Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia by Judah Schept

Abstract

Reviewed by: Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia by Judah Schept Justin Randolph Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia. By Judah Schept. (New York: New York University Press, 2022. Pp. [vi], 321. Paper, $32.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-5897-2; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4798-8892-4.) On page one of Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia, its author is nearly arrested. Judah Schept’s offense was attempting to photograph a Kentucky prison. Police spoiled that photo opportunity, but others proved successful. One of the book’s photos, also featured on this edition’s cover, a landscape captioned “The Interface,” depicts the road between a strip mine’s coal seam and the razor wire of a prison (p. 125). Interfaces offer a conceptual symbol for Schept’s inquiry. He explores the juncture between past and present with an eye to paths around the prison. “The rise of cages in the coalfields,” he argues, “reflects a new strategy for an old project: the state’s ongoing need to manufacture and maintain capitalist social order and social relations” (p. 5). Through this interdisciplinary study of the rural prison boom, Schept provides an invaluable state of the field in carceral and Appalachian studies, using the lens of racial capitalism to interpret the region’s complex identity. He also gives an innovative model for the use of blended oral and archival historical methods to study deep historical processes that manifest in the recent past. To be sure, the book’s multiscalar and multitemporal presentation will dissatisfy those strict historicists expecting engagement with a circumscribed archive. But Coal, Cages, Crisis opens important pathways for historians of the southern prison and those southerners who have judged the prison an unnatural feature of the landscape. The book has three parts. In Part 1, “Extraction and Disposal,” Schept reflects on Appalachia’s construction as a space of great value and worthlessness. Chapter 1 showcases the book’s reliance on autoethnography, placing the authorial self in the narrative and interactions with oral history informants, to explore mountaintop removal (MTR). Longtime residents reveal [End Page 397] that rural planners used MTR sites for garbage incineration before they were used for prisons. Chapter 2 reflects on the region’s legal and political history, rooting Appalachia’s prison boom in the War on Poverty as well as the regulatory revolution of the 1970s, which empowered mining companies to normalize MTR. Part 2, “Profit and Order,” places Appalachia’s deeper history of resource extraction and anticapitalist militancy in a continuum with the region’s experience of mass incarceration. Chapter 3 focuses on the afterlife of convict leasing through the case of Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary— now an ecotourist hot spot with moonshine tastings. Chapter 4, similarly, considers the longue durée of Wheelwright, Kentucky, a company town whose economy transitioned from coal to private prisons. Both chapters rely heavily on secondary historical literature and archival research situated alongside theoreticians of capitalist crisis, including Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, and the abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, to complicate simple narratives of one industry replacing another. Part 3 tracks one community’s debate over a new federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky, between 2013 and 2019. Chapters 5 and 6 expound on Schept’s idea of “carceral social reproduction,” the elite reorganization of Appalachian society—everything from workforce development to social benefits like road construction and elementary education—around prison expansion (p. 152). Chapter 7, coauthored with the activist-scholar Sylvia Ryerson, narrates the 2019 defeat of this newest prison by a complex coalition of anti-prison forces. This reviewer hopes for books that build on Schept’s image of the prison by exploring those just outside the frame of photos like “The Interface.” How might incarcerated people behind the concertina wire directly inform this history? How do the police lurking behind the photographer plug into a political economy like Kentucky’s, where “the state prison population has grown” since the passage of a 2011 bill meant to decarcerate (p. 13)? Schept has given us a model and program for collaborative...