Linking Environmental and Criminal Injustice: The Mining to Prison Pipeline in Central Appalachia

Introduction

The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation on Earth. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2,224,400 people living in the United States were incarcerated in federal or state prisons or local jails in 2014, a fourfold increase since 1980. ¹ When parole, probation, and other forms of monitoring are added to these figures, we find that 3% of people living in the United States are under some form of correctional supervision. ² The sheer number of prisoners in the United States should give pause to any observer, while a closer look at the demographics of our prison population is especially troubling; people of color, those in poverty, the uneducated, the addicted, and the mentally ill are disproportionately represented behind bars. ³ Researchers from numerous fields have examined the impacts mass incarceration holds for society, families, and the economy, but environmental justice scholars have not yet centered prisons in their studies. ⁴ At the same time, criminal justice scholars have spent much effort understanding how the United States became an incarceration nation, but have failed to address the environmental implications of our carceral state.

Bringing these two fields into conversation is critical, as several fronts that link criminal and environmental injustice demand sustained attention. One of these is the environmental conditions within prisons. For instance, a recent study found that every year a U.S. prisoner serves behind bars reduces his or her life expectancy by 2 years. ⁵ While it may be intuitive that prison is hazardous to one's health, little attention is given to the role that the environmental conditions of prison may play in this finding. Unlike most populations exposed to toxins, prisoners in unhealthy environs are exposed on a continuous and daily basis for the entirety of their sentences. ⁶

The information silence surrounding prisons makes obtaining data on inside conditions difficult, while the low status granted to inmates casts doubt on their self-reports. Nevertheless, numerous accounts of unhealthy conditions behind prison walls abound, with the toxic prison SCI Fayette in LaBelle, Pennsylvania, a telling example. Built on a former strip coal mine, the prison is directly adjacent to a massive dump that received carcinogenic coal waste for more than 60 years. ⁷ A survey of Fayette prisoners found that more than 80% experienced respiratory problems, while the inmate mortality rate was the highest in the state for prisons not catering to geriatric inmates. ⁸

In addition to the health of prisoners, another stream of research in need of study is the direct ecosystem impacts of prisons. Prisons effectively serve as small cities, responsible for the complete maintenance of hundreds of individuals. As such, they produce massive amounts of waste while being notoriously difficult to regulate. Often located in isolated areas, monitoring for potential environmental violations is difficult, and numerous accounts of prison-related pollution of waterways and ecosystems have been reported. ^{9 , 10} One example comes from an investigation conducted by the state of Washington, which found that roughly “a million gallons of sewage water and other contaminates have been negligently dumped or accidently spilled from one prison, Monroe [Correctional Complex], polluting local river and wetlands.” ¹¹ Relatedly, others have begun to note the impacts prison construction and operation can have on local fauna, especially on endangered species. ¹²

This article addresses yet another point of contact between environmental justice studies and criminology, examining the relationship between coal mining and prisons. In this study, I use the case of central Appalachia to highlight a troubling pattern of siting prisons in spaces with long legacies of strip coal mining. These coalfields are becoming prisonfields, and the indivisibility of environmental and criminal injustices is increasingly clear. ¹³ To put this current state of affairs into proper context, I begin by outlining how the current carceral state is largely an outcome of political and legal actions taken more than a century and a half ago. The geographic shift of incarceration from urban to rural spaces in the last quarter century, exemplified by central Appalachia's prison boom, is then outlined. This development is nested within the broader decline of the coal industry in the region, which has driven policymakers to cast their hopes on prisons to drive their local economies and stem population loss. As such, this work contributes to environmental justice studies centered on the impacts of coal and criminological studies of prisons by conjoining these areas of inquiry. In so doing, recent developments in Appalachian coal country highlight what I call the “mining to prison pipeline,” and speaks to the general undervaluing of this region as one useful only for extracting resource wealth and then, as that runs dry, the depositing of society's “refuse.”

