“That Makes Them an Easy Target:” Criminalization and Racialization in a Central Appalachian County

• In Event: Abandonment, Criminalization, Development: Geographies of Carceral Expansion in Three Countries

Abstract

The geography of incarceration in the United States has shifted over the past twenty years. While the U.S. remains atop the world in per capita incarceration rates and numbers of people inside, the locus of this system has been moving downscale over the past two decades. Local jail incarceration rates have been rising in rural counties and declining in many big cities; there are now more people overall incarcerated in rural jails than in urban jails. This paper explores this shift in Smith County, a small, mostly-white rural county in Eastern Kentucky. Interview participants spoke of frequent jail stints, police harassment, unstable employment, punitive drug treatment, and unreliable housing. Relying on ethnographic research as well as insights from scholarship on racial capitalism and carceral geographies, we argue that the local state relies on racialized criminalization as a way to manage class conflict in a rural geography characterized by organized abandonment.

Author

• Judah Schept, Eastern Kentucky University