WHEN BEING TRANSPORTED to prison, Cinquan “Umar” Muhammed said, most people try to take their mind off things through chatter. But he’s a quiet person, and in the nearly 30 years he spent being shuffled between federal penitentiaries in rural mountain communities, he said he preferred to take the time he had outside the barbed wire to look out at the leafy wilderness that lined the road to his cell.

During the last week of March, however — and only seven months since his release from prison — for once he came to the mountains of his own free will, together with a small crew of other formerly incarcerated people. They drove together in a large van from their homes in the Washington, D.C., area to the site of a proposed new federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky.

“Driving here, somebody asked me: ‘Are you nervous?’” Muhammed said. The beautiful geography concealed something uglier, he knew. Behind the shelter of the woods, dusty, flat strip mines squatted on sheared-off mountaintops. And on top of many of those mountaintops was now the concrete of the very prisons where he and many of his fellow travelers had languished for decades. “You’re remembering those many times over the years coming in over the mountains, knowing that your final destination is prison.”

Muhammed and the others, all members of a writing workshop and book club through Free Minds, a D.C.-based nonprofit, came to speak to the community in an effort to warn them of what lay in store should the prison be built. This was the latest strategic move in a long-term campaign led by some Letcher County residents to put a stop to the project.

At its currently slated cost, FCI-Letcher would be the most expensive United States federal prison ever built.

The prison was first proposed in 2006. It was stopped in 2019 through a combination of environmental lawsuits, local opposition, and federal ambivalence about the project. But it was revived in 2022, though downgraded from a maximum- to medium-security correctional institution that would hold 1,152 people and a prison camp for another 256 people. The price tag has increased though: Initially set at $444 million, it is now budgeted to cost more than $500 million to construct. Its main cheerleader is Hal Rogers, the Kentucky congressman who has secured his astonishingly long electoral career in part by earmarking massive quantities of federal funds for roads, prisons, and post-9/11 securitization in his home state.

If built, it would be the fourth new federal prison in Eastern Kentucky, and the sixth federal prison built in Central Appalachia since 1992, making the region one of the most concentrated areas of prison growth in the country.

At its currently slated cost, FCI-Letcher would be the most expensive United States federal prison ever built. It would be constructed upon the literal and figurative wreckage of the coal industry. Its proposed site, a former mountaintop-removal site in the unincorporated community of Roxana, is in a region that has been left in poverty despite the immense wealth coal generated for the mine-owner class. In addition to economic free fall, the area is facing the consequences of coal mining in the form of water contamination and extreme flooding. In the summer of 2022, 13 counties in Eastern Kentucky suffered deadly floods and mudslides. Their effect was particularly acute in Letcher County, where the flood dislodged culverts, wrecked bridges, and spun homes off their foundations. In the immediate aftermath, at a moment when locals were feeling uniquely vulnerable and in need of aid, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) quietly resurrected the Letcher prison project.

Muhammed and the others thus made their long trek to impress upon Letcher County’s residents that the prison would only make local people more vulnerable. They wanted to remind everyone that the toxic environment within the prison — and the poor environmental conditions outside of it — link the community and the people behind the prison walls. Or, more accurately, that those inside and outside of the prison are in actuality a single community.

THE BOP RELEASED its draft environmental impact statement in early March, nominally to assess any potential environmental problems that might impede the project. Following the draft’s release, the agency held a public-listening session on the evening of March 28.

The meeting, which took place in the fluorescent-lit, blue-and-white cafeteria of Letcher County Central High School in Whitesburg, the incorporated town nearest to the prison’s proposed site, was standing room only. The prison’s supporters arrived early to sign up to comment, so the first half of the meeting — nearly two hours of comments — was overwhelmingly dominated by those speaking in favor of FCI-Letcher. The shadow of ecological tragedies hung heavy over their words, as they spoke of mass coal-industry layoffs and the devastation wreaked on the community by the July 2022 floods, which killed 45 people and destroyed over 9,000 homes. Again and again, people repeated like a mantra, “We need the jobs.”

As the meeting passed its halfway mark, the balance began to tip, as those who had come to speak in opposition to the prison finally had their turn. Joshua Boyer, who had carpooled with Muhammed from D.C., seemed to recognize the true theatrics of the public comment session. Turning to the crowd, he urged those present to ask for better than what they were being offered. “Let us channel this energy into industries that uplift communities: education, renewable energy, or tourism,” Boyer said, and then called for solidarity. “These are investments to create lasting opportunities and jobs rooted in a sustainable future. Let’s demand better, not just for Letcher County, but for all communities striving for a more hopeful future.”