Historical Underpinnings of Mass Incarceration

Following the Civil War, two constitutional amendments, coupled with the demand for labor, cultivated the bitter soil from which mass incarceration has grown. With emancipation, agriculturally dependent southern states faced economic collapse due to the loss of their enslaved workforce. The lack of servile labor imperiled profits not only for plantation owners but also for northern investors financing many southern operations. In fact, the freeing of slaves severely endangered all U.S. financial institutions linked to the export of cotton, the world's most widely traded commodity. ¹⁴ Perversely, two Constitutional amendments created at this time ultimately led to the creation of a new labor pool, which could be treated with similar brutality to its cursed predecessor, while ensuring continued profits for northern and southern capitalists alike. ¹⁵

Ostensibly, the 14th Amendment intended to protect the citizenship rights of recently freed slaves and provide them equal protection under the law. It also, however, created the legal standing for felony disenfranchisement. This component of the 14th Amendment has, to this day, severely undermined the ability of African Americans to wield power through the voting booth. Meanwhile, attorneys soon argued the rights granted in the Amendment could be applied to corporations. The Supreme Court's agreement with this argument gave corporations the rights of people but not the responsibilities, resulting in the massive growth of corporations and corporate power. This Amendment, coupled with the Justice System Improvement Act of 1979, allowed interstate trade of prison-made goods and legalized private prisons such as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and G4S. Private corporations frequently contract out the labor in private prisons operated by CCA and others, with annual sales around $800 million. ¹⁶ Fortune 500 companies, notably Walmart, contract much of this labor. Walmart demands mention here because of its significant and surreptitious support of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which lobbies Congress to deregulate industry, remove labor protections, and expand prison labor programs. ¹⁷

The immense power corporations wield in the United States and their role in supporting prison growth are a direct outcome of the 14th Amendment, but the 13th Amendment has played an even bigger role in the growth of the carceral state. Ratified December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment aimed to outlaw slavery, but included a critical loophole; the prison labor exception clause that stated: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” As such, and perniciously, this clause incentivized incarceration as a means to create a new enslaved labor force. After the ratification of this Amendment, so-called Black Codes criminalized being unemployed, as recently freed slaves could be imprisoned for “loitering” and “vagrancy.” Indeed, an 1865 Mississippi statue, “order[ed] that all African American workers must enter into labour contracts with white farmers by 1 January of every year, or face arrest and incarceration.” ¹⁸ Convicts were “leased” to private entities who, unlike former slaveholders, had no vested capital in their workforce, freeing them to literally work many prisoners to death. Oshinsky (1996) notes that prisoners leased to railroad companies in South Carolina following the Civil War had a horrific mortality rate of 45%. ¹⁹

Yet similarly to how the end of slavery gave way to coerced labor contracts for so-called vagrants, there remain direct ties between state-mandated labor for black Americans and prisoners. Known as “convict leasing,” these practices shifted from the cotton fields to the coal mines, extending a racist historical legacy of enslaved workers at the behest of state- and corporate-driven financial interests. Mine operators, especially in the South, used prisoners for the most dangerous and grueling work in the mines. According to historian Mary Ellen Curtin, all of Alabama's able-bodied male prisoners had been leased to two coal companies by 1888. ²⁰ Prison abolitionist and Birmingham, Alabama native Angela Davis explains how this history played forward until the deindustrialization of the region in the 1980s: “The fathers of many of my friends worked in these mines and mills. It is only recently that I have learned that the black miners and steelworkers I knew during my childhood inherited their place in Birmingham's industrial development from black convicts forced to do this work under the lease system.” ²¹ Today, “convict leasing” is no longer on the books, but inmate work is alive and well, organized through a unit of the Federal Bureau of Prisons called the Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR). UNICOR's seemingly noble mission of preparing inmates for life on the outside has repeatedly been marred by numerous complaints of laborers being exposed to unhealthy and dangerous conditions in their work environments. ²² As such and in sum, the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution provided much of the earliest legal underpinnings for today's exceedingly high incarceration rates, despite their principled intentions.

