Who’s fighting whom? Rural-urban resource competition as misdirection

When I first read Professor Pruitt's 2014 book chapter on the rural lawscape, my gut reaction was defensive. I learned that rural areas have fewer courts, longer police response times, and less access to legal services than urban areas. The obvious solution would be to invest more money in these areas so that they have real access to justice. But then came my instinctive urban response: who is going to fund this? The taxes from urban spaces? Why should cities subsidize rural services?

I sat with that reaction for a while. It felt spiteful, and after some time, I realized I'd asked the wrong question.

The zero-sum framing

Pruitt's chapter, “The Rural Lawscape: Space Tames Law Tames Space,” talks about the “mutual constitutivity” of law and rural space. Rural areas have less law because their material characteristics (low population density, distance, sparse built environment) make legal infrastructure expensive to maintain. That sparse legal presence then shapes rural culture, fostering self-reliance and skepticism toward the state.

Photo Credit: Jay Walljasper (2019)

The policy implication seems obvious: if rural residents want more legal infrastructure, they need more funding. And state funding is finite, and largely comes from the taxes of wage-earners in the city. So rural gains mean urban losses, right?

This framing positions rural and urban communities as competitors. It shows up in fights over federal appropriations, in resentment about which communities receive disaster relief, and in arguments about whether “real America” deserves more than coastal cities.

Prior posts on this blog have explored related dynamics. One post on California redistricting quoted a rural rice and walnut farmer: “People in the cities don’t have a clue what it takes to survive out here. I don’t think people that were born and raised in the cities can represent us to the same extent.” This frames the issue as the big-city bureaucrats thinking they know better than the rural folk with their actual lived experiences.

Another post on the Secure Rural Schools Act documented how a rural school superintendent made fourteen trips to Washington over three years to secure funding that Congress acknowledged had bipartisan support but still allowed to lapse. The funding was described as “budget dust” relative to federal spending. If rural needs are so uncontroversial and so cheap, why did it take three years and fourteen flights to get the money allocated?

The actual budget

To help me put all this in perspective, I considered the scale of American federal spending. The FY2025 defense budget request was $849.8 billion. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had access to $28.7 billion in 2025. Customs and Border Protection’s budget was more than $19 billion for that year.

Meanwhile, the Legal Services Corporation asked for only $1.797 billion in 2025, while facing the threat of a proposed 46% budget cut. The LSC distributes funding for civil legal aid to low-income Americans in both rural and urban areas.

Photo Credit: Mina Corpuz (2026)

The access-to-justice gap that the rural lawscape chapter documents is not expensive to address relative to other federal priorities. The entire LSC budget is less than 0.2% of defense spending. Meaningful investment in rural legal infrastructure would cost a rounding error on military appropriations.

This pattern holds across federal spending. In FY2023, 62% of the federal discretionary budget went to militarized programs: war, weapons, law enforcement, incarceration, detention, and deportation. Less than $2 out of every $5 in federal discretionary spending went to education, housing, childcare, disaster relief, environmental protection, or scientific research. Since 2001, the federal government has added $2 to the discretionary budget for militarism for every $1 invested in communities.

Meanwhile, wealth inequality has reached historic levels. In 1963, the wealthiest families had 36 times the wealth of families in the middle. By 2022, they had 71 times the wealth. The incomes of rural men have stagnated for 50 years, while the top 1% saw their incomes increase by 229% between 1979 and 2019. Rural and urban working people have both lost ground to the same forces.

The federal government has the money to invest in rural communities. It simply chooses to fund violence. The scarcity that pits rural against urban is not a fact of nature. It is a policy choice.

The shared problem

Both rural and urban poor face access-to-justice gaps. Rural residents drive hours to reach a courthouse. Urban residents wait months for overburdened public defenders. The material conditions differ, but the underlying problem is the same: inadequate funding for legal infrastructure serving ordinary people.

There is some federal recognition of the specific problems that rural Americans face. The Violence Against Women Act identifies domestic violence in rural areas as a focus for discretionary spending. The Crime Control Act sets aside funds specifically for rural drug enforcement.

