My first experience with a prison town was visiting my father while he was caged in the Taylorville Correctional Facility of Illinois. He was arrested for distribution of a controlled substance. I was poor, so this was one of the few trips I made outside of Chicagoland in my childhood. It was a grueling four-hour journey in an incredibly hot conversion van. Something that felt like what I’d imagine being kidnapped does. I was an angry teen, and the trip did little to improve my mood. In fact, the experience fueled my anger at the racism that I believed drove America’s sprawling penitentiary system.
However, nearly 25 years of researching U.S. prisons has significantly changed my view of why we built so many prisons. America’s infatuation with incarceration isn’t just an artifact of its racist past. It is frequently nourished by the support of both Democrats and Republicans, and it is often welcomed by rural communities of color needing help. Its jobs sustain hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino workers. The forces supporting America’s prison system are far more complex—and diverse—than is commonly understood. That doesn’t mean that our sprawling overincarceration system is a good thing. But only when we truly understand the dynamics of the prison-building can we begin to identify and implement the policies needed to dismantle it.
The prison boom, costing more than $30 billion and extending over 35 years across nearly every state, is perhaps one of the largest uncoordinated public works projects since the New Deal. The U.S. incarcerates so many in its 1,700 prisons that it held the dubious distinction of being the world leader in incarceration for 30 years.
The standard story for prison-building is that rural white Republicans are trying to exploit Black bodies by caging them for corporate profit. The standard story also suggests that the supply of people caught in our criminal justice system generates demand for prisons. On both fronts, often the reverse is true: Prison growth has been largely fueled by public funds for public jobs, while at the same time acting as fuel for the carceral machine rather than a response to it.
For example, take Alabama. In September 2023, Alabama announced the building of its new prisons would cost the state more than $1 billion. Alabama is a world leader in rate of incarceration and overcrowding. These conditions have led to dangerous conditions for incarcerated persons and staff across the system. New prisons in Alabama will replace old, crumbling, overcrowded facilities, but they will also provide an additional 5,500 beds. These factors lead to me to believe that Alabama is well positioned to supplant Louisiana as the U.S. (and perhaps the world) leader in incarceration.
Thousands of people incarcerated in Alabama prisons went on strike in 2022 to protest inhumane conditions. There have been documented cases of abuse by staff and deaths of incarcerated people. Part of the current rationale for Alabama to build new prisons is being driven by concerns for how overcrowding will affect staff and even incarcerated persons, not simply corporate profit. Given the protests over miserable and inhumane conditions in their prisons, support for new prisons crosses racial and political divides, with Black and white lawmakers at local and state levels who are both Democrats and Republicans supporting prison-building.
Prison-building takes years of legislation before construction. I have found that state legislatures controlled by Democrats from 1984 to 2004 were more likely to build prisons. A common dynamic when a prison is being built is that Republican-led legislatures afterward pass stricter laws ensuring there will be more incarcerated persons.
Rural-town disadvantage and state factors such as income inequality are also essential drivers explaining why states like Alabama build prisons. In short, the more disadvantage there is in a rural town means the higher likelihood of a prison being built. As the county seat of Elmore County, Wetumpka, Alabama, would serve as an anchor for one of two “supersize” prisons being built with up to 4,000 beds. One in three residents of Wetumpka is Black, and 20 percent of these residents live below the poverty line—that’s more than twice the average in the county. Wetumpka’s profile is consistent with my research on prison towns that suggests that already having a prison in your town increases the chances of building a new prison by 20 percent. These factors best explain why the prison is being built near Wetumpka, and are also consistent with my research showing that having higher proportions of Black Americans living in poverty increases the likelihood of a prison being built. Given the high percentage of poor Black Americans, towns like Wetumpka are often stigmatized, and their development opportunities limited. In come prison jobs.
This is very different than the idea that we built private prisons to profit corporations. However, this belief drives the mythology around prison-building as a racist, private venture, propelled by corporate greed. This myth is depicted in scholarly works, newspapers, magazines, and high-profile documentaries and movies.
But the prison boom is a public works project. This stands to reason given that nearly 82 percent of all U.S. prisons are operated by the state, such as the ones being built in Alabama, and 5 percent are operated by the federal government. Not to diminish the dangers of privatization within the criminal legal system, but it is important to highlight the distinction between privately run, for-profit facilities exploiting slave labor for profit, and the other 87 percent of prisons that are owned/operated by states.
Further analysis of every U.S. prison shows that before incarceration rates rise, states build prisons. Put differently, the supply of prisons generates demand that states grow the population of incarcerated persons. In fact, our working paper suggests that prison demand is not only inelastic but drives incarceration, not the other way around. States that build more prisons incarcerate more people. Even if this current prison-building boom in Alabama seems to be motivated by concerns for correctional staff and those in their care, the incarceration rate will undoubtedly increase given the increasingly punitive culture of the Republican-controlled state Legislature.
The flip side is this: There are more than 450,000 corrections officers in the U.S., and nearly half are Black or Latino. Prisons not only provide stable government jobs for people of color, but stability for rural communities of color, and a calming influence on otherwise unstable local rural economies that suffer from limited development options. Despite nearly 1 in 5 rural people living in prison towns—more than 10 million Americans—the prison boom has gone virtually unnoticed as most were built in an invisible land: rural communities of color.
It’s important we get the story right about why we build prisons in the first place. A poor diagnosis of problems inevitably leads to poor policies. Misguided interventions often worsen conditions for vulnerable populations. Recognizing why prison-building persists in rural communities will allow us to provide strategic alternatives to the perverse incentives that have entrenched prisons so deeply in these communities.
After leaving community/political organizing, including working for then–Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama, I relocated my wife and two small children to the prison town of Forrest City, Arkansas. Here, as I did research for my book, I quickly learned that leaders of these communities understood all too well the moral quandary of supporting prison-building. I learned that for people of color, even in a majority-Black town, the prison is simultaneously an engine of death but also a way to save their community. Black leaders supported prison-building in their community not simply for jobs, but because they believed the prison would save their town’s reputation.
In no way am I arguing for prisons to continue functioning as public works programs. However, I am calling for the standard story on prisons to be overhauled. Like so many, my father was caught up by the wave of mass incarceration. At this time, even people with addiction issues, most of whom were incompetent dealers like my father, were portrayed as drug kingpins raining down violence across communities. My father, like so many others, did not fit this bill.
Looking back, we now know that many of our family members found their way into the drug trade through the underground economy. I should not have had to visit my father in prison. How many Alabama children will have to visit their parents in this new facility? To reimagine rural communities of color, we need a new narrative around the prison boom. This narrative should center on a public health approach focused on harm minimization to communities now dependent on prisons and people currently inside them. By offering viable alternatives to rural communities, we can curb prison demand, and work to end the cruel practice of caging so many people for a public works project.
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