# The Specter of Waste: Incarcerated Bodies, “Healthy” Labor, and the Production of Recreational Forests

## Anaïs Lefèvre

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Anaïs Lefèvre. The Specter of Waste: Incarcerated Bodies, “Healthy” Labor, and the Production of Recreational Forests. Modern American History, 2025, pp.1-22. 10.1017/mah.2025.3. hal-05157192

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

# The Specter of Waste: Incarcerated Bodies, “Healthy” Labor, and the Production of Recreational Forests

Anaïs Lefèvre

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Anglophone Studies Department and The HDEA Research Lab, Sorbonne University, Paris, France
Email: anais.lefevre.1997@gmail.com

## Abstract

In the post-World War II period, as they faced a spate of prison riots and rising concerns about juvenile delinquency, many states set up penal forestry camps. Portrayed as a progressive step that would make incarcerated people fit for freedom through healthy work in natural settings, forestry camps also promised to contribute to the public good by fulfilling the forests' manpower needs. At a moment when outdoor leisure was increasingly popular, the work of incarcerated workers helped create infrastructures that would make forests accessible to visitors. Using primarily the case of Washington state, this article shows how and why incarcerated people became a material and ideological resource for the state. It also shows how official discourse about forestry camps clashed with material and human realities on the ground.

In 1961, an article in the daily newspaper in Vancouver, Washington, celebrated the five-year anniversary of the nearby Larch Mountain penal forestry camp. Located at the heart of the Yacolt Burn, a 100,000-acre area devastated by fire in the summer of 1902, Larch Mountain camp had bleak beginnings for the first incarcerated men who were transferred there from the state penitentiary. Arriving in the dead of winter, they found a snow-covered set of buildings providing only the barest necessities. Yet, as the author of the article noted, much of the initial “desolation” had been “conquered by the men themselves.” They had removed brush and snags, planted shrubbery, created roads, and even built a chapel in their “free” time.<fnref n="1" /> By 1961, the camp was still “rustic” but, according to prison administrators, it was fulfilling its essential mission, which was to “rehabilitate forests as well as men.”<fnref n="2" /> That success could be measured in precise figures; in five years, the men at Larch Mountain had reforested 941 acres of land and completed twenty-six miles of fire line road across the forest, among other achievements. In the discourse of administrators and newsmen, the moral rehabilitation of incarcerated men was equated with physically hard work in the forest. In this, Larch Mountain camp was no exception. It was, rather, part of a broader trend in postwar U.S. punishment practices and philosophy.

In the years between the end of World War II and the mid-1970s, prison officials and criminologists overwhelmingly subscribed to the rehabilitative ideal. The idea of reforming

I wish to extend my deepest thanks to Andrew Diamond, Bryant Simon, and Jake Wolff, who read several drafts of this article, offered invaluable suggestions, and encouraged me to submit it for publication. I am also very grateful for the constructive advice of the three anonymous reviewers who have commented on this work. Finally, this article might not have existed without Yves Figueiredo’s inspiring paper on Frederick Law Olmsted’s conception of nature and mental health at the 2023 HDEA conference on Health and Wellness (Sorbonne-Université).

<footnote n="1">¹“Honor Camp Anniversary,” *The Columbian*, Feb. 17, 1961.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²*Ibid.*</footnote>
incarcerated people in prisons was as old as the invention of the penitentiary itself, but, starting
in the late nineteenth century, some prison experts came to use a medical framework to depict
the objectives and methods of penal institutions.<fnref n="3" /> By the postwar period, this discourse had, in
David Garland's words, become the “hegemonic, organizing principle” of the penal system for
prison officials, justifying the development of programs that purportedly aimed at “curing”
incarcerated men and women of their criminality by emphasizing individual treatment in
institutional classification, programs, and sentencing.<fnref n="4" /> In recent years, historians have shown
how the rehabilitation framework fell apart, giving way to penological policies focused on
incapacitation in the era of mass incarceration. They have also shown that the rehabilitation
ideal was used to stymie political organizing and to justify oppressive patterns of medical
intervention through coerced sterilizations and behavior modification programs, and they have
sought to recover the agency of incarcerated people as they navigated these “rehabilitative”
institutions.<fnref n="5" />

