Critical Resistance Central Appalachia (CRCAPP) is CR’s newest chapter. Formed in 2024 and launching in 2025, it’s members anticipate involvement in a number of campaigns and projects, from assisting the Building Community Not Prisons coalition fighting FCI Letcher (a new federal prison proposed for Eastern Kentucky), to providing political education and other support to an anti-jail campaign in Louisville, to long-term organizing around police violence in West Virginia.
The region of Central Appalachia is home to an extensive geography of prisons and jails, alongside a long history of police violence. In fact, Central Appalachia now has one of the highest concentrations of federal prisons, and is a ripe region of resistance and abolitionist organizing. There is a storied legacy of of various communities across the region resisting the prison industrial complex (PIC) – from site fights against jails and prisons, to solidarity media work and mutual aid organizing, to robust prisoner-led resistance and prisoner solidarity projects and campaigns. There is also an established relationship between Appalachian abolitionists and CR, as CRCAPP members helped to organize CR’s southern regional conference, CR South, in 2003, and all founding chapter members have over a decade of history with the organization as movement partners and trusted comrades.
Once launched in early 2025, the chapter will continue to work to strengthen and pollinate the PIC abolitionist impulse that is alive and well in Central Appalachia. More info coming soon!
Critical Resistance Central Appalachia (CRCAPP) is a part of the Building Community Not Prisons coalition (BCNP) to stop federal prison expansion in the region by stopping the proposal for a…
Learn all about CRCAPP’s primary campaign in the Building Community Not Prisons coalition to stop expansion of the federal prison system in Letcher County, Kentucky.
Co-founding CRCAPP chapter member, Judah Schept wrote the feature analysis article of Issue 41 of CR’s The Abolitionist Newspaper (printed in June 2024) all about the campaign to stop FCI Letcher. Check it out for free on CR’s website here.
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