Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 50: Gulag Holler (w/ special guests Sylvia Ryerson and Judah Schept)

Episode Date: May 2, 2018

On our 50th episode, we're joined by journalist Sylvia Ryerson and Eastern Kentucky University professor Judah Schept, to discuss the federal prison that has been slated for construction in our home of Letcher County, Kentucky. We also talk about rural prison expansion and the carceral state more generally, and about how prisons are sold as economic development for deindustrialized regions. Check out their recent article here: http://bostonreview.net/law-justice/sylvia-ryerson-judah-schept-building-prisons-appalachia And check out Sylvia's Restorative Radio project here: http://www.restorativeradio.org/audio-postcards-2/

Is that Tanya Tucker? It's me. In the Big Apple? I am. I navigated the whole city today by myself. How many construction jobs have you worked on today since you've been there, since you're a hardworking East Kentuckian, Tanya? Oh, my God.

I went and got my fucking nails done. I will say I walked Tanya to the bus stop this morning it was really cute i felt like i was taking my little kindergartner to the bus yeah she i hugged her i hugged her as i got onto the bus and the bus driver was literally shaking his head because i had dollar bills in my hand and the bus doesn't take dollar bills it takes quarters and he and I was like it's 275 right and he was like quarters quarters and I was just crushed oh my god wow well that's because I misinformed you wow it was fine he just let me ride anyway because it because my goodbye was so beautiful with you, that's why. Well, it sounds like everybody is here and ready to go. More or less.

More or less. All right, welcome to the Trillbillies. Tanya Tucker in the Big Apple corresponding all the way from New York City with Sylvia Ryerson and Judah Shept. Welcome to the show everybody. Hey! Thank you. Hello. Great to be with you all. Yeah this is kind of like a... Tanya what did you call it like back in the day when people would have like phone parties like on the holler line or something like that the party line it's the party line we're on the party line throwback yeah from the canyons of manhattan to are you yeah you're probably in brooklyn huh yeah we're in brooklyn slumming that's cool that's pretty cool um well so we wanted to have y'all on the show this week

because um you just released uh a article in the boston review called building prisons in appalachia uh this is a show we've sort of wanted to do for a long time, and now we have both a news hook and the opportunity to talk about it. It's something that we're all familiar with. So we're just going to kind of kick it off. I just kind of want to ask you, Sylvia and Judah, what is the article about, and what is your purpose in writing it? You could also even tell us a little bit about yourselves oh yeah you could also not to make this like speed dating or anything but yeah you could also sylvia you want to go first um yeah yeah well i'm so excited to get to chat

with you all because um i'm a huge fan and it feels like a little reunion for me because I miss getting to see you all every day from when I used to live in Whitesburg. MMT Radio as a reporter and was a part of the Calls From Home radio team that you all are carrying on with such amazingness. And yeah, and I'm just really excited to reconnect and talk to you all about all the incredible work that you've been doing in Letcher County since I was there around this recent federal prison proposal. Yeah, so I'm Judah. I am calling in from Lexington, Kentucky, and I'm an associate professor at Eastern Kentucky University in what's called the School of Justice Studies. And yeah, I tend to think a lot about and write about and teach about prison growth and opposition to prison growth and things like that. Yeah. And so you both wrote this article because it was announced on Good Friday, in fact. Hal Rogers announced it in relation to Good Friday.

He said, it is a good Friday indeed. It was announced that they have, I guess you could say, rubber-stamped approval for a federal prison for the county that we live in, Letcher County. So I kind of just wanted to talk a little bit about the history of this project, why it's important sort of nationally, and what you are both trying to say through writing what you've published.

Yeah, I mean, I think that the... Jude and I have been wanting to write something together, I think, for a while. And I think the immediate impetus, actually, for this piece traced a little earlier than the Friday announcement to an article that came out on NBC News a couple weeks prior. Do you want to talk a little bit about that article? Yeah, totally. Yeah. So as Sylvia was saying, there was this fairly, I think, highly circulated article and accompanying video from an NBC News journalist

and the product of, I think, a fairly substantial amount of time in Letcher County that profiled the county's attempt to build the prison. And which the article had been a long time coming. I think a number of us had been anticipating it. A number of us had been in contact with the journalists. And then I think it's safe to say that Sylvia and I and other folks were sort of disappointed, but perhaps not so surprised by the sort of tone and tenor and content of the piece, which absent like a few sort of gestures to opposition was fairly uniform in its like positioning of the prison as a kind of redemption opportunity for the county. for the county and more, for the most part, ignored all kinds of, well, all kinds of information that I think would otherwise have kind of tempered the content and made it a lot more complicated than it was and also ignored a lot of opposition that's occurred.

