How did so many prisons end up getting built on abandoned mine lands in Appalachia? Answering this question is not easy and requires examining a complex web of events and polices that when combined, created the conditions for the coalfield to prison pipeline. As critical geographer Brett Story describes, “the prison is not merely as a building or a place indexed to the ostensibly closed circuit of crime and punishment, but rather as a structure of power whose influence is spatialized across the uneven geographies of the nation.” With this vision in mind, demystifying the coalfield to prison pipeline requires “restaging the prison as a set of relationships dispersed across a set of landscapes we don’t always view or conceive of as carceral.