HICKORY FLATS — From a hillside near his Lee County farm, Edgar Fannon gazes at a sprawling complex of concrete bunkers and razor wire, not quite sure what to make of his new neighbor.
Below him, a huge federal prison is as quiet as it will ever be. The last construction worker left a few weeks ago; the first inmate has yet to arrive. As night falls, high-powered lights cast a glow over the empty prison yard.
Fannon takes in the view from the perspective of someone who has spent a lifetime raising cattle and growing tobacco.
“It bothers me to see agricultural land covered with asphalt,” he said, shortly after attending an opening ceremony at the prison. “You’ll never grow anything off that land anymore.”
But criminals growing older inside the maximum security prison will do far more for the region’s economy than the tobacco that once grew on this land – or, for that matter, all the land in Lee County.
U.S. Penitentiary Lee County will create 432 jobs and pump $25 million a year into the regional economy. That’s more than three times the revenue generated by tobacco in its heyday, politicians told Fannon and about 500 other people who toured the prison last month.
Profits from prisons has become a familiar refrain in this part of the state.
The $100 million prison is the third to open in the area since 1998. Two supermax facilities, Red Onion and Wallens Ridge state prisons, were built atop mountains in adjacent Wise County.
While no one is suggesting that the coalfields be renamed the cellfields, it’s clear that the region’s growing prison economy has helped make up for declines in the coal-mining industry.
During the past decade, the number of coal-mining jobs in the state’s seven westernmost counties dropped from 10,263 to 5,456.
Once all three prisons are at full capacity, more than 2,000 people will work at a prison or hold a related job, according to the LENOWISCO Planning District Commission, which covers Lee County, Norton and Wise County.
In many places, word of a prison coming to town would evoke howls of protest.
But here, where unemployment rates were in double-digits when the prisons were proposed, residents and local governments have been more accepting. In fact, they have been downright welcoming:
When a federal prison was first proposed in Lee County, voters approved a bond referendum to purchase a site by a nearly 3-to-1 margin. The county ended up using an interest-free $1.1 million loan from the Tennessee Valley Authority to buy 226 acres of farmland that it then donated to the federal government.
Across the county line, the Big Stone Gap Redevelopment and Housing Authority issued bonds to construct Wallens Ridge at a cost of $78 million. The authority rents the prison to the state as part of a lease-purchase plan. “It really was salvation for us,” authority director Chuck Miller said of the prison.
When Red Onion became the first prison to open in 1998, more than 3,000 people – many of them laid-off coal miners – applied for about 400 available jobs.
Many residents seem to accept prisons in the same way they might view a mine on a mountainside: It may not look or sound very nice, but it’s an economic reality.
“They certainly don’t want to be viewed as prison towns; I don’t imagine any community wants that,” said senior demographer Calvin Beale, who has studied prison growth in rural areas for Economic Research Services of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Still, they feel they have to forget about that and move on and accept these things,” he said. “They are the equivalent of coal mines that won’t close.”
As the nation’s incarceration rate steadily climbs, governments have begun to look more to rural areas for places to warehouse criminals. During the past decade, 245 prisons – 57 percent of the total – have opened in nonmetropolitan locations, Beale said.
Appalachia has received a substantial share. Two federal prisons are under construction in eastern Kentucky, and two more are in the works for West Virginia.
“I can’t imagine that some of these locations are the most efficient for transportation,” Beale said. “They are considerable distances from where the convicts came.”
That means the prison population, with a disproportionate number of blacks and Hispanics from large cities, is often guarded by a predominantly white staff that reflects the racial makeup of the region.
Race has played a role in complaints of inmate mistreatment at some rural prisons, including Red Onion and Wallens Ridge.
But concerns raised by human rights organizations in distant cities seem to have done little to dim Southwest Virginia’s enthusiasm for its new prison industry. Some of the support even comes from people who live within sight of the concrete fortresses.
Fannon, for example, doesn’t have much bad to say about the federal prison – except for the time gunfire from its firing range spooked his cows.
“I really haven’t worried a lot about it,” he said. “The prison doesn’t bother me being over there.”
Prisons pay the bills
Three times a day, like clockwork, things get hectic at the Double Kwik convenience store on Virginia 83 in Dickenson County.
The store is about a mile from Red Onion State Prison, and correctional officers wearing blue uniforms show up around shift changes.
Manager Amber Rasnick estimates that a third of her business comes from Red Onion. Guards buy gas, cigarettes, food from the deli and a commodity vital to their line of work – headache powders.
“It seems like they buy more than anybody else,” Rasnick said.
Red Onion, which opened in 1998, has an estimated payroll of $10 million a year and generates about another $11 million a year in local purchases, Wise County economic director Carl Snodgrass said. Those numbers doubled in 1999, when Wallens Ridge, an identical supermax, opened in Big Stone Gap.
“You can see people out in the community in prison uniforms who are driving new vehicles, whether it’s pickup trucks or cars,” Snodgrass said. “You see them shopping in the stores and you know the money is being spent from the prison payrolls.”
The community has also benefited from state and federal money used to upgrade water and sewer services that the prisons need.
