Prison Economics and Leavenworth, Kansas: A Rural Lens for Decarceration

Picture of the front entrance of USP-Leavenworth taken on September 6, 2009. Photo by Jimmy Emerson.

Since 2011, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has been issuing proposals for a small plot of land in Leavenworth, Kansas. Situated beside the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth—a medium-security prison near military base Fort Leavenworth—this land was to be home to a new Federal Correctional Institution and Federal Prison Camp. Over the last decade, the BOP has documented its project’s cultural impact, environmental importance, and community feedback, and construction plans are slowly coming to fruition alongside a towering budget. As older prisons across America face overcrowding, underfunding, and failing facilities, locations are being scouted for a new wave of construction. This scout for locations has positioned rural America uniquely to define the future of mass incarceration. 

Leavenworth’s construction accompanied a boom in state and local prison construction in the early 19th century—a trend that was primarily a reaction to the abolition of slavery and a need for labor. In states and counties, jails became the most prominent punitive system in America. Leavenworth’s construction, however, marked the United States government’s first transition to federal investment in incarceration. Constructed in 1897, USP-Leavenworth was the nation's first maximum-security federal prison and has held inmates since before Kansas was a recognized state. The incarceration of inmates at Leavenworth began with those who constructed it: the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth provided both the labor to construct the penitentiary and the prison’s first inmates. 

The position of Leavenworth as a military fort and unincorporated territory in the late 19th century made it an advantageous environment for prison construction. As Leavenworth’s population boomed at the turn of the 20th century, the city grew around the prison. Initially, in most of the country, rural communities met prison construction with skepticism. Rural areas saw these prisons as a threat to local property values and the safety of their surrounding neighborhoods. But, as the war on drugs took hold of American politics in the mid-1980s and prisons became a lucrative business, rural communities began seeing prisons as an economic asset.

The drastic increase in incarceration during the war on drugs created an influx of inmates without the space or facilities to hold them. As individuals were sentenced to small prisons, facilities struggled to keep pace. In 1984, USP-Leavenworth underwent a $30 million renovation. The federal government poured relentless energy and funds into expanding prison construction. Marketed as full of government jobs that would stimulate hard-hit rural economies, newly-constructed prisons were seen as an opportunity for the downtrodden communities clamoring to be their hosts. In a proverbial gold rush, a prison opened in rural America every 15 days in the 1990s. In 1997, Pennsylvania sold 200 acres of state-owned farmland to the BOP for just a single dollar. Before long, the population of local prisons began to outpace the populations in the adjacent communities.

Thirty years later, these prisons are aging, in need of repair, and bursting at the seams with inmates. While incarceration rates have not slowed, conditions have worsened, and community dissatisfaction with promised economic solutions has proliferated. In Nebraska, towns used to bid for prisons, desperate for a chance to be the site of construction, but a 2021 search for a Nebraskan town to host a new correctional facility found no takers. The novelty of prisons’ economic potential is gone. Instead, according to University of Missouri Professor Thomas Johnson, these rural towns are left with an industry that has no “linkages to other local businesses in the area.” The creation of a prison economy did not deliver the benefits promised. As counties acquired increasing costs due to autopsies, renovations, and legal fees, the jobs created were mostly outsourced, with the towns’ residents preferring nearby cities for employment instead. While Nebraska seeks a county to host its newest prison, the lack of community enthusiasm and changing attitudes towards incarceration have led to calls for new solutions. 

The current project in Leavenworth faces similar challenges. In 2020, Congress appropriated a total of $356 million to construct the new Federal Correctional Institute and Federal Prison Camp. In an attempt to modernize the Leavenworth prison system, this allocation focuses on creating more prisons right beside the overflowing ones. Kansas Senator Jerry Moran told the Kansas City Business Journal: “This project will… [provide] hundreds of jobs during the multi-year construction of the facilities. At a time when federal prisons are closing around the country, this project will secure jobs for Kansans for decades.” In the context of the failed ventures of prisons as economic stimulus, the inaccuracy of this statement is clear. The jobs provided by the construction of new prisons usually do not return to the community. The closure of federal prisons around the country is a reflection of pushes to end the abuses that proliferate within them. Instead of putting Kansas ahead, Senator Moran’s plan would lock the state into an economy of the past.

In December 2021, the Leavenworth detention center, owned by the for-profit prison company CoreCivic, saw its contract expiring in dire conditions. Over the last decade, the prison has become a “hell-hole where violence is routine and inmates are still on lockdown after one was beaten to death this summer.” Without drastic change, the inmates that have been suffering from dangerous overcrowding and abuse in the CoreCivic facility will likely be moved into other facilities like USP-Leavenworth. By allocating funds to further prison construction, systems of violence will not disappear—they will just proliferate.

The response by rural communities to the crises occurring within the prisons in their backyards leaves them with specific power over the next phase of incarceration. As renovations and expansion become necessary, communities have a choice between continuing to invest in an economic system that has failed them, or pushing back against the cycle of construction and incarceration. Solutions, such as maintaining smaller jail populations and community-based treatment services, would save counties money while removing the structures of abuse the towns were built around. In order to prevent the Leavenworth project from moving into its next phase of construction, the community must push to hold fewer of its members behind bars and reckon with the history of incarceration that has defined it. While America reckons with mass incarceration on a large scale, it is in small, rural towns where the future of the system must be decided.

Claire Burke (BC’25) is a first-year at Barnard College looking to study Sociology with minors in Environmental Humanities and Latin American Studies. Born and raised in Kansas, Claire grew up 20 minutes from USP-Leavenworth. You can find her serving coffee, painting at obscure hours, and looking for nature in NYC.