Big House on the Prairie

Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation

John M. Eason

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226410487
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

For the past fifty years, America has been extraordinarily busy building prisons. Since 1970 we have tripled the total number of facilities, adding more than 1, 200 new prisons to the landscape. This building boom has taken place across the country but is largely concentrated in rural southern towns.In 2007, John M. Eason moved his family to Forrest City, Arkansas, in search of answers to key questions about this trend: Why is America building so many prisons? Why now? And why in rural areas? Eason quickly learned that rural demand for prisons is complicated. Towns like Forrest City choose to build prisons not simply in hopes of landing jobs or economic wellbeing, but also to protect and improve their reputations. For some rural leaders, fostering a prison in their town is a means of achieving order in a rapidly changing world. Taking us into the decision-making meetings and tracking the impact of prisons on economic development, poverty, and race, Eason demonstrates how groups of elite whites and black leaders share power. Situating prisons within dynamic shifts that rural economies are undergoing and showing how racially diverse communities lobby for prison construction, Big House on the Prairie is a remarkable glimpse into the ways a prison economy takes shape and operates.

PART ONE

Prison Placement

TWO

Have You Seen My Backyard? Rural Ecology, Disrepute, and Prison Placement

Prisons have not always been the most viable development option for rural locales. Until the 1970s, a depressed town might have reasonably hoped for other kinds of large-scale economic development opportunities, like factories, mills, or a military base. Following de-industrialization and the retrenchment of the military-industrial complex at the end of the Cold War, factories moved to Asia and Latin America as military bases closed. In response, small towns changed their tune regarding prisons. From a market perspective, many towns might have considered a prison a perfect substitute for a canning factory. In reality, most protested the placement of prisons as LULUs (Locally Undesirable Land Uses); neither residents, nor citizen groups, nor politicians appreciated their towns being associated with stigmatized institutions (Blankenship and Yanarella 2004; Combessie 2002; Goffman 1961; King, Mauer, and Huling 2003). This trend began to shift around the mid-1970s when some rural towns began lobbying to “win” a prison. While the central question of this book deals with the cause of the shift from NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) to PIMBY (Please in My Backyard), Forrest City’s story suggests that the NIMBY question needs to be reframed.

If presented with the question of NIMBY, a Forrest City local might turn it around and ask, “Have you seen my backyard?” I heard this response many times as residents and civic leaders patiently explained what life was like prior to building the prison. To find out why rural civic leaders/residents want a prison, one must ask how they feel about their town. This ethnographic approach allows us to unpack the often-conflicting motivations underlying prison demand in rural communities. To this end, this chapter will show how traumatic events can stigmatize an entire town—in terms of the residents’ collective memory, as well as large, lasting effects limiting future development opportunities from outside investors.

Forrest City’s civic leaders and residents described their town in ways that resonate with sociological ideas about stigma and spoiled identity (Goffman 1961; Rivera 2008). For example, residents in Forrest City might say “bless their heart” in describing owners of struggling businesses in the old central business district downtown near City Hall. Many scholars find that rural communities of color face limited development opportunities and seek LULUs primarily because they are stigmatized (Blankenship and Yanarella 2004; Carlson 1992; Martin 1992). While there are necessary and sufficient conditions for prison placement, the role of stigma in prison “demand” can be segmented along two dimensions: local leaders must recognize that their town is stigmatized, and they must also begin to reshape local policy to account for constrained development opportunities. LULU “demand” can also be understood as a willingness to accept a stigmatized development (Mohai and Saha 2006). To demonstrate this, I will first consider how national economic trends through the 1990s impacted the rural South. Next, I describe how a series of inauspicious episodes in that period stigmatized Forrest City prior to prison building, further constricting scarce economic development opportunities. Then, I will explain how a prison starts to look like a good idea, considering these circumstances. Lastly, I describe how a legacy of stigma traceable to Jim Crow–era neighborhood politics continues to enshroud the town. In doing so, I demonstrate how the timing, direction, quantity, and quality of stigma across neighborhoods and places can help us understand prison building.