And so I think Sylvie and I were both sort of motivated to write something to reveal some of the problems in that NBC News piece. And then as Sylvia was saying, just on the heels of that, just like a week later, is when on Good Friday, the BOP announced or handed down its record of decisions. announced or handed down its record of decisions. So in the span of one week, you had this ridiculous story come out and then the actual decision to move forward with construction. Convenient. Exactly. Yeah. By design.

And when you reference BOP, you're referring to the Bureau of Prisons, correct? That's right. Yeah, sorry. The Bureau of Prisons. So the agency that's responsible for federal prison building and operations. You all mentioned that you were in contact with the NBC journalist that did that piece. what did they have to say about the deference paid to the planning commission, which is sort of this group of affluent elders locally that have sort of been trying to bring this thing here for more than a decade? Well, I actually, the only contact I've had with the journalist since the piece came out was just today when he emailed me the link to our Boston Review article and just saying that he stands by his reporting. But prior to that, he and I had... Salty! I'm interested, just to give the audience a little bit of some context, I would imagine what

he's saying he stands by is you you guys pointed it out in your article there was approximately nine seconds that they devoted to any kind of um interrogation of this as a good idea or any or you know they they out of a six minute piece they gave about nine seconds to like opposition um viewpoints and you know any kind of of sort of rebuttal to the project at all. I guess, is that what he was sort of referring to? I guess. I'm really not. He literally just sent me a one-line email, and after some discussion with Sylvia, I decided not to respond, at least not yet. But I suppose so. And I think that's a pretty indefensible, as you point out, Terrence, a lot. I mean, that's obviously so imbalanced. It's really token coverage of a pretty kind of

deep and vibrant collection of opposition. And so, yeah, I'm only left to kind of, you know, speculate on what he's standing by. But I suppose it's that. Especially given the name of the NBC article is literally Does America Need Another Prison? It's claiming to be investigative. I think, Judah, yeah, I think that your official response to that email should be a link to this podcast episode just keep the links rolling judah we're fine with that will do um well so so yeah no um so we know the media is obviously dog shit, and there's that. But I kind of want to talk a little bit about, like, in Sylvia, I mean, I know both of you have done a lot of research into this. But I want to talk a little bit about just sort of, like, zooming back several thousand feet or so to talk a little bit about like where this idea came from,

you know, rural prison expansion in general, you know what I mean? And the sort of, um, I don't know where it fits into, uh, as Sylvia would say, uh, neocolonial, Sylvia would say neocolonial, neocolonialism, neoliberalism. Yeah, well, I mean, for me, my research around the proposed prison in Letcher County, USP Letcher, which stands for United States Penitentiary Letcher, which is maximum security, 1200 bed prison that they're proposing to build here um actually goes back 10 years for me i i was an intern at apple shop in the summer of 2008 and i um remember picking up a copy of the mountain eagle and there was like a front page story about the possibility of um a prison coming to letcher county 10 years ago ago. That was in 2008. Yeah. And at that point,

the planning efforts had already been going for three years. It started in 2005. And the way I've been told the story, which I think is really interesting, is that this is the way the story has been told to me by Elwood Cornett, who's one of the co-chairs of the Letcher County Planning Commission. That's been the main sort of, you know, as you know, the group of sort of local elites that have been largely behind closed doors. Rest assured, this is not his first appearance on Trillbillies. Okay. His first mention. Elwood needs no introduction here.

Oh, Elwood. Yeah. Yeah, so the way Elle had explained it to me was that a group of local leaders came together and, you know, at that point they were looking at the statistics for out-migration in the county, the amount of young people leaving, and came together, formed this group called the Planning Commission and came up with a mission statement that was to give young people good quality jobs and reasons to stay home and to improve the local education. And they had this like five point plan of what they wanted to do to improve the future of Watcher County. And they then went to Hal Rogers' office and talked with one of Hal Rogers' aides, Bob Mitchell, I believe his name was. And that was when Bob Mitchell sort of said to the planning commission, well, would you ever consider a prison? And the way Elwood tells the story is at first they were like, no, we wouldn't want a prison. That's not what we're talking about here. We need help for our people.

