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Rural Law and Justice

Mountaineers are Not Always Free: Labor Politics and Incarceration in Early West Virginia Ella Siegrist*, Ella Siegrist,

Vigorous political and cultural debates have always surrounded the expansion of the prison in the United States. Scholarly work shows that mass imprisonment was not inevitable; rather, it was the result of political decisions and hegemonic ideologies–including, for example, rhetoric of law and order and humane rehabilitation–at temporal junctures. As case studies have identified a range of local trajectories of American incarceration, Appalachia’s prison history remains largely unexplored. This is despite all that the region has to offer as a case: a history of labor control and organizing; the legacy of company towns and privatized policing; and severe political and economic inequality resulting from extractive industry and uneven development. In the current project, I use historical-archival methods to trace the political history of Appalachia’s system of punishment. To do so, I focus on West Virginia, the only state entirely contained within Appalachia. Using historic newspapers, warden’s reports, legislative documents, and more, I explore the political discourse that led to the early entrenchment of the penal system in the state around the turn of the 20th century, as railroads, steel, and coal expanded in the region, bringing an influx of labor to the region and forcing a renegotiation of state structures. Penal practices of today, including the pay-per-bed system of warehousing prisoners from external jurisdictions and the constant evolution of fiscal justifications for imprisonment, echo incarceration in the state’s early history. As industry entered the region, state and extralegal actors continued to establish and adapt the local norms of punishment, strategically developing ties across political jurisdictions and between public and private interests. Using this case study, I argue that expanding the state’s capacity to punish was central to a broader project of state-building and key in the consolidation of political and economic power over time.