Despite his gaunt frame and sunken eyes, he walks with obvious confidence down Tuscarawas Street. At the intersection with Cherry Street, he turns and stares blankly at the road. The ink on his neck and hands suggests time in prison. Small, pale bruises are noticeable on one arm.
His eyes dart back and forth; he is clearly agitated as he heads toward the McDonald’s parking lot, the same McDonald’s where police tried to revive Christopher J. Burris after a drug overdose with two doses of naloxone last September. It took two more doses from paramedics to save him.
Burris overdosed on the powerful opioid carfentanil, which is 100 times more potent than heroin and is used to sedate elephants. He was eventually sentenced by a Stark County judge to the maximum sentence of 12 months in prison for drug possession.
A passenger in his car, who was also knocked unconscious, pleaded guilty to a charge of possession of a huge amount of drugs, a fifth-degree felony.
For most of the last century in America, urban blacks seemed to fill prison cells disproportionately, more than rural or suburban whites. But that trend has begun to reverse in the past decade, according to a 2016 New York Times analysis of the National Corrections Reporting Program.
The Times reported that rural white Americans are being imprisoned at higher rates and for longer sentences than urban blacks—a huge jump from 10 years ago, when urban, suburban and rural residents were being imprisoned at the same rate. In neighboring Guernsey County, where Stark lives, for example, the incarceration rate has risen 36 percentage points in the past decade.
Much of this overlaps with the opioid epidemic that is crippling much of rural America.
It also coincides with a bipartisan push in Washington to reduce mass incarceration in major cities. While blacks still make up a disproportionate number of prisoners, that number has fallen; the same is true for Latino prisoners. But the number of white prisoners has not fallen at the same rate.
This is partly due to the views of law enforcement officials and judges in rural areas about who should go to prison and for how long.
John Lane, the police chief in East Liverpool, Ohio, saw one of his officers overdose on drug residue that clung to his uniform after arresting a suspect. He favors sending drug users to prison for a very long time.
“My job is to keep the bad guys off the streets,” he said. “I wish we could find more money for addiction treatment. Bigger cities have the resources to fight addiction outside of prison, and we don’t.”
In larger cities, Lane explains, someone caught with a compact amount of drugs can be referred to a drug treatment program, but such programs aren’t as readily available in cash-strapped counties.
Rural America is also seeing rising poverty rates. Since the end of World War II, Americans living in rural counties have had higher poverty rates than those living in concentrated urban areas. This divide is most prevalent in Appalachia, particularly in the South.
As with the drug problem, access to social services for people living in rural areas is complex, mainly due to geographical location: many of the most vulnerable families do not have access to food, health care or mental health services due to lack of public transport or extreme weather conditions.
The ghosting of rural America didn’t happen overnight. The escalation of drugs increased incarceration; the de-escalation of opportunity contributed to both.
The industrialization of agriculture and the loss of production to third countries, as well as technological progress, have deprived us of a very essential element of the mechanism that constitutes the structure of America.
It’s no one’s fault, it’s everyone’s fault. It’s that basic.
If rural America continues to shrink, all of America will shrink, because rural America is as much a part of American identity as the skyscrapers of New York and the sprawling tech campuses of Silicon Valley. Rural America’s deeply rooted cultural traditions, religiosity, music, and storytelling history, and its belief in the nobility of difficult work that includes getting your hands grubby, all contribute to who we are in this country.
So how can we save rural America?
Subsidies from Washington are not the solution – they only neutralize this rugged, self-sufficient, and novel rural spirit.
The broader economic solution would be to create incentives that bring entrepreneurs back to their former hometowns, and to find community leaders who understand that we can’t bring back the industry or population that existed 50 years ago, but we can adapt to this change in a way that makes both economic and social sense.
For decades, in an effort to right past wrongs and injustices to urbanites, our political class has ignored our burgeoning rural population. This ignorance has led to rural Americans becoming a cultural joke: They are snail-paced and uneducated; they live in the past; their time has come and gone.
Our politicians are equally naive: to many Democrats, rural Americans are simply bitter and pitiable; to many Republicans, they are merely voices to be lulled into sleep by religion or false promises of job creation.
We can no longer allow poverty, drug addiction, decaying cities, and economic collapse to be an acceptable part of rural America. We must care more, innovate more, pay attention, or we will lose the people and culture that have been the backbone and fabric of everything our nation has done right since the beginning.