But legislative recognition of rural disadvantage does not guarantee meaningful investment. A post on the rural health fund noted that the $50 billion rural health fund in the recent reconciliation bill came alongside $137 billion in projected Medicaid cuts to rural areas over ten years. This is a gesture toward rural needs accompanied by a policy that actively undermines them.

The political function of the divide

When rural and urban residents see each other as competitors for limited resources, they do not build coalitions around shared interests in healthcare, legal access, housing, or economic security. The “why should my taxes go there” instinct, which I initially felt, plays into a framework where ordinary people fight over crumbs, instead of coming together to improve their material conditions.

Photo Credit: Jacob Migdall (2015)

A post challenging the Ezra Klein Show’s framing of rural-urban tension pointed out that rural voters alone lack the numbers to determine national elections. Blaming a “rural coalition” for federal policy obscures the urban voters who supported the same candidates and the structural factors that shape resource allocation. The framing is, as the post puts it, “inflammatory and therefore unhelpful. Of course, it is also inaccurate.”

Rural-urban resentment prevents coalition-building. When a rancher in Modoc County and an unhoused person in Sacramento see each other as competitors, rather than people with shared interests in functional public services, neither builds power.

What is the baseline?

I believe everyone in the United States should have access to a viable, just legal system regardless of where they live. That belief does not require me to think rural and urban interests are identical. It requires me to think they are not fundamentally opposed.

The money exists. The obstacle is political priority. Rural-urban competition is a distraction from the actual allocation choices being made.

Sheriffs, sovereignty, and rural governance

In much of rural America, the sheriff is not simply a law enforcement officer but a political actor with broad policymaking power. Sheriffs, like district attorneys, are elected officials who run for office on local platforms. In almost every jurisdiction, sheriffs operate the county jail. In rural places where courts may be distant and state capacity is limited, the sheriff operates as the face of local governance. In her recent book The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, Jessica Pishko traces the office of the sheriff from its origins to its contemporary role in American governance. Pishko’s work makes manifest that their power is a product of American legal history.

 The office originated in Anglo-Saxon England, where sheriffs functioned as local agents of the crown, responsible for tax collection. In the United States, however, that model was reshaped during the early nineteenth century. Pishko traces the office to the Jacksonian era, the sheriff became an elected official. This move was framed as a democratic improvement on inherited English institutions. Andrew Jackson and his allies sought to expand popular participation in government by multiplying elected offices, imagining the sheriff as a representative of the yeoman farmer and working-class men rather than an arm of elite authority. That historical choice structures the office today, embedding law enforcement authority within electoral politics and helping explain why sheriffs continue to see themselves not only as enforcers of law, but as truest local interpreters.

Control over the county jail is a central source of the sheriff’s authority. As a 2012 blog post, “Rural politics, patronage and (their links to) prisons” observed, in rural areas, the jail is often one of the largest sources of revenue collection. This reinforces the sheriff's authority and provides strong incentives to expand jail capacity and keep beds filled, especially in rural counties with limited tax bases and alternative sources of public funding. 

Credit: "Summit County Sheriff Ford Taurus Interceptor" by Seluryar is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

The county jail also functions as a central site of policymaking. Tasked with operating county jails, the sheriff makes unilateral decisions about booking, detention, intergovernmental contracts, and immigration enforcement. These decisions take on fiscal significance because the sheriff is not merely enforcing criminal law, but managing an enterprise that directly affects the county’s budget. In his 2021 law review article titled Jails, Sheriffs, and Carceral Policymaking, UCLA Law Professor Aaron Littman argues that sheriffs play a central role in driving jail growth. He shows how electoral and fiscal incentives at the county level create pressures that favor jail growth. Since the late 1980s, capacity has grown faster than the jail population itself. Because sheriffs are the officials who initiate and justify new jail construction, this expansion suggests they are actively pushing growth, rather than just responding to crowding. In this way, jail administration transforms the sheriff into a powerful local political actor whose enforcement choices are inseparable from questions of governance. 