Boyer, Muhammed, and the other people in this group were nearly the only Black people in the room. This ratio echoed the stark racial dynamics of the region: prison facilities almost completely populated by people of color, overseen by an often entirely White staff and enveloped by almost entirely White counties. These men and women had driven eight or nine hours to be here, to deliver the only testimony that would be offered that day from people who’d actually been incarcerated in an Appalachian prison. In fact, many of them had spent decades of their lives in neighboring counties — and yet, in the eyes of many in attendance, they were still outsiders.

The faces that stared back at Boyer were mostly stony, though some looked less certain of themselves than before. Some people left — maybe tired, maybe unwilling to listen — as Boyer and others described the conditions of the prisons they had been in, prisons just like the one proposed for Roxana.

When Muhammed took the mic, he described the toxic conditions of United States Penitentiary Big Sandy, about two hours away in Martin County, Kentucky. Big Sandy — itself the most expensive federal prison ever built at the time it opened in 2003 — rests lopsidedly on a former mine site. It’s acquired the nickname “Sink-Sink” for its subsidence into the softened and fractured ground beneath it. The prison, despite official promises to the contrary, did not improve matters in the water district. It did the opposite; the immense amount of water pressure needed to pipe drinking water uphill to the prison, and channel waste away from it, has contributed to regular loss of water pressure and service to the rural communities living downhill. And after all that, the water inside Big Sandy isn’t even safe to drink, thus exacerbating already unsanitary and moldy conditions inside the prison. Guards refuse to drink it, bringing their own gallons instead, but most of those incarcerated in the prison can’t afford bottled water from the commissary. Many of Muhammed’s cellmates suffered from various stomach upsets and health ailments.

“I never drank water coming out of the faucet because it was always different colors,” he said. “I was fortunate ... I worked, so I kept a few dollars on my account,” making it possible for him to purchase bottled water from the prison’s commissary. He’d always try to have a few cases on hand at any time in case of lockdown.

Residents of Eastern Kentucky have among the highest cancer rates in the country.

Chronically poor water quality is a shared plight of those inside the prisons and people living in the surrounding communities. In 2000, only a few years before Big Sandy opened, some 250 million gallons of liquid mine-waste burst through a slurry pond owned by Massey Energy and contaminated Martin County’s water supply with arsenic, lead, and mercury. The spill poisoned hundreds of miles of the Big Sandy River and its tributaries, killed most aquatic life in them, swept away roads and bridges, and polluted the water systems of over 27,000 residents. Locals say the cleanup was never adequate. In the two decades since then, the region’s coal industry collapsed abruptly, resulting in a significant loss of county revenue. In the meantime, the area’s water pipes have aged rapidly without any funds to fix them, which means many residents here live without safe, clean drinking water, and according to a 2023 report by Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, “sometimes without any water at all for extended periods.”

Residents of Eastern Kentucky have among the highest cancer rates in the country. Letcher County’s surface waters and municipal water alike are highly contaminated. Even the city water, which would presumably be piped into FCI-Letcher from Whitesburg, contains high levels of what are called disinfectant byproducts — triihalomethanes and haloacetic acids — which are formed when high volumes of water-treatment chemicals come into contact with dirt and algae. (Due to the dilapidated state of many of Eastern Kentucky’s water pipes, earth tends to seep in through the cracks.) These chemicals are carcinogenic and can be inhaled, absorbed through the skin, and consumed through drinking water. In other parts of the region, heavy metals and E. coli infiltrate the water system. Many Eastern Kentuckians have grown to mistrust their tap water, with people in rural areas in particular often spending disproportionate amounts of their meager family incomes on bottled water. Many others, who can’t afford to buy bottled water, have no choice but to expose themselves to the risks of drinking polluted tap water.

AS WITH OTHER parts of Appalachia, the wreckage left by the coal industry in Eastern Kentucky has made the landscape vulnerable to disaster. The mountaintop-removal mining process used here, which deploys explosives to clear forests and removes the topsoil in order to access underground coal seams, has left these regions more prone to flooding, erosion, and landslides. FCI-Letcher, which is slated to be built on 500 acres of a former mountaintop coal-mine, will make the prison toxic to its inhabitants and its neighbors alike, the project’s opponents say.

This, of course, follows the grand tradition of prison-building in the US: As an Earth Island Journal and Truthout investigation had revealed in 2017, almost a third of state and federal prisons in the country are built within three miles of a hazardous waste site. That proximity can contribute to contaminated water and air — both of which plague prisons from coast to coast — and to real health concerns. (See all our reporting on prisons and the environment.)

