No one thought they could shut this prison down. Can an interracial, interregional coalition do it again?

SHELBIANA, KY - JUNE 3: A bulldozer operates atop a coal mound at the CCI Energy Slones Branch Terminal June 3, 2014, in Shelbiana, Kentucky. (Photo by Luke Sharrett/Getty Images)

The Bureau of Prisons is revisiting the idea of building a new prison in Letcher County, an area of eastern Kentucky with a legacy of environmental harm

by Ray Levy UyedaJuly 10th, 2024

In 2018, a small coalition of residents, organizers, lawyers, and professors who organized to halt an eastern Kentucky prison construction rejoiced. The Department of Justice (DOJ) reversed course on its 2018 budget plan, rescinding $444 million earmarked for the construction of a federal prison in Roxana, Kentucky. The reason? The Bureau of Prisons (BOP), which is housed within the DOJ, didn’t feel like it was needed. Funds could be better spent elsewhere, like the infrastructure needs of the 123 existing federal prisons that were “deteriorating,” according to agency heads. 

Former President Donald Trump later reinstated the prison construction budget, along with an additional $60 million, but the Abolitionist Law Center and 21 incarcerated people sued. A year later, the Record of Decision that gave the green light to build in the eastern Kentucky town was revoked, stopping what would have been the most expensive federal prison project ever, pushed forward by one of the most influential members of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Hal Rogers. 

But that victory didn’t go unchallenged. In 2022, the Bureau of Prisons announced it was revisiting the idea of building a prison in Letcher County—only this time, it would be a lower-security federal correctional institution, and the initial capital investment would be $500 million. 

Prisons as economic revitalization is a narrative that the region’s representative, Rogers, has successfully proffered since he first proposed the prison’s construction in 2006. The organizers pushing back against this falsehood are even more ready than they were 10 years ago to fight the new build. And this time, they’re not just talking about what they’re fighting against, but what they’re fighting for.

“Fights that have the power to unite”

Letcher County is home to 21,000 people. It shares a border with Virginia, naturally demarcated by the Cumberland Mountain range. The site in Roxana, where the BOP wants to build FCI Letcher, was once a mountaintop removal coalfield. To access coal reserves deep underground, companies clear cut forests, burned the logged trees, blasted the tops of mountains off, and sent coal ash byproduct down the river. Across Tennessee, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia, where surface mining was used, 500 mountains were severely impacted or destroyed, accounting for a total of nearly 1.2 million acres of land.

Legacies of environmental harm aren’t always easy to identify, but in the case of mountaintop removal, the impacts live in the soil, water, and air quality around the mining site. The loss of an ecosystem puts pressure on the ones that remain. As species endemic to the region have fewer and fewer places to seek refuge, they are often marked as “threatened” or “endangered” and given special protection status under federal environmental law. Ten years ago, the National Environmental Protection Act was a key tool to undermine the BOP’s construction plan. There are structural vulnerabilities associated with hollowing out a mountain. At Big Sandy, another eastern Kentucky prison built atop a former surface mining operation, for example, a guard tower was found to be sinking into the ground. 

Coal company towns used to be so ubiquitous and influential in Appalachia that some even had their own currency. But looking at the numbers, coal has been on the decline for nearly a century. In Letcher County alone, only about 180 jobs still exist in the coal industry. Policymakers have long attempted to tackle the low wages, lack of jobs, and paucity of economic mobility that many communities in Appalachia struggle against. But the impoverishment is persistent. Eastern Kentucky was the starting point for former President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty six decades ago.

Long after coal companies leave, Appalachians are left behind with questions about how to navigate the precarity of the boom and bust cycle that, in many ways, has been thrust upon them. Legacies of magisterial industry actions and federal policy (often the intermixing of both by way of subsidies), along with news and media portrayals of Appalachia as backward or unintelligent, bolstered a rallying cry that Appalachia needed a new industry: prisons.

Why prisons in Appalachia? Judah Schept, a professor of justice studies at Eastern Kentucky University, said that locals understand how those in positions of power see the region as a “landscape of waste.” Looking at Appalachia through a lens of “waste geography,” it becomes clear that the prison as an institution is not about addressing crime but about where to house bodies deemed irredeemable. 

