Layers of Violence: Coal Mining, Convict Leasing, and Carceral Tourism in Central Appalachia

Abstract

The growth of the prison economy in Central Appalachia complicates attributions of the rise of the carceral state to the imperative to punish (Clear and Frost 2014; Garland 2001). While the prison-building binge is certainly enabled by policies that incarcerate more people for longer periods of time, the region that the demographer Calvin Beale (1998) observed as shouldering a disproportionately large share of the prisons built in the United States since 1980 continues to grow amidst bipartisan calls for reform. Four federal prisons have been built in eastern Kentucky since 1992; two of those were completed in the 2000s. A fifth federal prison, currently in the siting process for Letcher County, Kentucky, may be in construction by the time this chapter appears in print. Prisons are often marketed to rural communities as tools for economic development, despite dubious evidence of the success of this economic strategy (Hooks et al. 2004, 2010; Huling 2002; Ryerson 2013). A more capacious sense of what constitutes the carceral state further illuminates both the reliance on this strategy and the entrenchment of the prison economy in the region. In Morgan County, Tennessee, an hour northwest of Knoxville, the Brushy Mountain Development Group—a self-described “small team of three Tennessee entrepreneurs with extremely successful careers as business owners, restaurateurs, marketing experts and start-up incubators”—is looking to “revitalize” the rural area through building distilleries, orchards, and other forms of ecotourism on the grounds of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, a prison recently decommissioned in 2009. Best known perhaps as the prison that housed James Earl Ray, the man convicted of assassinating Martin Luther King Jr., the prison closed in 2009 and the Brushy Mountain Development Group secured some creative financing from the state and county and began planning for a multi-use tourist site.