More recently, scholars continue to wrestle with the question of why the United States incarcerates so many of its citizens, and different causal factors have been identified. Among others, Michelle Alexander sources this dramatic increase to Richard Nixon's declaration of “War on Drugs,” which reclassified some offenses as federal crimes and lengthened sentences for many drug crimes. ²³ In addition, “law and order” approaches to criminal justice in the 1980s and 1990s, together with tough state-level policies such as “three-strikes” and adherence to a “broken windows” approach to crime, played outsized roles in the growth of incarceration. Mandatory sentences could result in repeat offenders spending life in prison, and Alexander persuasively argues that such sentences (and the penal system more generally) are simply modern ways of enforcing segregation and limiting opportunities for people of color; a racial caste system she calls the “new Jim Crow.” Others look back further, arguing that the foundation for the prison boom was laid long before the 1970s. Marie Gottschalk, for instance, contends that the decisions made as far back as the American Revolution provide necessary context for today's punitive society. ²⁴ Moreover, moral panics, from alcohol to prostitution to juvenile delinquency, have reinforced societal fear and solidified the power to punish. Naomi Murakawa also takes a long view, arguing that the expansion of the carceral state is a perverse outcome of the civil-rights liberalism of Truman and Kennedy. Their liberal polices vastly empowered the once weak federal system, culminating in our current “Prison America.” ²⁵ Most recently, John Pfaff puts forth yet another explanation for the United States' extremely high incarceration rates, concluding that it is not a result of institutional racism, but rather the immense latitude prosecutors wield, along with the reward reaped from a “tough on crime” reputation. ²⁶

While causation for the spike in incarceration rates over the last few decades continues to be argued in the scholarly literature, this reality demands a large number of prisons. Of late, the siting of prisons has become a largely rural affair, and this shift, coupled with legacies of natural resource extraction, particularly coal in Appalachia, demands more attention from environmental justice scholars. Within this series of legal and historical contexts discussed above, institutionalized racism meets incarceration with significant environmental and human health impacts. Understanding the geographic shift from urban to rural incarceration is the first step to disentangling the relationships between the siting of prisons in coal country, health inequities, and incarceration.

The Mining to Prison Pipeline

Until recently, housing prisoners has been an urban affair. ²⁷ The geographic shift away from cities began in earnest in the 1980s, peaking during the 1990s. ²⁸ Indeed, between “1990 and 1999, 245 prisons were built in rural and small-town communities—with a prison opening somewhere in rural America every fifteen days.” ²⁹ The economic upheaval of the 1980s drove this shift, as agricultural consolidation, corporate flight to cheaper labor, and the machinations of globalization hit rural spaces especially hard. In central Appalachia, the coalfields endured the resource roller coaster of busts and booms during the 1970s and 1980s, witnessed a massive out-migration, and experienced the Reagan recessions acutely. Policymakers across the region, like those in other rural spaces, viewed prison development as an economic lifeline that could stem population outflow and bring jobs to their constituents. The rural prison boom in central Appalachia resulted in the construction of 29 state or federal prisons in the region since 1989. Yet, those anticipating an economic shot in the arm from the prison industry are, however, largely still waiting; a recent analysis found prison counties with higher rates of poverty and lower per capita income than nonprison counties. ³⁰ Importantly, the authors point to the opportunity costs of the prison development strategy, and how alternative pathways can be foreclosed in pursuit of this singular approach. ³¹

Coinciding with the 1990s prison boom was the rapid acceleration of the most ecologically destructive form of strip mining the region had ever seen: mountaintop removal (MTR). For nearly a century, coal operators in central Appalachia have used various surface mining techniques to extract coal, but none compared with MTR in the degree of resultant environmental destruction. In short, the tops of mountains that “overburden” seams of coal are cleared of vegetation, then blown apart with explosives, before the resulting rubble is then dumped into neighboring valleys creating a plateau-like landscape of decapitated mountains and buried valleys. Unsurprisingly, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has noted that such mines “can contaminate waters for hundreds of years,” while many species of fish and amphibians are now endangered, with developmental abnormalities becoming commonplace. ³²

