Hundreds of small rural towns and several whole regions around the country - in addition to those in the South - became newly dependent on an industry that itself is dependent on the continuation of conditions under which “criminals” and criminality can be continually produced (“socially constructed”). Norton offers an interesting case study of a rural prison archipelago that developed in upstate New York based on arguments by local officials that buildings constructed for the 1980 Winter Olympics would serve the prison industry in the future. New York State built thirty-nine new state prisons between 1982 and 2000, all of them in rural counties. But it was the forty-fifth state senate district in the far northern region of the state that built more than any other district, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, there were fourteen prisons located in the district, more than twice any other. Norton shows that a short-term opportunistic argument to win the Olympic bid depended on a vision of a future archipelago of prisons and, indeed, a steady supply of prisoners to fill them. […]
[A]t the height of the US prison-building boom in the 1990s, a prison opened in rural America every fifteen days. John Eason studies this phenomenon in detail, documenting the proliferation of prison building in rural America - specifically in poor, rural, southern towns - for the past fifty years. During this time the total number of prison facilities tripled […].
Moreover, Eason found that from 1980 to 2006, nearly 28 percent of all rural prisons were built in just three southern states, Texas, Georgia, and Florida. […] Hurling also offered a nuanced, regional examination of southern rural prison town archipelagoes. She followed the development of four such archipelagoes […] [including] in the West Texas Plains (one out of every five new rural prisons in the 1990s opened in Texas, the state with by far the largest number of new prisons) […].
Anne Bonds, citing examples from the Pacific Northwest, has documented arguments by local community leaders that prison building is the answer to poverty and resultant decline in social service provision needs. […] Williams, for example, studied the development of the thirteen-prison archipelago in Florence County, Colorado, starting back in 1871. He shows that state and local governments depended on the lobbying “myth” that prisons would bring economic development in order to find communities willing to accept new prisons, even though the profits of those prisons have accrued to industries outside of the local community. […]
It is not only prisoners’ labor that is increasingly commodified by work programs on the inside; their bodies and lives themselves can be bought and sold as well. With prisoners, in addition to laboring for abhorrently low wages on the inside of prisons, the profits of which accrue to the state and private entities, many local and regional economies depend on the income generated from the “purchase” of incarcerated bodies from other jurisdictions to continue filling carceral sites that were built during the 1980s and 1990s construction boom.
All text above by: Karen M. Morin. “Cattle Towns, Prison Towns: Historical Geographies of Rural Carceral Archipelagoes". Historical Geography, Volume 47, Number 1, pages 141-165. Published 2019. At: doi dot org slash 10.1354/hgo.2019.0004 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]