Since the start of the post-rehabilitation era in the mid-1970s, it has sometimes become
difficult to grasp the features that made this ideology effective in the first place. Chief among
them was the fact that many of these “rehabilitative” programs emphasized the therapeutic value
of work, either through vocational training or employment, within carceral institutions.<fnref n="6" /> This
therapeutic vision of work is also related to uses of labor in medical settings. The concept of
“rehabilitation” had been widely used in the post-World War I context when discussing the need
to return injured soldiers to “productive” civilian life, including through vocational programs.<fnref n="7" />
More generally, “occupational therapy” had long been part of the treatment offered in hospitals,
especially for patients suffering from mental illness, and work programs assumed a critical
importance in asylums. Work was both pragmatically necessary for the running of asylums and
depicted as a therapeutic program by medical professionals.<fnref n="8" /> In the rehabilitation era, this would
also be true of work in prisons.<fnref n="9" /> Making incarcerated people work enabled penal institutions to
function, by keeping maintenance costs to a minimum, and by reducing what authorities

<footnote n="3">³Michael Meranze, *Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835* (Chapel Hill, 1996); David J. Rothman, *The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic* (New York, 2002 [1971]); James J. Beha, “Redemption to Reform: The Intellectual Origins of the Prison Reform Movement Uncertain Landscape of Election Law,” *New York University Annual Survey of American Law* 63, no. 4, (2007–2008): 773–806.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴David Garland, *The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society* (Oxford, 2002), 35. See also: Lee Bernstein, *America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s* (Chapel Hill, 2010); and Francis A. Allen, *The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal: Penal Policy and Social Purpose* (New Haven, 1979).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵Natalie Lira, *Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900–1950s* (Oakland, 2021); Emily Thuma, “Against the “Prison/Psychiatric State”: Anti-violence Feminisms and the Politics of Confinement in the 1970s,” *Feminist Formations* 26, no. 2 (2014): 26–51; Dan Berger, *Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era* (Chapel Hill, 2014), 98; Melanie Newport, *This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration* (Philadelphia, 2022); Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, *Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America* (Princeton, 2017).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶For instance, see O. B. Ellis, “Correctional Growth through Co-Operative Effort,” *American Journal of Correction*, 1959: 6–33.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷Beth Linker, *War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America* (Chicago, 2011); Richard Verville, *War, Politics, and Philanthropy: The History of Rehabilitation Medicine* (Lanham, MD, 2009), 18.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸Elodie Edwards-Grossi, *Mad with Freedom: The Political Economy of Blackness, Insanity, and Civil Rights in the U.S. South, 1840–1940* (Baton Rouge, 2023); W. J. Dunlop, “A Brief History of Occupational Therapy,” *Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy* 1 no. 1 (1933): 6–10; Kathryn L. Reed, “Henry B. Favill and the School of Occupations: Origins of Occupational Therapy Practice and Education,” *Occupational Therapy in Health Care* 33, no. 2 (2019): 159–180.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹Anne E. Parsons, *From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945* (Chapel Hill, 2018), 44–66.</footnote>
perceived as disciplinary problems. At the same time, it was an essential mechanism through
which penologists believed they could make rehabilitation work, a “therapy” in its own right.<fnref n="10" />
Work was simultaneously an agent of health, moralization, and control.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the penal forestry programs that were developed in the postwar years. Inspired by the success of New Deal era experiments by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in reshaping male bodies and psyches in the forest, those praising penal forestry programs suggested that forestry work created not only healthy bodies but also healthy behavior, making incarcerated people fit to return to free society.<fnref n="11" /> As historian Volker Janssen has shown in the case of California, incarcerated forestry workers were conceptualized as “citizen-soldiers,” whose sacrifice for the public good was associated with redemption and the recovery of “manly citizenship.” Janssen has also excavated the racial and political implications of locating forestry camps in predominantly white rural areas: although the urban crisis may have seemed far away from the forests, forestry camps created a connection between the Sierra mountains and the inner cities from which many incarcerated people originated; they became part of a “transurban ghetto” that fueled urban decline.<fnref n="12" />