What can you do to help us? And then the way Elwood says, then we thought about it, and we realized that the prisoners just don't escape, and we came around to the idea. And that was in 2005, and then they became partners with Hal Rogers, and the rest is history, and they've been working now for almost 13 years

to bring this federal prison to town right um but i think that that's that start point is really interesting to me in that um i think that it's can be um from a national perspective people think that like you know rural places imagine prisons as this savior and like have this idea to go after. But actually, it was the opposite. Actually, it was the federal government offering this to this group of local leaders. It was directly from Congressman Rogers office saying, well, here's what we can give you. And I think that's a really important point of distinction that if if how Rogers office at that moment had said, well, we'll work with you to build a drug rehabilitation court

or we'll give you this investment in the school system or X, Y, or Z, regardless of the, like, that it might not have been a democratic process, that it was a very exclusive group of elite leaders, but they still would have gone in a different direction, I think, at that point. And so it was definitely a top-down sort of proposal from the federal government of being like, this is what we can offer Letcher County at this moment in time. Right. One of the things that I find so fascinating,

and you wrote about it several years ago, was that it almost, what wound up happening with the sort of local planning commission and with Hal Rogers is that after a certain point, the planning commission and local elites basically started selling the county's poverty. And this isn't just unique to Letcher County. You know, you've documented this in other counties and other places around central Appalachia and eastern Kentucky. But the effect that that winds up having is that they use all the very real problems that exist in the community, and then they say, therefore, the prison is a perfect solution to those problems. But the effect that that winds up having is that you actually cover up those problems and they don't get addressed whatsoever. And then probably very

likely they get exacerbated once the prisons actually come to these rural counties. Exactly, Terrence. And I mean, the whole site selection and recruitment process is this bizarre charade where, and I think this, you know, is nationwide in many ways where, I mean, so towns are basically advertising themselves as the best location in this bidding war. And I had other counties in Kentucky where I was doing research where they had, like, tried to get prisons prior to the ones that they now have and, like, lost. And so, like, it's like places competing with each other to the lowest common denominator to basically...

Okay, well, what's so ironic about it is that the Bureau of Prisons claims that they're sort of neutral in terms of where the prison goes. They just want to minimize their own internal costs. And so they're looking for a place that has cheap land, has, you know, is going to attract employees as a place to live. Whatever will make it easier for them. place to live, whatever will make it easier for them. And so that's the sort of irony of this, is that this is being advertised to poor communities as a jobs program, when actually, from the Bureau of Prisons perspective, there's no guarantee of jobs at all. And they're not designing this. I mean, I think it's, they sort of go both ways on this, but they claim to be,

you know, neutral in terms of site selection. And so it's sort of incumbent upon these local planning commissions to advertise the community in terms of both having the cheap and readily available land, but also a high quality of living and all the amenities that would like attract a workforce to live there. So they're kind of saying two things at the same time, which is like, we're a place that will welcome you with open arms and have, you know, really cheap land for you. But also we're not actually gonna articulate

the real social needs of our community in this process and sort of pretend that they don't exist. Right. And I think across the board, like you're saying, it's often fueled by federal elected officials because they have so much to gain from having, especially rural elected officials have so much to gain by having these populations move into their congressional districts.

And we don't have to go down that rabbit hole, but I think it would be certainly, I mean, just all of the reasons that hal rogers has to push prisons in his district are just they're it's sick it's just so sick and and like you said then the narrative he gets to be hailed as a hero locally and then the national narrative it still becomes rural versus urban it's like poor people pitted against one another because it looks like we've been begging for a prison. Right.

So this is just sort of one example. And I think another good example that you've given before, Sylvia, is the one in nearby McCreary County. I kind of wanted to talk about McCreary County and some of the surrounding counties, but I also wanted to talk, and Judah, you might be able to sort of add some stuff to this as well, about just that the phenomenon that you all are experiencing in Letcher County and in the surrounding counties in general region is actually kind of emblematic of a much longer and larger sort of trend. I think the number is 350 prisons have been built in rural areas of the United States just since the 1980s, which is dramatic. It's something like 15 new prisons were built in a rural community every year. That's what it averages out to. And of course, that mirrors our precipitous rise in the number of people who are incarcerated to the point of its peak at 2.3 million.

But I think as you all are saying, it's about more than just the numbers of people who are incarcerated. And it's also more than just about sort of our harsh sentencing laws and things like that. It's also about prisons being sort of marketed as these so-called solutions to all kinds of problems mainly caused by devolution and divestment and all of those things. of those things. And prisons are sort of positioned by people like Hal Rogers or the Planning Commission as this kind of magic bullet solution that supposedly will resolve all of these crises. When in fact, as you said, Terrence, it often, and this is borne out in the data, often exacerbates them, particularly in communities that are already sort of struggling economically. So that's sort of struggling economically. So that's sort of like the further style of view.