Recognizing sheriffs as political actors helps explain their increased prominence in national politics. Sheriffs typically run for office every four years, often in off-cycle elections that depress turnout and insulate incumbents (some jurisdictions it is two years). Many sheriffs campaign on political platforms. Association with the Republican Party is a recent and increasingly prominent phenomenon. As Pishko explains, crime and immigration have become central issues in national conservative politics, making sheriffs attractive allies. Within firmly conservative rural counties, the sheriff has embraced its political dimension. 

In interviews and reporting, Pishko documents the rise of the so-called “constitutional sheriff” movement. The movement argues that sheriffs have a special duty to uphold the original Constitution, positioning the sheriff as a bulwark against distant state and federal authority. 

The COVID-19 pandemic brought these dynamics to a head. When governors issued mask mandates and business-closure orders, local enforcement frequently fell to sheriffs. Many sheriffs, especially those in rural areas, were reluctant to enforce the orders. Sheriffs deployed the rhetoric of the “constitutional sheriff,” to justify refusing to enforce these orders. Sheriffs framed themselves as originalist interpreters of the Constitution tasked with protecting private property, gun rights, and religious freedom from elite liberal technocrats. The movement drew energy from longstanding rural anti-government traditions, including militia movements and the sovereign-citizen ideology.

The rise of the constitutional sheriff is a symptom of hollowed out state capacity in rural America. Sheriffs may seem local and accountable, but they wield extraordinary power with minimal oversight. In rural America, the sheriff's office is not simply enforcing the law, it is often deciding what the law will be.

Rural lack of anonymity in the wake of Tennessee explosion

An explosion yesterday at an ammunition plant in McEwan, Tennessee, population 1643,  left several dead and many missing.  In the Washington Post's coverage of the disaster, I was struck by these comments from the Humphreys County Sheriff in that they reflected rural lack of anonymity.  

Nearly 12 hours after the explosion, law enforcement officers were still trying to contact victims’ families, Davis said, adding that officials planned to work through the night to keep looking for possible survivors, interviewing witnesses and family members, and trying to find out what happened.

“It’s hell on us,” he said. “It’s hell on everybody.”

The close-knit nature of the community compounded the pain. Davis said that he’s “very close” with at least three families involved in the explosion and that the sheriff of the neighboring county could say much the same. That closeness drove Davis to keep looking for survivors, caring for the injured and consoling the bereaved, he said.

“When you have small counties like this, we know each other, we communicate with each other, we love each other,” Davis said. “And that’s what — honestly, it’s what keeps my motivation alive.”

“We’re working for our people,” he added.

This is from the New York Times coverage of the explosion: 

The explosion has shaken the small, tight-knit communities in Hickman and Humphreys Counties, which have a combined population of about 44,000.

One of the communities is known as Bucksnort, where there are winding dirt roads, ample hunting ground and just a handful of businesses. Steven Anderson, who runs a trout farm there, said there were only three points of interest in town — the trout farm, the munitions plant and a gas station with a convenience store where he said workers from the plant often eat lunch.

Postscript:  On October 13, the New York Times ran this story, "A Tennessee Sheriff Becomes the Face of Grief after Plant Explosion."   

Helicopters over Humboldt: a retrospective interview

Growing up in suburban Southern California, Humboldt County seemed like a completely different world. In some ways, I think it probably is. But stories about Humboldt—stories about environmental activists, cannabis cultivation, and, of course, Bigfoot—have always fascinated me. From bitter campus protests to its history as a major logging hub, Humboldt has been a major talking point on this blog for years. I wanted to contribute something to the already robust list of stories, but there was a problem: I have never been to Humboldt, and I don't have any stories about it!

My solution was to interview a friend, "M." He grew up at the end of a dirt road, on 44 acres of land ~15 minutes from the town of Redway. Initially, our conversation was general—we discussed his upbringing in the '80s and '90s and rural life in Southern Humboldt. But the piece of the story we kept coming back to (perhaps unsurprisingly) was marijuana. What M ultimately chose to share was, essentially, a brief oral history of cannabis cultivation in Southern Humboldt.