All for the prospect of upward economic movement. Rogers, who previously advocated for three other federal prisons in economically struggling towns in eastern Kentucky, has gone on the record saying that a prison in Letcher County will lead to 300 jobs and bolster the wider economy by contracting with local businesses, such as food purveyors. But there’s little evidence the prison’s construction will create a fraction of the 300 jobs promised. There is also a growing body of research claiming that in the long run, prisons in Appalachia weaken local economies. 

The logic belies its own approach: even with three other prisons, the region still struggles economically. There’s also concern that few Letcher County residents would actually qualify for federal corrections officer positions.

As Artie Ann Bates, the secretary of the local organization Concerned Letcher Countians, wrote for Inquest, “There are currently ninety job openings among the three other federal prisons in southeastern Kentucky but only one Letcher County resident working in any of them. What does that say about the desirability of these jobs? Like the BOP says in its DEIS, either local people are not interested in those jobs or can’t pass hiring requirements. Either way, they’re not biting.”

To Jordan Mazurek-Martinez, an organizer who helps lead the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, prison construction will weaken something else: the ties between all communities impacted by prison construction. That’s precisely the point, he said—to sow divisions between poor white communities and criminalized Black communities. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, Black Americans make up 33% of the federal prison population and are more likely to face lengthy sentences, including life behind bars. Prison Policy Initiative research has also shown how prison becomes a revolving door of impoverishment that targets poor Black and people of color, who, by virtue of incarceration, remain locked out of opportunities for economic mobility. 

“These fights, like the one against FCI Letcher, are fights that have the power to unite all of our communities because it cuts across us all,” Mazurek-Martinez said. 

Officials like Rogers are proposing prisons that largely incarcerate Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people as a salve for white economic depression. The use of Black and brown bodies for white economic development isn’t something Letcher County residents want, Mazurek-Martinez said. Appalachia is good for more than extraction by the coal or prison industry. One community’s economic crisis doesn’t have to be another’s economic opportunity.

“From the standpoint of capital, Black, brown, poor, [and] Indigenous bodies—our communities—we are not viewed as people,” Mazurek-Martinez said. “We are viewed as resources to be extracted. This prison is literally being built on this repeated pattern of extraction.”

The organization that Mazurek-Martinez helps lead is a part of a coalition fighting to build solidarity across communities implicated by the prison industry. The Building Community Not Prisons coalition rebukes the “racial capitalism that impacts all of our communities,” Mazurek-Martinez said. 

When organizers fought the prison’s construction 10 years ago, it was the height of battles against mountaintop removal coal mining, said Sylvia Ryerson, an organizer with the Building Community Not Prisons coalition and previous host of the “Calls From Home” radio show, which connects people with their incarcerated loved ones. In the years since, the companies have left, leaving behind the very places that Rogers wants to build Letcher atop, she said. 

“There’s still an entire movement landscape that is continuing to push for reclamation and restoration of the land, and we’re able to draw on that movement history as well,” Ryerson said. 

Appalachians have seen companies come in to take but never give. What industry is offering now is the promise of an enemy: of incarcerated people of color pitted against poor white Letcher countians. And though disinvestment and disregard are the throughline that motivates Building Communities Not Prisons to come together, there’s a fear that a prison might stir a racialized class divide between people whose liberation is mutual. 

The racialized class war that a prison might foment would be between those incarcerated and those doing the incarceration. Umar Cinquan Muhammad, a poetry ambassador with the Washington, D.C.-based Free Minds Book Club, was incarcerated for nearly 30 years, which included a stint at Red Onion State Prison in southwest Virginia near the border of Kentucky. Muhammad said that for many of the white guards he encountered, policing Black men like him was the first real interaction they had with a person of color.  

“When you have this type of dynamic that takes place, and they are the authority, it almost spells disaster from the beginning,” Muhammad said. “A lot of guards, they take their frustration out on Black and brown bodies.”

Many of those who are incarcerated in federal prisons in Appalachia are from places hundreds of miles away, like Muhammad, who grew up in Washington, D.C. The distance makes visitation nearly impossible, as working-class people either don’t have the means or the time to make the 400-mile journey. Muhammad’s mom visited him once while he was incarcerated, he said. 

The strategy for once again stopping the building of a new prison lies in the solidarity that the coalition hopes to build across region and race, from the Eastern Seaboard to the mountains of Appalachia.