Since the 2016 election, many political observers have taken a greater interest in the social and economic crisis afflicting rural America.

As people who grew up in and then migrated out of small towns, we’ve noticed a conversation that goes something like this: rural America is a “land of self-defeat”, characterized by deepening poverty and despair, worsening infrastructure and public health, and collapsing industry. These depictions, however, miss an important part of this story: the rising criminalization and incarceration of people in rural communities.

In 2017, our colleagues at the Vera Institute of Justice issued a report on an underappreciated phenomenon: at the same time that economic change and policy reforms in America’s biggest cities have resulted in fewer people in jails and prisons, small cities and rural counties are incarcerating more and more people. This week, we’ve released new research on this changing geography of incarceration. Our study is the first recent estimate of the national jail population, and the results are troubling and urgent.

Jails both produce and respond to the litany of horrors recited weekly in media coverage of declining small-town America – overdoses, violence, suicide, joblessness. Research consistently shows that jail impoverishes people and communities; even short jail stays can shred social stability, causing people to lose their homes and jobs. Research also shows that economic decline and increased jail incarceration each lead to higher rates of drug overdose deaths, playing an even bigger role in the overdose crisis than the prescription rate of opioids.

The number of people in jail nationwide has increased over the past four years – rebounding after a brief dip – and it is rural counties that have been the primary driver of that increase, even as major cities continue to lock up fewer people. According to our data, jail incarceration in rural counties has risen a staggering 27% since 2013, while urban incarceration has declined 18%.

Behind the abstract number of people in jail on a given day, there are millions of human beings who cycle in and out of jail each year, racking up unpayable fines, losing their jobs, their children, their health and even their lives.

The “first responders” to the incarceration crisis have been sheriffs and construction firms, who usually offer bigger jails as the solution. The result? A quiet jail boom across the country. As more people are locked up in rural areas and small cities, often for crimes of desperation and poverty, counties are investing more money in incarceration rather than social wellbeing.

Rising incarceration rates must be understood in the context of declining industry, and dwindling state dollars sent to counties. Take Monroe county, Ohio, which recently invested $15.1m in a new jail. Monroe county has one of the highest unemployment rates in Ohio and has suffered the closure of two major aluminum plants. Meanwhile state aid to localities declined nearly 20% in Ohio between 2008 and 2016. In Monroe county and across the country, decades of disinvestment have created a vacuum that jails now fill.

In many communities, the only institutions that have seen increased or sustained investment are the local police force and the county jail. This is despite decades of evidence showing that incarceration is a poor investment in public safety: it has rapidly diminishing effects on crime, and has utterly failed to reduce violent crime. In contrast, investments in education, jobs, housing and health actually produce safety. Rural Americans haven’t been asking for more jails. But jails are all that has been on offer.

Rising incarceration is often framed as an inevitability that local police, judges, prosecutors and county agencies are simply there to manage. But incarceration reflects policy choices and priorities. Despite federal politicians’ frequent platitudes about revitalizing rural America, the federal government has played a key role in the rural incarceration boom. Per diem payments from federal agencies like the US marshals and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and loans and grants from the US Department of Agriculture, are a large part of why cash-strapped, revenue-hungry county governments keep building bigger jails and expand jail budgets.

If you build it, they will come. And that’s what happened. The judges knew there was room, so they threw them in jail County sheriff in upstate New York

The rationale is that bigger jails enable counties to incarcerate undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, people sentenced to state prison, and people held by the US marshals, which in turn generates revenue to offset the cost of detaining poor people before trial, people who have violated their probation and people serving time for low-level offenses.

Counties with small jails also build bigger in order to avoid paying neighboring counties to lock people up when they run out of space. The result has been a carceral arms race sustained by state, local and federal governments. When counties build new jails, they build big, and when a county jail is the largest local community investment, it is utilized accordingly. As one county sheriff in upstate New York told us: “If you build it, they will come. And that’s what happened. The judges knew there was room, so they threw them in jail.”

Mass incarceration in rural counties is absent from mainstream conversations about both criminal justice and rural resilience. But the consequences are real for the millions of disproportionately poor, black and brown Americans who have been arrested and incarcerated in smaller cities and rural America. And while pure top-down policy change has not stemmed the catastrophic rise of incarceration in small communities, a growing multiracial movement of working-class and poor people has begun to articulate a new vision.

In Alamance county, North Carolina, organizers’ principled resistance to the criminalization of poverty has led to the creation of the first rural bail fund. Across the rural areas of southern New York state, people who have lost family members to the violence of incarceration have been demanding divestment from incarceration and reinvestment in community-based resources and care.

What we see in small-town and rural America is not self-defeat, but a struggle for survival. Across the country, people are organizing to change deeply entrenched policies that substitute punishment for a real vision of safety and wellbeing. Candidates and policy makers need to follow their lead.