It started, of course, with the hippies. According to M, they were "mostly college-educated idealists, looking to live off the land." Most were looking for tranquility, self-sufficiency, an escape from city living. In rural Southern Humboldt, "they found it for cheap." These initial community members were "rich in natural resources, but not in money." There was an issue, though—In Southern Humboldt, you can't grow much. "It's an interesting landscape for agriculture. Most of it is... these vast conifer forests. It's not really agricultural land."

 Enter the Marijuana plant. 

"Cannabis, during those early years, was something that [people] perhaps stumbled upon as a means of generating income for their community." By the time M was born, it had blossomed into a "spectrum of growers." On the one hand, there were "those that were fully in it, willing to grow more, risk jailtime, and supply cities that were farther away." For them, cannabis was a livelihood. 

On the other hand, "you had the mom-and-pop operations that were just a small greenhouse, or a few plants hidden in the woods." For them, cannabis was just "used to supplement income from whatever job they had in the local community." By the '80s and '90s, both groups were facing serious challenges from local, state, and federal law enforcement.

At the heart of our conversation was a story about Vietnam-era helicopters flying low across the treetops around his home. 

You could hear them coming from miles away—and we'd all run out into the yard... to have that experience; ok, we're on a homestead, living in nature, on a homestead off the grid; to have that seclusion, that self sufficiency, and then to hear an army helicopter disrupt the tranquility was pretty strange...

This profound juxtaposition was the result of CAMP: the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting. Managed by the California Department of Justice, CAMP united local, state, and federal agencies in a concerted effort to eradicate illegal marijuana grow operations all over the State of California. Launched in 1983, CAMP activity escalated throughout the 90s. 

In Northern California, CAMP culminated in Summer 1990 with operation Green Sweep. During that operation, the federal government deployed active-duty troops to Southern Humboldt in a drastic escalation of previous drug-policing methods. The operation was met with large-scale protests, some of which became violent. According to M, the "community felt it was being targeted and really terrorized by this government-funded operation." 

Despite its attempts at deterrence, M felt CAMP only increased profits for determined growers: 

when you have these aggressive tactics, the beneficiaries are the ones that are able to continue [growing]. If you increase the focus and the efforts to disrupt the exchange of product... you increase the price. That's what happened: you had cannabis that wasn't initially of significant value, [skyrocketing] to four or five thousand dollars a pound. There were many in the community that felt the reward was worth the risk: friends and neighbors that either faced jailtime or were impacted by friends and family getting locked up for cultivation...

M recalled one community member, busted with what was later described as "a handful of sprouts. They slapped a 5-year sentence on him. He had a young daughter. But he knew the risks..." 

Sometimes, the dangers went beyond jail time. 

As far as the actual exchange of the product for cash, I've heard there were buyers that would come up from the city; they would go up to someone's house, and you would hope to establish some kind of rapport and trust. 

But finding a buyer, at least at first, entailed "meeting at the bottom of a dirt road, and hoping for the best." For one of M's high school classmates, this dynamic proved deadly. "[He] became affiliated with some buyers from the Bay Area... perhaps he didn't put a lot of trust in them. They came up and robbed him, he resisted, and they shot him. He was 17 or 18." 

"It's interesting," M remarked towards the end of our conversation, "to return to that time period and compare it to the traditional American high school experience." 

I am inclined to agree. 

M now works in Portland, Oregon as a registered nurse. When asked if he ever saw himself settling down back in Humboldt, he responded with a simple "no," adding briefly that "too much has changed."

Kentucky sheriff shoots, kills judge in rural courthouse

 Here's an excerpt from the New York Times coverage of these sensational events: 

The sheriff of a rural eastern Kentucky county walked into a courthouse on Thursday afternoon and shot and killed a district judge in his chambers after an argument, the police said.

Mickey Stines, 43, the sheriff in Letcher County, turned himself in after shooting Judge Kevin Mullins and was charged with first-degree murder, Trooper Matt Gayheart of the Kentucky State Police said at a news conference on Thursday evening.

The shooting happened at about 2:55 p.m. inside the Letcher County Courthouse in Whitesburg, a city in southeastern Kentucky.

The sheriff was taken to a local jail and had been cooperative with investigators, Trooper Gayheart said.

