Carceral Dependence: Federal Opportunity and Criminal-Legal Expansion in West Virginia

• In Event: Law and Political Economy

Abstract

The expansion of a state’s capacity for punishment is significantly shaped by the local dynamics of the state: the interplay of political partisanship, state-level legislation, the fiscal realities of the state, and the actors in the penal field. However, in the U.S. context, the decisions of states to expand punishment–and how they go about it–also depends on external pressures. Taking the case of West Virginia, I demonstrate that punishment within the state was developed dialectically and contingentally with federal legislation and funds. More specifically, the creation of the state’s first penitentiary in the 1860s depended upon the importation of prisoners into the state from external jurisdictions, parallelling the economic dependence of West Virginia as a whole. This dependence has been a continual feature of punishment in the state, with federal prisons proliferating in the state in the era of declining coal. Today, the activity of the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are central to the apparatus of punishment as it stands, with West Virginia jails warehousing federal detainees. Rather than an opportunistic byproduct, this dependence on extra-state jurisdictions is–and has long been–central to punishment in the state. Using the historical case study of West Virginia, I argue that economic input from other jurisdictions, and specifically the federal government, was integral to the establishment and expansion of the carceral state.

Author

• Ella June Siegrist, Washington University in St. Louis