Right. And I think that can be hard for people to understand. Maybe it'd be helpful to talk through like what we've seen happen in McCrae and Clay and Martin County and nationally also, like what it means that this actually can make poor places poorer. what it means that this actually can make poor places poorer. I think one thing is in this bidding war that happens is counties are so desperate to get the prison that they end up paying out of pocket for a lot of the infrastructure costs for the prison. So I'm going to be really curious to see,

and I think we all need to watch what happens in terms of the location they've selected in Roxanna. It's on this teeny little two-lane road out in the county like who's gonna pay to to change that road potentially into a larger road and to run water lines and to improve the septic system so much of that money comes out of the county's budget because they're being promised this economic reward that then ultimately doesn't happen so I think think that's a huge thing is the sort of like the whole build up to the prison costs a lot. The people who live out there, and I know Terrence and Tom and I have talked about this before, I think on the podcast, that the people who live out there do not have sewage.

They don't have water. Like they don't have county infrastructure. And our current county infrastructure systems our water plant our sewage plant do not have the capacity to run lines like it's not even just a oh we'll just bury some lines and run them out there we need we have to overhaul our entire systems because we literally don't have the capacity to run it out there that far out in the county especially not to service a facility housing 1200 fucking people yeah and so um back i guess it's been two years ago now tom and terrence we um we started we all

started trying to like research the local um it's like the called the kentucky river area development district or whatever crD, they will ever so often release a list of priorities. And the last, like, I guess it was probably their 2016 list of priorities. Does that make sense? Yeah. Like the third time, this is for multiple counties, this is for like a 10 county area in eastern Kentucky. their number three top priority was to um build up the capacity of lecher county systems to service a prison and that was before that was that was two that was two years ago and of course like the rest this is a list of 50 priorities covering 10 10 or more counties it might even be more than 10 it might be a lot more um i don't know if you know uh tom

yeah i know it's uh letcher perry breath at lee there's a leslie maybe and a couple others yeah so it's several counties well and what's so fascinating about it is that like it i remember when they were first announcing that when when we all saw that document i remember specifically reading the research that sylvia had done on neighboring McCreary County. It was identical. It was literally the same thing. It was like what they do is they roll out the red carpet in terms of infrastructure,

and they make all these promises, and they actually will go to some extent to actually build some of the infrastructure. But it's got this weird sort of twisted logic where like they're it's so bizarre when you really think about it it's like they acknowledge the problems of de-industrialization and poverty and all these things but the way that they're doing it is they're using these things as like like as you said in the article putative uh solutions to it and it's i don't know it's just like can make you feel like you're living in fucking bizarre land.

It's just insane. Right, exactly, Terrence. And what happened in McCurry County was that after they built this whole new water treatment plant to support the prison, still a large percentage of county residents didn't have water supply because the whole design was to target the prison and so it goes back to this thing about it being a supposed community development but which actually isn't how you would holistically approach community development at all because it's not actually prioritizing what the county's needs are it's prioritizing the prison's needs and using the prison as like a vehicle that

the county can then even have access to funds that like why otherwise does it not have access to yeah right yeah and you need one need not look further than uh the water crisis in martin county to see that uh yeah how these things check out right exactly yeah which also has a prison which also has a prison right i guess we should yeah a prison that is literally sinking into the earth uh because it was built on top of a strip mine um sink sink right right yeah sink sink and it it is i'm pretty sure it's still currently the most expensive prison ever built in the United States until they build this one. I think that's right. Yeah, so this will, this USP Letcher would become the most expensive prison to be built in the U.S.

next to its neighboring Martin County in East Kentucky because they're putting these prisons in places that are truly bizarre and insane. Right. Sinking land. It is. That has been strip mined. Yeah. And, you know, something that we need to talk about, I feel like, just to tack on to the whole idea

of crumbling infrastructure and sort of prioritizing infrastructure for prisons over communities is oftentimes what you see happening is, and know i'm i'm just saying this anecdotally nothing's really been written about this that could actually prove this but oftentimes guys like hal rogers will be the cheerleaders for these pieces of legislation usually it's some sort of AML thing or the Reclaim Act is another one. And, you know, it'll get everybody in our sort of liberal nonprofit world worked up about the possibility of economic diversification and all these things.

But contained therein is, you know, funds for things like running water lines and sewer lines to prisons and stuff like that. And so what ends up happening is well-meaning people end up tacitly supporting legislation that ends up, you know, sort of compromising some of the things we believe in. Yeah, and I think that, like, an important point to tack on to that, and just to clarify for the audience, what Tom is referring to by AML is abandoned mine lands and the reclaimed man is like, it just kind of shows you the limits

of this sort of neoliberal imagination in which you can dangle these sort of economic development initiatives in front of the sort of more progressive, civic-minded types. And at the same time, you know, if you can just distract them with those big shiny objects, then you can also, with the other hands, expand the police state, expand the drug war, expand the prison state. I don't know.

