The Prison in the Coalfields: Work, Waste, Surplus, and Order in Carceral Appalachia

• In Event: Visualizing State Power

Abstract

Central Appalachia is home to 16 prisons. Despite this dense carceral geography, the symbolic and material remoteness of the region has kept it relatively removed from popular and academic considerations of the carceral state. To center the region in such an examination challenges dominant narratives of punishment as it also affirms the historical centrality of the region to the making of the nation-state, from settler capitalist speculation to industrialization to empire to mass imprisonment.
Regional prisons are often removed from view, holding people removed from their lives atop mountains whose tops have been removed by the most violent form of extraction. It is difficult to see these prisons directly; criminology’s focus on crime and punishment obscures their animating logics. We might consider looking elsewhere – before, after, under, above, and adjacent to – in order to understand the place and persistence of the prison. Stretching the temporal and spatial lens places the prison into the same visual and analytical register as mines, dumpsites, and landfills, requiring analyses of extraction, waste, surplus populations, and capitalist social order. This paper tracks the dialectics of extraction and placement, waste and value, as they enact—at times illuminating and at times obscuring—racial capitalist restructurings.

Author

• Judah Schept, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond