John Eason, Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation
| Author | Judah Schept |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474518756596 |
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Punishment & Society 21(2)
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May-Len Skilbrei
University of Oslo, Norway
John Eason, Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation,
University of Chicago Press: Chicago, IL, 2016; 240 pp. ISBN: 978–0226410340, $105
(hbk), $32.50 (pbk)
Slowly but surely, scholarship is revealing the complex dimensions of prison
growth in rural areas of the United States. As we know from demographers, the
United States engaged in a massive prison build up during the 1980s and 1990s,
reaching a fevered pitch of 25 new prisons each year in the 1990s, or 245 between
1990 and 1999 (Beale, 1998; see also Huling, 2002). Subsequent ethnographic,
journalistic and archival research has examined the context-specific ways that
prison growth occurred in, and impacted, specific states and their rural communi-
ties. This work has rigorously examined the political economies and cultural pol-
itics of Arizona (Lynch, 2010); California (Gilmore, 2007), Colorado and Texas
(Williams, 2011), Central Appalachia (Perdue and Sanchagrin, 2016; Ryerson,
2013; Schept, 2014, 2017); New York (Huling, 2002; King, Mauer and Huling
2004; Morrell, 2012; Norton, 2016), Pennsylvania (Che, 2005), and several other
states in the west including Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Idaho (Bonds,
2013, 2012, 2009). John Eason’s new book, The Big House on the Prairie: Rise of
the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation, makes a significant contribution to this
growing apprehension of the carceral state by examining the rural and multiracial
community of Forrest City, Arkansas, home to the Forrest City Federal
Correctional Institution.
Eason moved with his family to Forrest City in order to conduct ethnographic
fieldwork into the politics of prison siting and construction. Indeed, many of the
book’s greatest contributions are enabled by Eason’s methodological approach.
While Eason is clearly proficient in statistical data analysis (see, for example,
Eason, 2010, where he demonstrates the multiracial nature of many rural
Book reviews
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communities home to prisons around the United States), it is the case study
approach he employs in the book that allows for understanding the role of local
cultural politics in the rise and stability of mass incarceration. Eason is able to
engage numerous threads of existing arguments about rural prison growth through
grounded examinations of local history and through interviews with local actors.
Big House on the Prairie contributes significantly to the work of rural sociolo-
gists, critical race theorists, prison geographers and others interested in the polit-
ical dynamics of prison siting and placement, mass incarceration, and the political
economic patterns of racial capitalism that produced the US carceral state. Eason’s
focus on stigma management and the role of local cultural politics in shaping the
narrative around economic development adds an important element to the existing
body of research. While the book is less driven than other work by analyses of
broader political...
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