It's just, again again it's just a really fascinating thing to behold it's very twisted and disgusting but right and i think that even connects back to this whole piece of um people like hal rogers and similar uh similar career politicians who represent poor congressional districts ours being one of the poorest, we often go back and forth with actually a congressional district in Harlem, I think, or the Bronx, somewhere here in New York. I should go visit them and be like, hey, we're cousins. Let's have a party. But their congressional districts are shrinking in population size. And so they are all the time at risk of losing the district.

Like by gerrymandering, they will redistrict states. And there were multiple times over the last 30 years that Hal Rogers could have very easily lost the 5th District of Eastern Kentucky. As in, like, it wouldn't be a district anymore and it would be like tacked on to another district so that he would be likely to lose that seat and not be able to compete with another in a whole nother region and these prisons provide huge population things for him instead of like actually investing in the region so people want to stay there or move there this is his this is his easy um access to a lot of a lot of bodies and uh as we and they're and they're non-voting bodies which is a very important piece because we know that when people aren't voting republicans

are winning right um so another thing i wanted to talk about in, in you, you all mentioned it towards the end of your, um, article, uh, is you talk about Golden Gulag, uh, which is a book by Ruth Wilson Gilmore. I've not actually read it is one of the book that I've been meaning to read for a long time. But, um, I think it ties into this question of the people who are in the prisons and the sort of conventional thinking that prisons are built on the margins of society and that people are pushed into these places and they're just sort of like disappeared but i think that um and i'll just quote directly

from the article that you wrote um uh golden gulag geographer ruth wilson gilmore corrects the common mistake of thinking that prisons sit on the edges of society holding marginalized people in marginal places instead she notes edges are also interfaces that can connect places including non-contiguous places into a relationship in the case of eastern kentucky prison building consolidates the crises of urban and rural sacrifice zones or what what Gilmore calls organized abandonment. But for this very reason, the choice to build a prison in Letcher County reveals the social social proximity between and interdependency of rural and urban struggles for justice. I really like that. Could you guys expand on that just a little bit? Could you guys expand on that just a little bit?

Sure. I mean, I think in some ways, those connections that Ruthie Wilson Gilmore is talking about, you all in Eastern Kentucky know intimately, both in terms of the idea that rural places, and in particular Central Appalachia, that rural places and in particular central Appalachia, the kind of like myth that it's, you know, remote, inaccessible, you know, place disconnected, and in fact, behind all of these other sort of urban areas of the United States. You all know that from, you know, better than better than anyone better than most people, because Appalachian coal is what fueled urban industrialization in World Wars I and II. There is this sort of like inherent connection between rural and urban, certainly between Appalachia and all kinds of urban spaces. I think the prison is a really kind of, well, quite literally, as well as metaphorically, like concrete illustration of that, that connects all kinds of places that I think most people maybe think of as being

not related or struggling in different ways, or in some ways, like totally opposed to one another. And it in fact, brings them closer together in some of the ways that we laid out. Also, you know, I think what we were hoping to do in writing this piece is really showcase the incredible organizing and coalition building that you guys have done that actually enacts those very connections. I mean, you guys work together to have everyone from the Sierra Club to the Human Rights Defense Center, to the Color of Change, to the Abolitionist Law Center, the fight against campaign against toxic prisons. I mean, I think, you know, that what you're doing is some of the most exciting organizing out there. And I think what was so frustrating about the NBC piece was that in barely even mentioning this incredible mobilization in what became an unprecedented number of revisions to the federal environmental impact statement for this prison. revisions to the federal environmental impact statement for this prison. When I was doing my undergraduate thesis in college, I was looking at the process for Clay, Martin, and McCree and reading the required EIS statements for each of those three prisons.

And I remember just going through those those documents and it was so exciting every time I found like one public comment that was somebody questioning the process. And there were some amazing petitions, particularly in McCree County, there was a lot of opposition over all the sites had really problematic outcomes in different ways and a lot of organizing over land conservation and local land ownership and the property tax base but anyways I but I think it's kind of amazing that like now Letcher County being the fourth of these four prisons to come to Eastern Kentucky you all have just like opened the floodgates in terms of the record of opposition that you've created and now is catalogued.