A Shifting Economic Base

While structures, collective memory, and shared meanings of communities change over time, all communities have functions. Many argue that the economy is the most important factor in defining local space. When cotton was king, Forrest City served as a distribution and sales center. In the modern global economy, international markets determine crop prices, and metropolitan areas serve as distribution centers. Despite its location on Interstate 40, Forrest City has not functioned as a major industrial or commercial center in quite some time. Like so many rustbelt cities of the North, Forrest City’s local economy has suffered from de-industrialization during the information age of the last thirty years. Many farms in the region were traditionally family owned, but since the 1960s, large corporate farms have pushed out local Delta farmers. The mechanization of farming facilitated a move from an agrarian to an industrial economy. Lacking the ability to mechanize rapidly, facing the loss of many young adults to urban areas, and other shifts in the market, many small Delta farmers were unable to compete in national and international markets—Saint Francis County was not immune to these trends.

Although the town fathers didn’t understand it at the time, by the mid-1980s Forrest City was swiftly approaching a perilous precipice. Despite de-industrialization and a continued dependence on the local agrarian economy, Forrest City was once a center of light industry, ranging from textiles, rubber, and canneries, to the most significant development, Sanyo television. The addition of Sanyo in the early 1980s offered a renewed sense of economic stability for Forrest City elite. But even with the brief economic expansion from the addition of Sanyo, changes in education and housing policy set by elites had cast the die for Forrest City’s future.

The population of Forrest City swelled by the 1980s in comparison to surrounding communities as it became one of the largest employment centers in the region. However, these were often branch plants (Taub 2004), light industrial facilities that take advantage of local tax breaks in rural, primarily southern, communities. When the tax breaks expire, the corporations leave without making any significant investments in the communities or the properties they abandon. While rural communities may gain a short-term employment boost, this type of corporate welfare ultimately leaves towns with the bill for infrastructure improvements to roads and sewers and environmental cleanup. Branch plants are a way for corporations to use rural southern communities as rest stops en route to the Global South. This trend had taken hold in Forrest City as well. Given these shifts in the global economy, the economy of Forrest City could be summarized in a word—struggling—prior to building the federal correctional facility.

Further complicating the economic woes of Forrest City was arguably the most critical stretch in damaging the town’s reputation—this period was described by one informant as the worst luck any community could suffer in such a short time. Over roughly an eighteen-month period between1984 and 1985, Forrest City endured a series of events that would bring national media attention and forever alter the collective memory of its citizenry. The surreal sequence of violence surrounding the arrest and trial of Wayne Dumond (about which more below) were featured on the television news magazine 20/20 and covered extensively in a book manuscript during the same time period that local workers at the Sanyo television manufacturing plant went on strike in an effort to organize a union. The strike made national news and was even included in an academic article on employee/management relations. The intensity of national media converging on small-town happenings exacerbates stigma, making these places infamous in the local and national collective memory. Recent examples include the Jena Six in Jena, Louisiana, and the racially motivated dragging death of James Byrd Jr., a black man, in Jasper, Texas. Such infamous moments often structure the context in which future events are interpreted.

In spring 1985, workers at the Sanyo plant in Forrest City went on strike for the second time in six years. During a demonstration, an informant recounts, plant administrators used an incident that caused minor damage to a Japanese administrator’s car to depict the mostly black demonstrators as violent and threatening to the administrator’s life. Once again, Forrest City was thrust onto the national stage. The story was carried in the Arkansas Gazette and Business Week. “Pickets carried signs that read: ‘Japs Go Home’ and ‘Remember Pearl Harbor.’ Windows were broken, guns were fired, a car was overturned, and at one point the plant was nearly overrun by strikers” (Byrne 1986). While property was certainly damaged and violence threatened, the Japanese management at Sanyo characterizing the striking workers as violent is consistent with the finding that Japanese automakers avoid siting their US plants in areas with black workers (Cole and Deskins 1988). The reporting was brutal:

