The group’s first meeting was in March 2016 at Tom Sexton’s house, a spacious three-bedroom apartment a few doors down from the Harry M. Caudill Memorial Library on Main Street in Whitesburg, Kentucky. Time was already running out. Sexton and eight of his friends, most of them, like Sexton, environmentalists or other activist-types who had surfed between nonprofit jobs, huddled in his living room and tallied their resources against those of their opponents. It was a grim accounting. Between them, Sexton and his friends had a few decades of organizing experience, some youthful social media savvy, and at least one person willing to chain herself to heavy machinery. As Sexton might say, that and a buck fifty will get you a cup of coffee at the Double Kwik—and probably a felony charge. Their opponents were the richest men in the county, backed by one of the most powerful members of Congress, the federal government, and anyone else who stood to benefit from the construction of a $444 million federal prison in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky.



A month earlier, the area’s congressman, Representative Hal Rogers of Kentucky’s 5th district, had secured funding to build the prison atop a former surface mine in the hamlet of Roxana, around 20 minutes west of Whitesburg. Rogers’s achievement was the culmination of an arduous process that had begun back in 2005, when one of his aides suggested to local community members that the best way to improve the county’s prospects was to bequeath it a prison. The people Rogers’s aide spoke to belonged to the Letcher County Planning Commission, a private enterprise with a public-sounding name, composed of business and civic leaders in the area. Its co-chair and most public face was Elwood Cornett, a retired educator and practicing preacher. The other co-chair was Don Childers, an influential oil and gas magnate who made his fortune supplying regional mining and trucking interests. Childers was a major contributor to Hal Rogers’s campaigns and to the Republican Party of Kentucky. For Rogers, the prison would be the crowning achievement of a career defined by his prodigious ability to bring huge sums of federal money to his home district, much of which, according to a 2011 investigation by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, ended up in the hands of a close network of family members, former aides, donors, and business associates. For this talent, Rogers has been dubbed the Prince of Pork.

Tom Sexton was not the prince of anything. He worked for the Sierra Club of Eastern Kentucky, but was better known for bullshitting and rabble-rousing. He claimed to dress according to the Italian principle of sprezzatura, which he liked to translate, in his creaky drawl, as “disheveled elegance.” Sexton once had political ambitions of his own. Inspired by meeting Bill Clinton in Little Rock, he moved home to Whitesburg in 2012 and ran for city council. After tying his opponent (each received 282 votes), he won his seat on the flip of a Sacagawea dollar. Two years later, when he took the fall for an unpopular payroll tax passed by the council, his political career hit the rocks. But hey, that’s democracy. Meanwhile, Sexton told me, Hal Rogers had presided over one of the poorest congressional districts “for damn near 40 years now and made zero progress.” Rogers had won almost every election in a landslide. In the non-landslides, he ran unopposed.

By the March 2016 meeting, Sexton’s council days were long over. On his bookshelf, a picture of him with Bill Clinton had been defaced with devil horns (on the latter). And Sexton and his friends were now about to undertake a much more quixotic task than getting 300 people you’ve known all your life to vote for you. Many of Sexton’s friends had been radicalized by the Black Lives Matter movement, which had forced a profound reckoning over race and punishment in America. As they saw it, the state built prisons as a way of recruiting the rural white working-class into the economy of racist mass incarceration. And this group wasn’t willing to be recruited. By their lights, the moral calculus was straightforward: If you won’t stand against injustice when it could benefit you, what good is your commitment to justice?

For many in the group, the political was also entwined with the personal. They were intimately familiar with the horrors of the carceral system and its entanglement with poverty. One member had a close family friend who was locked up in Ohio. Others had friends in and out of jail. Lill Prosperino, who grew up in Big Cowan, Kentucky, had watched their mother die of a preventable disease because she didn’t have health insurance. Prosperino’s stepdad, a coal miner, was out of work, and Prosperino’s father was in jail. “We exchanged bad jobs for worse,” said Ada Smith, whose cousin works at U.S. Penitentiary Big Sandy in Martin County. The prison wasn’t underground, but it might as well have been. Both jobs were dangerous. Generations of miners sacrificed their lungs and limbs to King Coal. But prison work wasn’t just hard on the body; it was bad for the human soul to be responsible for another person’s unfreedom.