In the case of FCI-Letcher, the risks are related to strip mines, which contain high levels of toxic contaminants, all broken up by the mining process and then dumped back on the mountain. These include nickel, arsenic, and even silica, which itself causes a debilitating lung condition (silicosis) and exacerbates others, including black lung disease. Though work over decades of mine reclamation has kept these contaminants somewhat contained in Roxanne, prison construction threatens to dislodge them, sending plumes of dust across nearby old-growth forests and into local communities.

The coal industry in Eastern Kentucky has left the landscape vulnerable to disaster.

According to the draft environmental impact statement (DEIS), building the prison would require excavating and leveling 200 acres of the site to change it from “gently rolling, sloping, and steeply sloping conditions to a level platform.” This would involve clearcutting over 120 acres of secondary forest that has grown on the actual site as a result of nearly three decades of land reclamation efforts. The excavation work would also alter the path of some nearby streams and wetlands, which would further jeopardize the region’s already compromised water quality. To this day, streams in the region run red with oxidized metal residues.

Environmental groups have long pointed out that the facility would impact nearby wildlife habitats, including a 250-acre old growth forest within Lilley Cornett Woods, a registered Natural National Landmark. Species impacted would include several recognized as threatened, endangered, or of special concern in Kentucky. This includes the Kentucky red-backed vole, sharp-shinned hawk, American black bear, eastern red damsel, mountain midget crayfish, and Cumberland arrow darter, as well as the Indiana bat and grey bat, both highly imperiled species protected under the US Endangered Species Act. The DEIS doesn’t address water quality concerns in any depth, saying simply, “Water quality of the streams near Roxana has not been assessed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and there are no identified impaired waters or TMDLs [total maximum daily load of contaminants] for the site.”

University of Kentucky public health researcher Beverly Anne May, a native Eastern Kentuckian who has been fighting the prison since it was first proposed, pointed out that the EPA hasn’t even tested for radon in the water, a radioactive element often associated with coal and gas extraction. “The people who are incarcerated there would be incarcerated sometimes for decades and potentially exposed to a potent carcinogen and [have] no way to get away from it,” she said.

May has mapped out the link between coal mines and extreme flooding, finding that 2022 flood deaths were concentrated beneath eroding strip-mining sites and tailing ponds (bodies of water used to filter mining refuse). “Well, we know the next big flood is coming,” May said. “We just don’t know when. That means they’re going to be cut off completely. Whenever the next big flood comes, the workers, the [incarcerated people], they’re going to be up the creek.”

Despite the incidence of a thousand-year flood in 2022, this year’s DEIS makes the same assessment as the 2016 environmental impact statement: It looks at the hundred-year floodplain only. But the frequency of these flood events no longer lines up with terms we use for them. Thanks to our changing climate, hundred-year floods could soon happen annually; thousand-year floods will increase, too, with Appalachia’s vulnerability multiplied by the disrupted hydrology of coal. Slapping many tons of impermeable concrete on what were once headwaters of the Ohio River watershed will magnify the problem, giving water nowhere to slow down, pool, or percolate into the ground, and leaving it to rush downhill instead.

Being at the top of the mountain is no guarantee of safety, either. FCI-Letcher would itself be on high ground, but the roads that would serve as its entrance and exit flooded in 2022. If this happened again, medical evacuation or supply transport would be impossible, and history instructs that the safety of incarcerated people would be a low priority.

Edward Hunter, a member of Free Minds, noted that during his time incarcerated in Florida, he and the other imprisoned people were put on lockdown during a hurricane as most of the correctional staff evacuated, leaving behind only a skeleton crew. “It was Category Five,” Hunter recalled in a private conversation. “We stayed in the cell all three days, and they knew the water was contaminated, but they brought you just two bottles of water per day.” He says that the water coming out of the taps was a dark brown, undrinkable.

With federal prisons so remote, and lockdowns frequently sudden and unexpected, there’s often no way for people to know the condition of an incarcerated loved one in an emergency scenario.

“Don’t let your community become just another prison county where they torture human souls,” Muhammed pleaded to the assembled crowd at the public hearing.

IT’S NOT AS though FCI-Letcher’s supporters — most notably the Letcher County Planning Commission, a nonprofit whose members comprise local business and civic leaders — are in complete denial of the downsides of building another prison in the county. There is something more complicated at play here. There was an air of resignation to even the strongest pro-prison comments, if you listened hard enough. Even the prison’s biggest public cheerleader, a Roxana preacher named Elwood Cornett, admitted he’d rather see something more restorative — but those alternatives simply aren’t being offered, so this is what Letcher County gets and they ought to be grateful for it. Others described children who had moved far away, hoping in earnest that the promised prison jobs — as violent and traumatic as they are — would bring them home. This is despite the fact that, by the BOP’s own admission in the DEIS, most people from Letcher County are unlikely to qualify for jobs at the prison, given lack of education, inability to pass a fitness exam, age, or drug and criminal history.