Those living near mining operations countenance drinking water contaminated with heavy metals, landslides and floods, omnipresent dust and trucks, and blasts that shake homes and ruin wells. ³³ Epidemiological studies are revealing significant human health impacts, with some researchers finding people living near MTR sites with elevated rates of birth defects and premature death due to respiratory, heart, and kidney diseases. ^{34 , 35} Those living in the eastern Kentucky coalfields, for example, have some of the lowest life expectancies and health outcomes in the nation. Letcher County, KY., the proposed site of a federal prison discussed below, has a 44% obesity rate and an unemployment rate more than three times the national average. ³⁶ As such, it is clear that while bringing little economic development to the region, coal mining has degraded human and environmental health; coal has proved more a curse than a blessing.

While coal deposits are outcomes of eons of geological transformation and chance, the siting of prisons are choices, complicated processes involving numerous stakeholders at multiple layers of governance, from the federal to the local, from the public to the private. While the context surrounding each prison siting decision varies and generalizations are challenging, looking at specific cases sheds some light on these maneuverings. Wise County, Virginia, a county with more than 50% of its landmass strip mined, saw two prisons built during the prison boom: Red Onion State Prison and Wallens Ridge State Prison. ³⁷ Opened in 1998, Red Onion is a security level-S or maximum-security facility built to house about 850 inmates. ³⁸ Constructed nearby with the same blueprint, Wallens Ridge opened one year later and is capable of holding about 1200 inmates. ³⁹ Both prisons are built upon former strip mines, as prisons, along with golf courses and Walmarts, are one of the few postmining land uses attempted on such sites. ⁴⁰

Then Governor George Allen pushed these projects to house the projected surfeit of Virginia's prisoners due to the decision to abolish parole in the Commonwealth in 1995, coupled with the trend toward increased sentence length generally. ⁴¹ Such prisons represented a key part of the tough on crime zeitgeist fostered by President Clinton's punitive stance on crime, evidenced by his signing of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Among other components, this Act expanded the federal death penalty, provided resources for hiring 100,000 new police officers, and allotted $9.7 billion for new prisons. ⁴² Such measures resonated in conservative Wise County, and the construction of these prisons saw very little community resistance. ⁴³

A current proposal to build a 1200-bed federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky, directly across the state line from Wise County, is following a strikingly similar path. Like Red Onion and Wallens Ridge, Letcher would also be built on top of a former MTR mine and is being shepherded by a conservative politician. In this case, the politician is eastern Kentucky congressman Hal Rogers, who secured $5 million to place a maximum-security facility in his district in 2005. ⁴⁴ In 2016, Rogers secured an additional $444 million for the project. In addition to being directly on top of a former mine site, the proposed prison would be near an active coal mine and surrounded by large sludge ponds leftover from decades of strip mining; essentially ground zero of coal mining's toxic legacy. The Bureau of Prisons did not include these ponds and additional surrounding mining sites in their Environmental Impact Statements, and many experts contend that water nearby the site is contaminated. ⁴⁵ Indeed, a report by Letcher County Water & Sewer District concluded that the water supply for the prison is endangered by “mining activities, oil and gas wells, untreated sewage, and solid waste.” ⁴⁶ Left untreated, prisoners housed in this facility would likely face severe health hazards as a consequence of this contaminated environment.

Given Appalachia's history, the current happenings in the region are anything but shocking. Long stereotyped as a region home to ignorant, inbred, lazy, drunk, and violent peoples summed by the term “white trash,” this space is witnessing a significant shift; as the funneling out of mineral wealth slows, we see this region becoming a repository for society's “waste” in the form of inmates. Indeed, as there are not enough local bodies to fill these beds, people of color are trucked in from urban centers hundreds of miles away to be guarded by white officers. Institutional racism provides the human grist for this bedeviled mill, powering the prison industrial complex. Moreover, locating prisons in isolated places such as Wise County hefts significant burden on the families of inmates by making visitation difficult, imperiling the social networks of inmates so critical to preventing recidivism.