Aided by $13 million in federal funds, the town of Jonesville got a new waste water treatment plant and the town of Pennington Gap doubled the capacity of its water system to serve the prison. The government has also contributed $6 million for a new airport in Lee County that the prison will use.
Wise County bills the state $60,000 a year for landfill and emergency service for Red Onion, and the tiny town of Pound gets $30,000 a month to provide sewerage to the prison. Although much of the money is used to finance an upgrade made necessary by the prison, “it’s still quite a revenue for us,” town manager Bobby Dorton said.
Unlike most businesses, prisons are recession-proof. “Crime is always going to be with us,” Wise County administrator Ed Sealover said.
Wise and Lee counties also expect to see sizeable population growth as a result of the prisons – although the inmates in the two Wise County prisons were apparently not included in last year’s census count.
The town of Big Stone Gap, with a population of about 4,800, would receive additional federal and state dollars based on the extra 1,200 “residents” from its prison. Although Wallens Ridge was not full at the time, town officials are trying to determine why none of its inmates were counted in the census.
Who’s getting the jobs?
The way Charles Parker sees it, being locked in the same building with murderers and rapists is not so bad a thing.
“I don’t consider the prison job nearly as dangerous as a coal-mining job is,” said Parker, a Lee County resident who worked the mines for 26 years before becoming a correctional officer at Red Onion.
Parker, who spends most of this time above the inmates in control towers or gun ports, says he worries less about being attacked by an inmate than he used to fear such things as falling rocks or a mine collapse.
Guarding inmates at a state supermax pays between $23,381 and $41,980. The money is not as good as what coal mining offered, Parker said, but the state benefits and retirement package make it a decent alternative.
Parker, who now works at Wallens Ridge, is too old to apply for a job at the federal prison, where wages start at $30,000 but applicants must be 36 or younger.
The federal prison has hired 52 guards from Red Onion and Wallens Ridge. Employees transferred from other federal prisons to fill supervisory positions make up about half of the 282 hires to date.
Once the prison is fully staffed, about 275 employees will be from Lee, Scott and Wise counties, prison warden Mike Adams said. But so far, only about 40 hires have been from Lee County.
That has prompted critics to say that while the prison may be good for the region, the direct impact on Lee County will be less than suggested by Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, who worked to bring in the prison.
“They call it local . . . but what does Rick Boucher consider local?” Lee County resident Denver Poteet said. “Local would be the 9th District for him, which is a pretty big area.”
Poteet admits that his opposition to the prison is based largely on the fact that he has a good view of it from the front porch of his brick ranch. But others have reached the same conclusion.
In California, less than 40 percent of the jobs from new prisons went to residents of the towns where they are located, according to Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Gilmore researched the economic impact of prisons on small towns for an upcoming book, “Golden Gulag.”
Gilmore found that the distance prison employees are willing to drive to work is nearly double the average commuter range. Why? Because many of them want to live in areas with better schools, entertainment and amenities than a prison town might offer.
Once a prison dominates an area, Gilmore contends, other industries are reluctant to locate there. As a result, prisons are often located in clusters.
“You end up with your only option being to get another prison and another prison and another prison,” said Tracy Huling, an independent researcher from New York who has been studying rural prisons for the past five years.
Some opponents of rural prisons cite different concerns: They say the politics of prison-building, once based simply on the need to protect society from crime, is driven by economic factors as well, now that poor, rural areas have discovered the perks a penitentiary can bring them.
“Now you’ve got the local officials begging their legislators to get them a new prison,” said Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C., group that has been critical of the nation’s rising incarceration rate at a time when crime is declining.
“It has introduced a whole new dynamic in prison expansion when prisons are actually sought and welcomed,” Mauer said.
Culture shifts with the economy
The landscape of far Southwest Virginia is replete with reminders of how coal was once king.
Abandoned mines are common, and locomotives pulling coal hoppers still rumble by on the way to the ones still in operation. Businesses have names such as the Farmers and Miners Bank and Black Diamond Food and Gas.
Coal is still a force in the economy, but increased automation has cut the number of jobs it offers. As government officials attempt to recover, they say it’s important not to rely on prisons as a cure-all.
“We don’t want to be too reliant on any single industry,” said Skip Skinner of the LENOWISCO Planning District Commission. “Coal has been great to us, it still continues to be good to us, but it hurts us because we have depended too heavily on it.”
But in Wise and Lee counties, no other new industry in recent years has provided as many jobs as the prisons.
With the work has come a gradual cultural shift, said Stephen Mooney, a Dickenson County native who teaches English at Virginia Tech and is affiliated with the school’s Appalachian Studies Program.
Young men no longer talk about following their fathers and grandfathers into the mines, Mooney said.
As the community grows more accepting of prisons, some see a similarity between descending into the mouth of a coal mine and walking through the guarded gates of a maximum-security prison.
“It strokes the male ego in much the same way that mining coal does,” Mooney said of guarding dangerous felons.
“There is a sense of fulfilling or meeting a national need in much the same way that people who were mining coal felt that they were connected to the national experience and providing the fuel that drove the national industrial economy.”
The connection between crime and economic growth in Lee County is perhaps best illustrated by the prison’s location.
It stands in the county’s industrial park.