This fantastic essay by Dee Davis, from the Center for Rural Strategies in Whitesburg, KY, appeared on the Daily Yonder earlier this week.
Elwood Cornett stopped by my office. He is a retired educator and a minister, a kind and decent man. He came by six years ago on the same mission: to tell me about the effort to bring a federal prison to our county and to ask for my support. Our county is poor. The few industrial jobs we’ve had are in coalmining and that ship is sailing away. For most of the last ten years Mr. Cornett’s volunteer group has been trying to attract a $300 million dollar prison project with its promise of good jobs and outside investment.
It is the kind of crummy choice rural communities often get. And in Appalachia it appears to be as close to a choice as anyone out there is going to give us. You preen for the Bureau of Prison screeners, you pledge all manner of local support, you turn your schools into corrections training facilities, and then if all goes well, you get outside contractors paying their own tethered suppliers to build a frightful facility with the few decent paying jobs going to qualified people mostly from long distances away. From that day forward this community will be known mostly for the prison and the special notoriety of the individuals housed there: terrorists, drug kingpins, and if we are lucky, local politicians.
Of course some fast food franchises and convenience stores will feed and fuel the families from the New Jersey or New Mexico who drive in to visit a wayward child, but the promised economic impact of the prison will lie there, beckoning but beyond local reach.
At least that is where the evidence points. Our Congressional District, Kentucky’s 5th, is the nation’s poorest. The two poorest counties in this poorest of Congressional Districts have federal prisons that some civic boosters thought would help them turn things around. They just didn’t. As the song “Jericho” says, “We are the prisoners of prisoners we have taken.”
