Prisons Are Not Innovation: Post Coal Organizing in Eastern Kentucky

In early 2016 Congressman Hal Rogers announced that $444 million had been allocated for the construction of a federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky, an “economically distressed” county on the border of Kentucky and Virginia. In response to this announcement, locals formed the Letcher Governance Project, a throwback in both name and mission to the grassroots Letcher County Local Governance Project of the mid-1990s. Like the old LGP, the new LGP demands transparency from public officials and agencies; aims for democratic control of the county’s institutions and lands; and seeks to radically alter power relations in the county. This panel will cover the historical, economic, and political trends and events that led to the development of United States Penitentiary (USP) Letcher. It will examine the history of resistance in Letcher County since the mid-1990s, as well as what it looks like to organize in a post-coal economy. It will also explore what it is like to organize for political change as a group of “millennials” in eastern Kentucky, and will discuss organizing tactics that the LGP has used to pressure leaders to consider mass incarceration and the rights of prisoners. The panel will also supply discussion on what recent demonstrations against the prison have revealed about power structures in the region, and will provide context about how this particular fight intersects with larger trends in American society; namely, institutional racism; the exploitation of predominantly white, rural working class communities; the shift in American energy sources; rural depopulation, and so on