Finally, it is important to note that Red Onion, like many other regional prisons, has been accused of violating the human rights of prisoners. According to a report by Human Rights Watch:

Prison staff use force unnecessarily, excessively, and dangerously. Inmates are fired at with shotguns and have been injured for minor misconduct, nonthreatening errors, or just behavior that guards have misinterpreted…. inmates at Red Onion report staff's punitive use of electric shock stun devices. Conditions at the facility are unnecessarily harsh and degrading. General population inmates are confined in their cells more than 20 hours a day. In segregation, inmates are isolated 23 hours a day. All are subjected to remarkable levels of control and forced to live in oppressive and counter-productive idleness, denied educational, behavioral, vocational and work programs and religious services…Correctional officers and other prison staff threaten inmates with abuse and subject them to racist remarks, derogatory language and other demeaning and harassing conduct. Facility administrators and supervisory staff appear to condone such unprofessional conduct. ⁴⁷

The words of those incarcerated at Red Onion are even more powerful, and a revealing documentary, Solitary: Inside Red Onion State Prison, has brought the totalizing despair of the facility to light. An inmate named Quincy explains, “I feel like I'm being burned alive in the ground and everybody is just, basically, walking over top of you. You can hear them but they can't hear you. That's the way I feel, forgotten.” When humans, communities, and environments are deemed inferior, their sacrifice, whether for profit, progress, or punishment, is rarely far away.

Conclusion

The mining to prison pipeline in central Appalachia makes clear the significant links between incarceration and environmental and human health concerns. This case proves instructive as it brings environmental justice and criminal justice studies into close conversation, while also bridging the spatial gap that has bifurcated environmental justice scholarship for decades. In Allan Schnaiberg's seminal work The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity, he discusses “withdrawals,” the resource extraction that takes place primarily in rural spaces, and “deposits,” the disposing of waste in mainly urban spaces. ⁴⁸ Central Appalachia has long served as a region of withdrawals where capital is funneled away leaving behind coal mining's toxic legacy. The last quarter century, however, has seen a dramatic increase in deposits, as prisons, historically unwanted land uses, are increasingly sited in the region. We find coalfield communities struggling with poverty, depopulation, and degraded environments hoping prisons will serve as economic lifelines. What they generally find instead is that prisons are not panaceas, and that this economic model forecloses other viable and sustainable development opportunities. As such, this rural space is now home to societal refuse from urban spaces, disproportionately men of color from east coast cities. In this way, the mining to prison pipeline in Appalachia serves as a lens to examine how structural racism, fostered by legal decisions from as far back as the Civil War era, has culminated in the United States becoming the world's most punitive society, imprisoning bodies and entire regions.

While this article centralized the mining to prison pipeline as it relates to coal, the theoretical underpinnings—where economic factors weigh in on historical racism to shape environmental justice concerns related to prisons—are not limited to one region or resource. By centering incarceration in their work, environmental inequality scholars can shed light on these understudied relationships and help build more robust theories. A few scholars doing such work should be mentioned, including Sbicca, who is undertaking the significant work of linking food justice and restorative justice, examining the challenges and opportunities presented by prisoner reentry. ⁴⁹ Russell, for her part, makes a compelling argument that the eighth Amendment to the Constitution, with its prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments” may prove a means of stemming environmentally related prison abuses, ⁵⁰ while Pellow pushes us to consider connecting prison abolition to the abolition of environmental injustices. ⁵¹ In light of the case explored here, the link between fossil fuel extraction and climate justice also deserves sustained attention, as do the emerging connections between environmental activists and criminal justice reformers.

In conclusion, it should be noted that prisons effectively serve as landscapes, ⁵² telling us much about who we are; as Fyodor Dostoevsky noted, “You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners.” This measuring stick would certainly result in an unflattering evaluation of the United States, and points to the dire need for prison reform. By expanding the conception of live, work, and play to include those behind bars, EJ scholars can contribute to this goal by shedding light on the environmental and human health implications of this mass incarceration nation.