I mean, you guys delayed the advance of the prison for 30 months through this process. I mean, so I just, I think that's astounding. And I just think of like now this document we have that is because of your work, of the just thousands of comments of opposition that is um in comparison to those other three places it's just above and beyond um what's ever been on the books before tanya do you have anything you want to add to that

i mean it's pretty wild to hear it framed that way because it's hard in this moment in time not to feel like we failed because there's a fucking record of decision. And it's been a really emotional month since the R.O.D. came down. But like when I've tried to reflect on that time when we were organizing beyond what we were even able to do, like we were meeting multiple times a week. We were all just tapping ourselves out, trying to wrap our heads around what to do and taking, you know, as many steps forward as we can. And they weren't all we weren't always making the best steps forward. we weren't always making the best steps forward. But it feels like we knocked a few bulbs out somewhere, a few places. But four days before the 2016 election, which has also had its own fallout, of course, and this podcast really was born out of that moment. And there's just been a long year and a half since then. But four days before the election, we had a community gathering in our public library in Wattsburg called Prison Town.

We called it like, why now? What's next? Or something to talk about, like, just unravel all of this. Like, you know, why is this being proposed to us? Why now? What's the process? What the hell's going on? And what can we expect?

And like over 30 people showed up to that in our local library. And we put together in preparation for this gathering, we put together a timeline of mass incarceration in the U.S. starting with slavery and ending with prison expansion, like coming up to the current day prison expansion in the U.S. And a lot of it had a lot of those like role, all that role prison expansion that Judah mentioned earlier. And then like the $44 million dollars for this prison being allocated um and us starting this organizing and it just feels like then the election happened i mean that was a pretty that was like the last big powerful moment that i feel like we had in kind of the

let your governance project um organizing and and then the election happened and it felt like a lot of wind came out of our sails not you know just a couple months after that Nazis announced they were marching in Pikeville just you know 30 miles down the road and so and then we've basically been chasing Nazis out of Appalachia for the last year. So it's just been like the most insane roller coaster, just onslaughts of attacks on the region that I don't even think we've fully stepped back and reflected on and thought about. And so it's really kind of emotional to even hear Sylvia say it in these terms of like, we documented resistance and because so many people we we personally in ledger county we know so many people who don't want to prison um and that and those

stories and feelings get completely lost in the national narrative and sure as fuck are completely lost at in this nbc piece absolutely um one thing i i'm really interested to hear from y'all about is, you know, we kind of had a weird roller coaster. Like, because, you know, when you point this out in your piece, the funding, the Trump administration wanted to can this prison they they just they said back in 2017 that they didn't want to fund this thing and they had cited weirdly enough they had cited uh declining prison population and you know some of these other factors you know and then they sort of did an about face a couple um weeks ago and then included it in the budget, no doubt probably because of Congressman Hal Rogers' clout. But what I'm really interested to talk to y'all about is what is the future for incarceration in this country?

You know what I mean? Because I'm not as plugged into some of these larger conversations as y'all are. And not only that, but what is what is the future for in terms of, um, rural America? You know what I mean? Cause like from where we sit,

it's obviously very, the machine is still humming along very efficiently. uh, and it seems like Jeff Sessions, as you even noted in the article, it seems like Jeff Sessions wants to return back to this time of the 80s and 90s that expanded the prison state so much of law and order and the drug war and all these other things. I think it's hard to predict because it's – in some ways, it's an uneven. The evidence is sort of uneven. So you have a place like New York, which for, you know, a couple of decades was one of the sort of bellwether states for rising like incarceration trends and whatnot. lots of upstate prisons and rural communities, et cetera. But in recent years, maybe the last decade or so has really dramatically reduced the number, like closed rural prisons. And so you have

sort of that on the one hand, and then you have something like Central Appalachia and Eastern Kentucky in particular, which is built, you know, if this gets built, like as we write in the piece, it'll be the fourth federal prison built in just the last, what, 15 or 20 years or so. Even as Trump came into office, but certainly preceding him for a few years, you had this kind of growing so-called bipartisan consensus about the need for prison reform. And you had a bunch of states, including Kentucky, partner with these sort of like non-profit organizations to strategize and reduce their state prison populations. to strategize and reduce their state prison populations. But it was really sort of token. And what you saw happening, and one of the ways that I would answer that question, is you saw jail populations starting to rise as state prison populations started to slightly decrease.

So Kentucky, for example, has really significantly, severely overcrowded jails in all kinds of places. You also see all over the place, the Vera Institute of Justice actually just came out with this report about the sort of new trend of rural jail populations growing dramatically. you have that. And then the kind of like final part of that is you see sort of like this, I think of it as a kind of insidious logic of folks who at one time would have been sort of prison or jail boosters, you know, orbiting, who had orbited around the kind of logic of law and order and throw away the key and all those things now trying to justify expanding prison and jail and what, and, you know, other institutional infrastructures through invoking like racial justice and therapeutic justice and things like that. So just as one example, Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in the United States, now builds reentry facilities and wanted to turn the prison that's in Floyd County in Wheelwright into, what do they call it, like a nursing home for parolees. So I think we have to be really kind of hypervigilant of how these kinds of enlargements of prison infrastructure

