destroy everything that would be against this in our land, comrades. Step by step, one by one if it be necessary-_but we have to destroy in order to construct a new life. This is the principal objective of our resistance.

References:

Ballestrini N & Moroni P (2021) [1997] The Golden Horde. Calcutta: Seagull Books

Bambara TC (1999) Those Bones Are Not My Child. New York: Pantheon

Cabral A (2016) Resistance and Decolonization. London: Rowman & Littlefield

Davis T (2022) The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom Durham: Duke University Press

Gramsci A (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks New York: International Publishers

Negri A (2014) [2004] Factory of Strategy: 33 Lessons on Lenin. New York: Columbia University Press

Norton J. (accessed Dec. 1, 2022)

Pirri F & Caminiti L (1979) Scirocco. In Ballestrini N & Moroni P (2021).

Schept J (2015) Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion. New York:  New York University Press.

Schept J (2022) Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia. New York:  New York University Press.

Simone A & Pieterse E (2017) New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times. Cambridge: Polity.

Woods C (1998) Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta. London: Verso.

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Craig Gilmore is a co-founder of California Prison Moratorium Project.