I grew up in Palestine, West Virginia, which is mostly a farming community; there aren't a lot of jobs.

In the false American imagination, West Virginia is a joke or else it's a charity case; but more than anything it is unseen, an invisible architecture of labor and struggle; and incarceration shares this invisibility, hidden at the center of everything; our slipshod remedy for an abiding fear, danger pinned to human bodies and then slotted into bunk beds you can't see from any highway.

Deep down, I'm just a West Virginia hillbilly.

People in West Virginia do have cars. We have indoor plumbing. We even use knives and forks.

In West Virginia, the most vulnerable people we have are people who get up every morning and go to work.

I've been a conservative in West Virginia before that was popular. I've seen a change in West Virginia. Not a change in John Raese, but a change in West Virginia and a change in America.