There's not much violent crime here. There's a bit of the usual enterprise one finds everywhere there are drugs and poor people, which is to say, everywhere. But even the crime here is pretty well predictable. The police chief's assistant notes that if they know the nature and location of a particular crime, they can more or less drive straight to the perpetrator.
There's a great deal of drug use, welfare fraud, and the like, but the overall crime rate throughout Appalachia is about two thirds the national average, and the rate of violent crime is half the national average. Booneville Police Chief Johnny Logsdon is justifiably skeptical of the area's reputation for drug-fueled crime. But he is not blinkered. "We have loggers and coal producers," he says. "We have educators and local businesses, and people in the arts. And we have the same problems they have in every community." He points out that the town recently opened up a $1 million public library — a substantial investment for a town in which the value of all residential property combined would not add up to the big lottery jackpot being advertised all over. He does not deny the severity or scope of the region's problems, but he does think that they are exaggerated by visitors who are here, after all, only because Owsley holds the national title for poorest county. Owsley's dependent underclass has many of the same problems as any other dependent underclass, but with a poverty rate persistently at the 40 percent mark, the underclass plays an outsized role in local life.
