Boydton Prison

The Washington Post has an article on the impending closure of the Boydton, Virginia, prison, which will have a devastating effect on the local economy.  I'm particularly interested in this because I've visited Boydton a few times over the past several years to see the remains of Randolph Macon's pre-war campus there.  (And a Confederate monument in front of the courthouse, of course!)  It's a beauitful part of Virginia and I recommend the trip if you're driving down I-85 and can spare the time for a side-trip.  It's also a place I want to go back to sometime to look at their probate records, but that's a story for another time.  What I find important is how the prison represents a lifeline for that small and poor community, especially after the local candy factory and mill closed.  And now even that's going to be closed, in large part because Pennsylvania no longer wants to pay Virginia to house 1000 of their inmates.

This also reminds me of something I've been meaning to blog about for a while now: a trip I took last summer to Chester, Pennsylvania, shortly after the trip I made out to Cherokee, North Carolina.  The nicest -- by far -- building in Cherokee is the Harrah's Casino.  I was there with a friend who studies indigenous people and so one of the things we wanted to do was to see the effect of the casino on the community.  While I fully realize that the casino brings in money to the community, it sure looked like that money wasn't well-distributed.  The casino is beautiful; the surrounding buildings aren't.  The casino is also the only place in Cherokee Country where you can buy alcohol.  Yes, really.  Anyway, to get back to the story, a couple weeks later I was up in Chester and a friend there mentioned to me that the local casino -- which looks remarkably like the one in Cherokee -- is across the street from the Chester jail.  There's something incredibly poignant about the juxtaposition of those two American institutions across the street from each other.  The casino and the jail.  Next time I'm back there I'm going to try to get both in the same picture.

Comments

[Ahasan]

Whereas each are legitimate American Institutions underscoring the dreams and nightmares of a capitalist culture, their territorial juxtaposition is really no more and no less remarkably poignant than the juxtaposed existence of churches and liquor stores and bars that have long existed side by side and across from each other in nearly every inner city in the U.S.