“This community is small in nature, and we’re all shook,” the trooper said.

* * *

The news stunned the residents of Letcher County, which is about 110 miles southeast of Lexington and is home to about 21,500 people.

Whitesburg, incidentally, is home to the Center for Rural Affairs, which publishes the Daily Yonder.  It suffered severe flooding in 2022.  

Literary Ruralism (Part XLVII): Kent Haruf's "The Tie that Binds"

Kent Haruf's 1984 novel, The Tie that Binds, leads with something of a contrast--or perhaps it's a more  subtle distinction--between rural and urban.  The opening paragraph also introduces one of the principal characters, Edith Goodnough, whose life the novel chronicles from her birth.  Indeed, it goes farther back still, to her parents' migration from Iowa to eastern Colorado and the fictitious small town of Holt, where all of Haruf's novels are set: 

EDITH GOODNOUGH isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there in that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bud Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough. (p. 1)

Sheriff Sealy--representing "the law" plays roles throughout the novel.  He is a peer, for example, of the narrator, Sanders Roscoe.  

(c) Lisa R. Pruitt 2011
Kilmarnock, Virginia 

Early on in the novel, Roscoe is visited by a journalist from the Denver Post, and this exchange ensues: 

“Mr. Roscoe,” he says. “I’m Dick Harrington. With the Post.” 

“That so?” I say. “I hope you’re not selling anything.” 

“No,” he says. “The Denver Post. It’s a newspaper. Maybe you’ve heard of it.” 

“Sure. I’ve heard of it,” I say. “But we keep it out on the back porch where we scrape our boots, so we don’t have to track cow into the kitchen.” Then I throw my head back and laugh. “It saves throw rugs,” I tell him. 

But he doesn’t think that’s real funny; he looks at me like How can I be so dumb and live? Guys like him think they drive the 150 miles out here due east from Denver and when they get here we don’t know anything. They think they have to educate us poor dumb country bastards. They think we don’t know what the Denver Post is. We know all right. We just don’t give a damn. (p. 6) 

How interesting that Haruf offered this observation four decades ago because it's surely even more true now--this assumption that rural folks are stupid.  I am reminded of this recent empirical academic work by Michael Carolan of Colorado State University.  It documents the annoyance of rural Coloradans at their urban counterparts, an annoyance born of feeling unseen and unappreciated.  

The Tie that Binds also features this comparison of rural and urban teens' experiences; it also acknowledges the role of generational change. This excerpt features Edith Goodnough as a teen, along with her younger brother Lyman. 

BUT if Edith and Lyman had been city kids, things might have been different. City kids, even in 1915, had some opportunities to escape which farm kids didn’t have. City kids could take off and walk ten or fifteen blocks or jump on a trolley car going across town and end up as far away from home as if they were in another state entirely, another country even. Then they could make their mark, or not make it, and start their life over or end it, but whatever happened, at least the ties would have been cut, the limits of home would have been broken.

Or if Edith and Lyman had been country kids living now, alive and howling in the 1970s, things might have been different too. It’s TV and movie shows and high school and 3.2 beer and loud music and paved highways and fast cars (and what goes on and comes off too in the back seats of those cars, until maybe Bud Sealy shines his flashlight in through the side windows)—it’s all those things and more that country kids have now, and you can’t tell a farm kid from a town kid, even with a program. They’re just about all the same, all alike in their cars, driving up and down Main Street every Saturday night, honking and howling, in Holt, Colorado. 

But Edith and Lyman didn’t have those things, those chances and opportunities to escape. They were farm kids in the second decade of this violent century, and they were stuck. Their mother died early, like I’ve already said; their father was Roy Goodnough, and even if he was a raging madman sometimes, even if he yelled too much at them, he was still their father.  (p. 52-53)

I am not certain I agree with Haruf that city kids and country kids are now so indistinguishable... but I did love this novel, not least for its intimate, small-town setting.  

Holt is said to be based on Yuma, Colorado, where Haruf once lived.  Interestingly, Yuma was in the news yesterday because of a hail storm there on Monday.