Japanese managers were shocked. Says Sohma (the Sanyo plant manager): “You cannot leave this alone. Union leaders are destructive. I want the union to be strong, but I want it to be intelligently strong to help people instead of stirring up things” . . . The cultural gap is wide. The Piggly Wiggly supermarket may stock bamboo shoots these days, but Forrest City remains a small, isolated town of conservative values in eastern Arkansas. Many of its 13,800 people, half of them white and half black, are uneducated, poor, and apprehensive of change . . . “People here are still trying to get over the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on integration of schools,” says one community leader, “yet Sanyo is asking them to accept Japanese ideas and technology.” (Byrne 1986)

The historic backdrop of the Sanyo strike helps explain why these local events drew national media attention. From a social movement or social capital perspective, strikes are the definitive tool for workers to voice and work through dissent with an employer. However, this strike was a losing proposition for workers from the start. First, the Japanese corporate model was hailed as the future of business practice during the 1980s. Second, the Ronald Reagan presidency was at best hostile toward, if not repressive of, organized labor. Many scholars agree Reagan was attempting to cripple it (Minchin 2000). Third, Arkansas was a right-to-work state. This confluence of factors created the perfect storm for unions and workers striking against the idealized Japanese corporate cultural model.

Vincent Roscigno and Keith Kimble (1995) find that barriers to unionization in the rural South include foreign competition, automation, and low-profit, low-skilled industries, a combination that results in continued underdevelopment of these communities. Many of the light industrial manufacturing jobs like the Sanyo plant in Forrest City fit this mold. Barriers to unionization in the South were primarily based on the durability of elite white power, maintained through racial hostility and the subordination of blacks (Cornfield and Leners 1989; Roscigno and Kimble 1995). The political structure in Forrest City at this time was founded along racial lines as several city council seats, leading positions at the chamber of commerce, and the mayor’s office were all occupied by whites.

The Sanyo strike stigmatized Forrest City in the national media. The strike also caused civic leaders within Forrest City to brand the unions as unruly and detrimental to the social order or the town. Ironically, the town leader quoted above notes how Forrest City is haunted by remnants of Jim Crow in arguing that the workforce resists change. However, the white town leaders failed to mention their own resistance to change.

Like many Delta communities, Forrest City has failed miserably in investing in public education. This failure has long-run economic consequences. An educated citizenry can make for a ready workforce and is attractive to a wide range of companies. Because of their paltry investment in public education, communities like Forrest City are not positioned to choose high-end companies for an economic “take-off” (Taub 2004, 61). Given their high need and limited options, towns like Forrest City often come to see stigmatized LULUs as the best opportunity to attract new development. Before the Sanyo strike, major industrial employers like General Industries had already left to open a plant in the Global South. The strike drove participation in the labor force down, causing unemployment to rise. For most of the 1980s, the unemployment rate in Forrest City hovered in the teens. By 1986, unemployment jumped above 20 percent and remained high, spiking at over 25 percent in 1989.

There are lessons to be learned about Forrest City from other labor disputes in Arkansas. For example, Timothy Minchin (2000) chronicles the strike at the Georgia-Pacific paper plant in Crossett, Arkansas. This case study draws interesting parallels with the 1985 Sanyo Electronics strike in Forrest City for several reasons. The 1,100 workers on strike equaled nearly one-fifth of Crossett’s total population, even if all the workers did not live in Crossett. In Forrest City, the 2,000 workers who went on strike at Sanyo also represented a sizeable proportion of the workforce. When a large proportion of a town’s adult population is employed at a single institution, that institution can wield considerable influence over the local government and its view of the magnitude of a labor dispute or plant closing and its decisions regarding taxes and infrastructure. As in Forrest City, the Crossett strike was a public relations nightmare. A union officer in Crossett described the strike as cutting through families and tearing the community apart (Minchin 2000). The Sanyo strike similarly caused strife between family and friends and evoked statewide and national ignominy on the town’s already ailing reputation. In both places, the strike divided the towns along racial lines.