Those opposing the prison, meanwhile, seem confident they can win again. There’s a strong local resistance to the project from people who have spent over a decade trying to win over their neighbors; to make them understand that even the smallest promises from the prison’s boosters are unlikely to come to pass in a way that benefits them. This movement is made of landowners in Roxana and a mix of people from Whitesburg and neighboring counties. Recently, the campaign defeated Section 219, a piece of fast-tracking legislation that would have bypassed parts of the environmental review process and removed the project from judicial oversight. These locals know that the risk is theirs to bear. Still, they admit that winning folks over is not easy work.

“We’re told we don’t matter — that our place, environment, water, future, air don’t matter, except as a sacrifice for someone else’s gain.”

“It’s catching us at a vulnerable time,” said Roxana resident Mitch Whitaker, who has publicly opposed the prison since 2016 and is among landowners who have refused to sell their property to the BOP for the prison site. “Roxana got flooded real bad; it was Noah’s flood.”

Locals who support the prison say that even if no one in Letcher County gets the aforementioned prison jobs, there will still be people moving to Letcher, shoring up the tax base, buying from local businesses. But the BOP says out-of-state employees won’t be moving to Letcher County; there’s nowhere for them to live following the damage wreaked on homes by the 2022 floodwaters.

One study suggests that $600 million would fix Eastern Kentucky’s post-flood housing crisis, a little more than what’s earmarked by the BOP for the prison. Build Community Not Prisons, a grassroots coalition of Letcher County residents opposing the project, has taken this on as a rallying cry, asking why the federal government will invest in Kentucky only as an extraction site and human landfill, rather than shoring up its climate resilience and compensating people for all they’ve lost.

ROXANA’S RESIDENTS DON’T see the place they live in as a wasteland. They love hiking the Lilley Cornett Woods and fishing in the local water bodies; they’re concerned about the area’s rare bats. The former mine site itself has become a kind of commons over the years, a place for four-wheeling, hunting, hiking, and family picnics. It’s become repopulated with grasses and trees, deer and coyotes — proof of the possibility of recovery. It’s a place of worship, too: Kings Creek Baptist church sometimes holds services on the flat mountaintop beneath the open sky.

“I fish the river all the time,” said another landowner, a lifelong Roxana resident who asked not to be named out of concern for his family’s safety. “It’s great smallmouth stream. Deer hunting, turkey hunting, [the area is] really, really special to us and our family.” But when the prison lights and noise disrupt sleep and chase off wildlife, “what’s gonna happen is good people gonna leave,” he said.

It’s perhaps most in line with the goals of mine-lands restoration to just leave the place alone. Funding to upgrade Roxana’s water and sewer lines — nominally to benefit Roxana, and really to meet prison specs — is slated to come partly from the federal Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Program funds. These are funds intended to enhance the local economy, community safety, and restore the local environment. But despite drawing on them, the prison would be under no obligation to deliver anything but basic site stability and economic investment. These mountains are now no longer useful as an energy resource, so by the logic of capital, they’re wasted space. As Judah Schept, a professor of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University, writes in his book Coal, Cages, Crisis, Eastern Kentucky is seen as a trash place, fit only to be a dumping ground.

As one prison opponent, a father of a young daughter living in the nearby Cowan community, pointed out during the hearing — Letcher County ought to qualify as an environmental justice community under EPA guidelines. The designation would make the county eligible for federal community development grants. “Letcher County is on the line to again bear the environmental burden,” he said. “We’re told we don’t matter — that our place, environment, water, future, air don’t matter, except as a sacrifice for someone else’s gain.”

At the end of the hearing, Muhammed, Boyer, and other members of the D.C. carpool promised to return and continue the conversation, to build solidarity between locals and the people incarcerated in their prisons.

The next morning, the D.C. carpool drove up to the top of Pine Mountain, a scenic overlook, to see in a new light the geography that had isolated them for so many years. It was shortly after sunrise and the air was chilly. Fog still interlaced the dense tree canopy, but through it they could finally see it: all of Letcher County below, the forested sandstone hills just beginning to show spring growth, the little houses along the hollers and creek beds, without barbed wire or armed guards. The sky that Muhammed fixated on in his cell, no longer just a tiny square of blue but a wide expanse across the horizon.

A version of this article originally appeared online in Inquest, a forum for advancing bold ideas to end mass incarceration in the United States.