can take the form that we're used to, like what's happening in Letcher County, but they also can take the form of kind of slightly amended projects that might make us feel a little bit better. But we need to sort of be wary about what they actually will do, what work they'll do. Right. Yeah, I mean, exactly as Judah said. I think just to outline for folks the chronology of this particular proposal is pretty striking in that the funding, the original $444

million was allocated in 2016 and then just this past summer in the Department of Justice budget proposal for 2018 they rescinded the funding because they noted the decline in the federal prison population. And the Bureau of Prisons basically told Congress that they didn't think this prison was necessary. And so they didn't have the funding for it in their budget. And then Trump just reinstated the full funding. just reinstated the full funding and so it's just it's um a surreal situation where we're literally building a prison that the bureau of prisons itself has said is not necessary which i think just like underlines um our complete reliance on this system even when you have like the the actual bureau of prison saying it's unnecessary we still can't get out of it um so i just think that's like you know what is what does

that mean that we've become this this sort of um system of racialized social control has become so ingrained in our society that we're sort of like continuing onwards um even when even when there's been this supposed sort of reckoning um that we don't really we haven't really uh enacted anything different yet we're still like plotting for it and it also and it also just speaks to sessions um real determination to sort of uh steer us all backwards right right and to further lay this at how rogers feeds it's judah brings up cca also on this um timeline we have seen the coal industry's contributions to how rogers re-election campaigns plummet as the coal industry plummets

yet cca cca has been um increasing their investment in his re-election campaigns over the last decade wow yeah um and i think both of you uh make a really good point that i really want to stress to our listeners um which is i'm having a little bit of feedback on my, which is that like, we, everybody should be incredibly wary of any kind of like market-based solutions to decarceration. And just like you saying what you were saying, Judah, about how they want to change or transition the facility in willwright floyd county into a i can't remember what you said like a recovery center or something yeah like a nursing home yeah it capitalism in the logic of capitalism still hasn't found an answer

to uh to non-productive uh people of society that it deems non-productive and so prisons in some way is a sort of logical extension of that but like i don't know if people have really um reckoned with like what comes after that because it's probably going to be just as uh as you're saying sylvia it's probably going to be just as racialized, just another system of social control. And it's incredibly important to stay on your toes about it and to, as you said, be wary. Keep your eyes open, I guess. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. GeoGroup is another large corporation that gives hell a lot of money. GeoGroup is another large corporation that gives hell a lot of money. GeoGroup and CCA. Didn't one of them change their name recently to like a... Oh, that's right. CCA is CoreCivic. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. They wanted a little more public-friendly name. A little rebranding. Yeah, rebranding. Exactly. Rebranding. Right. God. little more public friendly name a little rebranding yeah rebranding exactly rebranding right god um and they're currently building a lot of uh immigration detention centers that's right yeah they run about half of them i think right yeah well um there's not much else i want to add

to this unless um you unless either of you want to add anything, I did want to talk a little bit about the Restorative Radio Project just because it's an important part of the story we're telling here, which is that I think what sort of gets buried in a lot of this isn't just the incarcerated people themselves, but how the system impacts loved ones of incarcerated people. And Sylvia's, your restorative radio project, I think is a good example of highlighting that. Yeah, I mean, so I guess in that, on that point, I did want to say that, I mean, I think for me, the work I did in

Ledger County was coming from even a longer history of work that's happened at Apple Shop against mass incarceration in the prison system going back to the 1990s when Amelia Kirby and Nick Zabrilla created this incredible documentary film called Off the Ridge, which was about the opening of two state prisons in southwest Virginia right over the border. And that led to the creation of the Calls from Home show, which you all are continuing to this day, which is ultimately what led to Restorative Radio. But for people that aren't familiar with Calls from Home, it's a weekly radio show on WMMT that provides a toll-free phone number for families from all across the country to call into the radio station and leave a message that is then broadcast out to reach those incarcerated. WMMT has seven prisons within its local broadcast area as of now.

And USP last year would also fall within that broadcast area. But so, I mean, I think that Calls from Home is just, I mean, what you all are doing with that show every week is just an incredible point of solidarity between urban and rural communities and across time and space of like helping families connect um because the people that are calling it every week are so I I hosted that show for four years and you all are hosting it now and um and it's um I uh I just a really special thing I think um but I think it was for me through hosting that weekly radio

show and um maybe you all feel the same that I would get to know a lot of the families that called in week after week after week um from Florida and California and Connecticut and the Virgin Islands all across the country to this teeny little radio station in southeast Kentucky to reach their loved ones. And it was through that show that I really learned the tremendous obstacles that families face in terms of being able to keep in touch with their loved ones incarcerated, that so many people hadn't been able to visit in years or even decades, and that phone calls are exorbitantly expensive and letters get censored or don't reach people, just the layers and layers of obstacles for family communication that are only exacerbated when the prisons are, when you're incarcerated very far from home.

