An Environmental History of Incarceration in California, 1851-1990
Datum
2018-06
Autor:innen
Zeitschriftentitel
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Verlag
University of Oregon
Zusammenfassung
This thesis uses official reports, legislative documents, and news articles to understand the relationship between incarceration, labor, and the environment. In the nineteenth century reformers, state officials, the general public, and free, white laborers all debated the future of incarceration in California. By 1880, the state constructed Folsom State Prison as a natural resource colony, prioritizing natural resource development and preservation of the racial hierarchy of California’s labor system over concerns about moral rehabilitation and health. In the early twentieth century, Progressive and Conservation Era ideas about outdoor labor and moral transformation offered a resolve to the nineteenth century tensions. In highway camps and prison farms, incarcerated workers expanded capitalism to new rural fringes. The state presented these civilizing, masculinizing projects that rehabilitated prisoners’ minds and bodies. In the post-war period, the highway camps evolved into conservation camps. The incarcerated workers were disproportionately urban men of color who labored to develop natural resources and protect white, rural communities from natural hazards. In the eyes of white Californian’s, the prisoners’ heroism earned them a degree of cultural citizenship. However, the camps contributed to imbalances in environmental citizenship in post-war California: prisoners were equated with natural resources; the camps contributed to the unequitable geography of natural hazard management; and like other penal reforms, they did not quell the urban disorder that arose in part because of environmental injustices in communities of color. Environmental degradation in rural economies and the emergence of law-and-order conservatism shifted priorities, and rural whites demanded prisons to provide employment. In the end, California incarceration made wasted landscapes and bodies productive, and prioritized natural resource and hazard management over the benefits prisoners received from the “wholesome outdoors.”
Beschreibung
105 pages. Presented to the Department of History and the Robert D. Clark Honors College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science June 2018
Schlagwörter
Environmental studies, History, Public works, Prison, Labor, California, Incarceration, Natural resources