Rising incarceration rates in the rural South--and what to do about them

Olivia Paschal reports for Facing South, "How to reverse the rural South's rising incarceration rate."  The dateline is Madison County, Kentucky, population 92,987.  An excerpt follows:

In rural America, incarceration rates have been climbing over the last decade, even as they've plummeted in cities. The rural-urban disparities in criminal justice are not limited to incarceration: A recent study by Sam Sinyangwe, a data scientist and activist, found that police killings are rising in rural ZIP codes, even as they drop in urban ones. While crime rates in rural areas are significantly lower than in urban centers, incarceration there continues apace; the majority of people held in the South’s rural jails are in pretrial detention. 

Counties are building new and larger jails, and some are accepting new prison contracts — part of what scholars term "industries of last resort" for rural counties whose economies and budgets have struggled since the farm crisis of the 1980s and deindustrialization in the 1990s. 

Six other posts about this rural jails phenomenon nationally are here.