“That Makes Them an Easy Target”: Criminalisation and Racialisation in a Central Appalachian County

Abstract The geography of incarceration in the USA has shifted over the past 20 years. While the USA remains atop the world in per capita incarceration rates and numbers of people inside, the locus of this system has been moving downscale over the past two decades. Local jail incarceration rates have been rising in rural counties and declining in many big cities; there are now more people overall incarcerated in rural jails than in urban jails. We explore this shift in Smith County, a small, mostly white rural county in Eastern Kentucky. Interview participants spoke of frequent jail stints, police harassment, unstable employment, punitive drug treatment, and unreliable housing. Relying on ethnographic research as well as insights from scholarship on racial capitalism and carceral geographies, we argue that the local state relies on racialised criminalisation as a way to manage class conflict in a rural geography characterised by organised abandonment.