Amelia Kirby was driving in a particularly beautiful part of her home county in the late 1990s when she noticed the construction. She thought it was yet another strip mine, taking off the tops of mountains to extract the coal beneath. But instead, it was the beginnings of a prison.
Amelia’s double-take was indicative of a general shift in central Appalachia, an area roughly spanning eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western Virginia and southern West Virginia. As the coal industry has declined in an area long synonymous with it, states have turned to prisons as an alternative form of economic development. Since 1992, central Appalachia has seen the construction of four federal, three state and one private prison, with another federal prison potentially on the way. Horrified by this turn of events, Amelia, then studying in Massachusetts, began to pay more attention to the construction and wrote her thesis on its social and economic impact on the local population.
[For more of this story, written by Elaine Teng, go to http://billmoyers.com/2015/04/28/calls-home/]
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