Less people in the community means less job competition. Incarcerating people — disproportionately from urban areas — in rural facilities removes potential workers from the local labor market and reduces apparent unemployment in sparsely populated counties. This creates a perverse political economy around incarceration that makes reform structurally threatening to the communities that benefit from it.
Small Counties and Wrongful Convictions
Small Counties are often believed to be filled with salt of the Earth people, and usually they are. Sadly there are also poorly trained police officers, sheriffs’ departments without body cameras or other resources, and ego-driven prosecutors out to make a name for themselves, too. Any or all of these factors can drive up wrongful convictions. Consider:
The Beatrice Six — six people convicted of a 1985 murder based on false confessions. All were exonerated by DNA evidence. A textbook case of a small county justice system producing a catastrophic wrongful conviction cluster.
Documented in John Grisham’s The Innocent Man and adapted for Netflix — Ada, Oklahoma’s justice system produced multiple wrongful convictions tied to overzealous prosecution in a small community.
Harris County drove a record rise in exonerations — not a small county, but a documented case of structural prosecutorial practices producing systemic wrongful convictions at scale.
Why Rural Prosecutors and Judges Resist Reform
This is likely another reason why many rural prosecutors and judges fail to adopt rehabilitative services or embrace 21st Century practices. It’s paradoxical, however, as reform measures could create considerably more jobs in the community.
The Vera Institute’s In Our Backyards initiative explores the structural reasons why small towns become hotbeds of mass incarceration. Of course I am not the first professional to have this epiphany. Vera identifies three root causes:
- Unmet needs and poverty — communities without adequate social services turn to the justice system by default
- Lack of community resources — no alternatives to prosecution exist, so prosecution is all that happens
- The Federal Government renting up jail beds — federal contracts for housing immigration detainees and other populations create a direct financial incentive for counties to maintain and expand jail capacity
