Judah Schept’s Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia compels us to move our abolitionist thinking away from where is often seen as the heart of anti-carceral struggles – urban centers – to the Appalachian landscape. While Coal, Cages, Crisis focuses on a particular region, the book is more than a case study. It extends broader understandings of dialectics of carceral and abolitionist geographies amid global and national economic contradictions and realignments. Schept deftly traces how the layered extractive politics of coal and prisons have shaped the region while also highlighting the multitude of ways people have contested the rendering of Appalachia as a sacrifice zone. In recent years, prisons have been sold to and forced on residents as the answer to the “crises at the point of production and social reproduction” (Schept 2022, 16) confronting the region. Yet prisons do not solve the root problems facing Appalachians but deepen dispossession, exploitation, precarity, and vulnerability to premature death. Against the false promises of carceral futures, Appalachians and their comrades have forged abolitionist struggles across scales, firmly rooted in the militantly anti-racist and anti-capitalist Appalachian radical tradition. Schept highlights how they are making links and deploying strategies that abolitionists elsewhere can be learning from while they fight to a secure a different kind of future for everyone and anyone.

As Schept notes in the introduction to his book, over the last thirty years Central Appalachia has seen a boom of state and federal prison construction: 12 new prisons overall, eight in Eastern Kentucky. At the same time, the Appalachian coal economy has been in free fall marked by the drying up of jobs, the intensification of mining practices, and declining rates of profit. It would be easy to end there, but this is where Schept begins the story. In doing so, Coal, Cages, Crisis stretches our understanding of how extraction – as an ideology and material practice – is at the core of not only Appalachian prison expansions but also racial capitalism. Building on the work of scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007; 2022) and Laura Pulido (2016), Schept illuminates how extractions of land, natural resources, time, and money is a racializing project of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks and not-quite white Appalachians. Coal industrialization was built upon settler enclosures that turned commons into commodities while reshaping the landscape – from the building of company towns to the development of strip mining. More recently, prison boosters have sought to naturalize the building of prisons on mountain top removal sites, and even gone as far to employ the technologies of mountaintop removal for prison building.

In his articulation of the dialectic of extraction and waste, Schept takes a cue from Eastern Kentucky residents who recognize prison expansion as part of a long history of Appalachia being rendered as “a place for trash” (44). Extractions produce literal waste – coal slurry, coal ash, trash incinerators. The concentration of these toxicities in the region is made logical through the rendering of Appalachians as “trash people.” At the same time, racialized surplus populations are deemed to be waste and subject to political and economic extractions. This takes many forms: predominately Black and Brown incarcerated people’s time, and thus lives, are extracted through their physical incapacitation in prisons. Appalachian residents – who disproportionally bear the environmental harms of waste – are afforded little of the state revenue from mining as these monies are, instead, put to use in projects such as sports facilities at the University of Kentucky.

Yet Coal, Cages, Crisis does not reduce Appalachia to carceral and extractive violence. Schept’s superb attention to multi-generational and multi-scalar abolitionist struggles is informed by his long-term embeddedness in abolitionist movements. Schept expands our genealogies of abolitionist politics to include the histories of coal worker militancy – from strikes for better working conditions to the setting fire on convict leasing camps and release of prisoners during the 1891 Coal Creek War. Zeroing in on the contemporary period, Schept details the alliances built in the pre-2021 campaign against the construction of the proposed federal prison USP Letcher. For instance, organizers connected with local landowner Mitch Whitaker who refused to sell his land to the Bureau of Prisons, likening this fight to his grandfather’s refusal to allow coal companies to mine on the same land. Moreover, as a federal prison project that could ostensibly incarcerate people from anywhere in the United States, anti-prison activists forged constituencies across vast geographies during the environmental review process. While emphasized the environmental hazards a prison would bring to Letcher County, movement lawyers brought forth a lawsuit that articulated that the federal Bureau of Prison had failed to include a key constituency – people incarcerated in the federal prison system. In this move, activists emphasized that incarcerated people are central to environmental justice, and that all federal prisons are always both local and national issues.

At the November 2022 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association, I had the pleasure of chairing an ‘author meets readers’ panel on Coal, Cages, Crisis and am pleased to bring their remarks to publication. It is worth noting that these remarks came mere days after it was announced that the federal government was reviving its proposal to build USP Letcher in Eastern Kentucky – bringing into sharp relief the timeliness and significance of Schept’s book.  

Each of the roundtable contributors are abolitionist theorists and organizers in their own right who clarify the political questions and stakes of the book: How do we put the prison industrial complex into crisis (Gilmore)? How might attending to destruction reveal new truths about the circulations of capital (Heatherton)? What happens when we refuse to limit our analysis of racism to the narrow categories of disparity and diversity (Murakawa)? How does interrogating interfaces strengthen anti-carceral movements, especially amid the resurgence of the No Letcher Prison campaign (Ryerson)? Each of these reviews point us to one of the central thrusts of Coal, Cages, Crisis. Political struggles are at their core fights over what kinds of futures will be made and there are still countless possibilities for the collective future of Central Appalachia.

References:

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

Gilmore, RW (2022) Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. London: Verso.  

Pulido, L (2016) Flint, environmental racism, and racial capitalism. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 27(3), 1-16.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is an assistant professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (forthcoming 2023 University of North Carolina Press).