Exploitation and Rehabilitation: California’s Prison Fire Camps AUTHOR: Madeleine Fraix ABSTRACT: This paper addresses the complex interplay of social, political, and economic factors that influence the positionality of incarcerated individuals working in California’s prison fire camps. The argument highlights the ways in which government and media responses to climate related-disasters, specifically the recent wildfires in California, create neoliberal narratives that render structural and institutionalized violence invisible. Through a discussion informed by concepts such as “structural and symbolic violence,” “liminal space,” and “biopower,” this analysis aims to emphasize the importance of ethnographic work in maintaining a less fragmented picture of prison fire camps -- one that addresses the intricacies of rehabilitation and exploitation among incarcerated workers. INTRODUCTION Since 1972, the area burned by wildfires in the state of California has increased fivefold (Meyer). Immense blazes such as the 2017 Thomas Fire and the 2018 Camp and Mendocino Complex Fires dominate this trend, devouring the state and exposing what American sociologist Eric Klinenberg identifies as a “connection among state retrenchment, rising fear of violence, and vulnerability” (Rogers 309). Klinenburg highlights how climatic conditions have forced a government response that prioritizes profit, works to conceal the social and political dimensions of such disasters, and further subjugates marginalized communities. Furthermore, this current public health and climate crisis has highlighted the ethnoracial and class divisions that influence social and health outcomes. Governmental institutions and organizations have framed California’s wildfires as seemingly “natural disasters,” allowing them to render damages and deaths as invisible and a product of individual failures, rather than carelessness on the part of these institutions and decision makers. This masking of structural inequalities associated with California’s wildfires, and the state’s response to them, has been applied to the very individuals who fight fires, specifically incarcerated laborers who are “hired” by the government. It is critical to recognize how the state constructs and manages roles or prison labor while perpetuating the vulnerabilities of incarcerated people working in prison fire camps. Additionally, these analyses must be viewed within the historical context of prison labor in the United States. It is necessary to look beyond the simple, moral binaries of prison labor as either a necessary societal good or modern slave labor. A deeper analysis that takes into account the perspectives of incarcerated individuals working in
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California’s prison fire camps shows the dynamics and impacts on incarcerated people to be much more complex. It may be both exploitative, and, potentially, rehabilitative. In turn, discussing the fire camps as a liminal space between the walled-in prison and the outside world is essential for understanding the intricacies of these lived-experiences and their intersections with state power, health, and justice. First, the following will provide a brief historical context of prison labor within the development of the United States penal system. This backdrop is essential for the subsequent discussion addressing the relationship between social discipline and prison labor, specifically the significance of structural and symbolic violence that perpetuates the institutionalized violence of the prison system. I will then look deeper into the organization of California’s prison fire camps, both in terms of the economy and the everyday activities of workers themselves. From there, I aim to deconstruct two competing ethical frameworks of prison fire camp labor in the context of neoliberal attitudes of governance, emphasizing the contrast between government narratives and ethnographic work done in the camps themselves. I conclude with an analysis of camp environments as liminal spaces, emphasizing how their very positionality has made room for mechanisms of state power in relation to social categorization. HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF PRISON LABOR The imposition of profitable labor as penalization for a crime dates back to 16th century European “houses of correction” (LeBaron). In the United States, the prison system took hold after the dissolution of slavery. Section One of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution declares, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (US Const. amend. XIII). While this revision abol-