And I think, I mean, that's just the most devastating part of this phenomenon, um, is that it's, it's separating families. And, um, it just, I think really shows the hypocrisy of the whole system for me, because we know that, um, people being able to stay in touch with their families and have family relationships is the most important thing in terms of being able to successfully reenter once your sentence is served. And so we're literally making that nearly impossible for millions of families. And I'll just add that another spinoff of the radio show has been these ride shares because the bulk of the folks who are incarcerated in southwest Virginia, just across the border of Letcher County, and two maximum security state penitentiaries there are from Richmond, Virginia. So birthed out because we've been like building relationships and getting to know these families over the last 20 years now almost. We figured, you know, one of the biggest needs is that folks can't get down here to see each other.

And so some local churches have started and there's like more churches all the time helping have started making it like a missionary project out of their church. And it's just to support ride shares from Richmond down to Southwest Virginia. And we have big potlucks so people can meet each other. They pack lunches so they cover the gas, the food for families to get down here. And these are the type of like creative, resistance, solution, hustles that never get picked up by the media. And that NBC completely fucking glazed over and didn't give an ounce of credibility. And so if this prison gets built, that will be what the

organizing looks like. Churches will come together to create a situation where we can at least try to support families who are going to be coming to this community. Not to mention, we know that when people in Richmond, Virginia, when a black man in Richmond, Virginia is arrested for some petty ass crime, and he's going through the system, he's told, you know what, we're going to send you down to Wise County, where it's nothing but white hillbillies down there barefoot, and they fucking hate you, and you're going to serve out your time down there. And so it's just like building on this fucked up narrative that has just been exacerbated from from the 2016 election right um well uh these are all uh really important uh aspects of this um

again i don't have much else i want to add to this, and we are just now past an hour. But do y'all have anything you want to plug or any final thing you want to talk about? I'll just say one quick thing. I suppose it's a plug for the book you brought up before, Terrence, Golden Gulag, which I think to me is sort of the most comprehensive and incisive book that I can think of that I've read on really trying to sort of understand why we have the system we have today, the prison system minutes have really illustrated that I think is essential to her argument in the book and the point that you brought up actually, Terrence, in reference to our piece about prisons kind of collapsing these urban and rural crises into one space and bringing these places closer together. I think what Sylvia, well, first of all, what WMMT has done with Calls From Home and what Restorative Radio does and what Tanya was talking about with respect to sort of all of the organizing work is, to paraphrase what Ruth Wilson Gilmore says in the book, that even as the prison is sort of in the midst of and sends out this vast, what she calls, or maybe she doesn't use this term, but a vast sort of carceral

web that connects all of these places. All along that web are all of these little sort of nodes of, you know, you can call it what you want, whether it's resistance or abolition or, you know, something less, I don't know, something even less sort of super politicized, but just folks making do and surviving and creating connections. That's also what happens. And that also follows that kind of like same cross regional geography that I think we have to understand the prison in is we have to also think about our coalitions in that way. And I think that's one of the sort of central points that Sylvia and I had wanted to make with the piece. And that was totally, as Tanya said, was totally ignored in the NBC news piece is that really it's all of the work that you all did in Letcher County that the Letcher Governance Project did. And that you did with all of these other groups operating sort of at

different scales and in different spaces. Yeah. Sylvia, do you have anything? I just think that the organizing that's been done around this is some of the most exciting organizing happening. And I also think that there's an incredible long, decades long history of work specifically against mass incarceration in Letcher County and then obviously um you know a century of organizing um that this you know is a part of that lineage um and I think that's what um this a story that really needs to be told nationally is the work that you all are doing. So thank you for that.

Well, we thank you for your work as well. Literally, I told you many times over the years, Sylvia, it wouldn't have been possible without all that research, and the same goes for you as well, Judah. You can check out their article. It's in the Boston Review. I just had it in front of me. I can't remember what it is now.

It's called Building Prisons in Appalachia. And thank you both for being on the show today. And please make sure Tanya makes it back in one piece. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you, guys. Bye. it's been a really fun time and uh tanya don't forget you need quarters on the buses oh my god don't talk to strangers don't talk to strangers i love strangers that's all i do it's my favorite past time. All right.

Well, this has been great. And thank you all. And we'll see you on the other side. Bye. See you later. Thank you. Bye.

Thanks so much. Bye.