I discovered this racial divide about unions through the unsolicited visceral reactions of white elites when they talked about life before the prison. Many of the white elite held an extremely negative view of unions, in general, and specifically, the attempt to unionize Sanyo. When discussing the Sanyo strike, their faces contorted with disgust. Their look of agony was tied not only to discussing the ugly events that unfolded during the strike; they also felt the strike sent a negative signal to current and potential businesses. They felt that the attempt to unionize, and the strike specifically, broadcast to potential industries that Forrest City was comprised of unruly, uneducated blacks, who wanted handouts from the union instead of jobs that required hard work. According to the chamber of commerce, a willing and ready workforce was central to attracting good companies to the “Jewel of the Delta.” While corporations during this era either received tax breaks or fled to the Global South, elites in towns like Forrest City demonized unions as the cause of de-industrialization. Meanwhile, annual millage fights persisted, white elites refusing to raise property taxes to fund education.

Unequal Justice Redux: Stigma from a History of Violence

When asked what life was like before the prison came, all informants told me things were bad. They listed record unemployment in Saint Francis County and Forrest City and the workers’ strike at the Sanyo plant as instances that sullied the reputation of the town across the state. However, more than a decade prior to breaking ground on the prison facility, Forrest City achieved national infamy with a bizarre story that invoked the strong negative imagery of southern rural communities reminiscent of the book and film Deliverance. One quiet spring evening in 1984, the teenaged daughter of locally elected county coroner Walter “Stevie” Stevens was brutally raped at gunpoint. A Forrest City resident, Wayne Dumond, was arrested in 1985 and charged with the crime. While Dumond was awaiting trial, two armed men entered his home and castrated him. The national news program 20/20 reported that Saint Francis County Sheriff Conlee bragged to locals about the act and proudly displayed Dumond’s genitalia in a jar on his desk. Sheriff Conlee was notoriously corrupt and eventually imprisoned on charges unrelated to this case.

During my time in Forrest City, informants characterized the Stevenses as one of the “good ol’ families” in town. Scholars believe that in small, tight-knit southern communities, according to an unwritten rule, public servants protect the interests and well-being of elites (Davis et al. 1941; Dollard 1937; Tomaskovic-Devey and Roscigno 1997). Given the association between Walter “Stevie” Stevens and Sheriff Conlee, rumors surfaced that they conspired to have Dumond emasculated. Sheriff Conlee’s investigation into the attack on Wayne Dumond only furthered rumors about his role in the castration. After claiming that he had questioned between 100 and 150 people (roughly 1 percent of the total population of Forrest City), Sheriff Conlee said that he could not find Dumond’s attacker. In concluding his investigation, he found that Dumond’s wounds were self-inflicted. In another outlandish turn of events, while he still awaited trial, Mr. Dumond’s home was burned to the ground, and his wife and children fled the state in fear for their lives.

In some respects, violence in Forrest City exemplifies and reifies a broader regional history of violence (Butterfield 1995; Lee and Ousey 2005; Woodruff 1993). Given the history of violence, specifically lynching, in this region of Arkansas, it would be easy to assume that the vigilante actions detailed above were racially motivated. However, all actors described, including Wayne Dumond, are white. While these vigilante acts of castration and arson were not, in this case, overtly racist, it is difficult to disentangle this type of violence from the historical context of towns like Forrest City. In fact, some would argue that acts of violence (even if believed to be tacitly supported by the state) preserve the racial hierarchy. The literal castration of a working-class white man, and the burning down of his home, conveys a figurative message to blacks that lynching is still a possibility, given the not-so-distant past where racial violence was the norm.

Although Conlee wa...