This article builds on these insights and adds to the conversation in three ways. By grounding the discussion in national debates about prison labor and rehabilitation, and by choosing different case studies (Washington state and the federal system), this analysis demonstrates that penal forestry was not solely a California project, but one that was rooted in the larger U.S. penal and political context of the mid-twentieth century, thereby transcending local or regional particularities. In addition, this paper focuses not on the networks of inequality and decline that outdoor labor programs have contributed to entrenching, but on the reasons why the state embarked on this course in the first place. Put simply, I attempt to uncover how forestry camps turned incarcerated bodies into a material and ideological resource for the state. Materially, incarcerated people fulfilled manpower needs in the forest (another public resource); ideologically, officials’ association of that labor with the concept of healthfulness served to promote the rehabilitation ideal. Thus, forestry camps in the rehabilitation era stand in contrast to representations of incarcerated people as a “warehoused” population benefiting ailing local economies only insofar as the carceral system creates jobs for free people.<fnref n="13" />

Finally, this article seeks to explore the connection between the work of incarcerated people in the forests, and the ability of free citizens to access healthy outdoor leisure. Although leisure is usually imagined (and sold) as the antithesis of work, work sustains its existence.<fnref n="14" /> In this case, part of the benefits yielded by the labor of incarcerated people consisted in enabling others to take advantage of the forests’ recreational potentialities. Penal forestry provided material amenities to visitors, while also paradoxically intensifying fears of crime and destruction.

<footnote n="10">¹⁰For instance, see J. M. Forrester, "The Georgia Penitentiary System," *American Journal of Correction* (Jan.–Feb. 1968): 18–22.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹Bryant Simon, “‘New Men in Body and Soul’: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Transformation of Male Bodies and the Body Politic,” in Virginia Scharff, ed., *Seeing Nature through Gender* (Lawrence, KS, 2003), 80–102; Rachel Louise Moran, *Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique* (Philadelphia, 2018).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹²Volker Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest: Public Work, Civil Defense, and Prison Camps in Postwar California,” *The Journal of American History* 96, no. 3 (2009): 702–726.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³For reflections on the connections between mass incarceration, prison siting, and economic decline, see for instance: John Major Eason, *Big House on the Prairie: Rise of the Rural Ghetto and Prison Proliferation* (Chicago, 2017); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, *Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California* (Berkeley, 2007); and Brett Story, *Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America* (Minneapolis, 2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴For a reflection on the dichotomy between work and leisure, see Cindy S. Aron, *Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States* (New York, 1999), 70–71. About the commodification of the ethos of leisure, see Elsa Devienne, *Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth Century Los Angeles* (New York, 2024), 22.</footnote>
Incarcerated bodies were perceived as both an essential resource and a potential pollution of natural spaces.

Forestry camps were rooted in intertwined conceptions of nature, health, and morals. Ever since the early nineteenth century, parks and the open air have been associated with health and contrasted with the “miasmas” of crowded urban landscapes.<fnref n="15" /> Landscape designers like Frederick Olmsted had also promoted parks as leisure spaces that would discipline the “lawless classes of the city.”<fnref n="16" /> Yet, it was not enough for prisoners to enjoy the fresh air passively to be rehabilitated. Instead, echoing Theodore Roosevelt’s praise of the “strenuous life” in the open air, and following the example of CCC participants, prisoners had to perform hard physical labor in the forest.<fnref n="17" /> That work would be productive for society at the same time as it theoretically remade them into honest citizens; in forestry camps, incarcerated people were both the patients being cured, and the agents helping to maintain the health of forests and nearby communities. Forestry programs were simultaneously “re-directing twisted lives and re-foresting wasted lands.”<fnref n="18" />

This fusion of these two objectives—the rehabilitation of men and the rehabilitation of forests—was not an accident. Forests and prisons were two places where officials invested state power with a view to ensuring health. Concerns about the health of forests, and their ability to serve human needs through resource extraction or otherwise, represented the key rationales behind the takeover of forests by the state.<fnref n="19" /> Meanwhile, in carceral institutions, health considerations were deeply intertwined with the transformation of incarcerated people into productive citizens, while idleness was seen as morally and physically crippling. In its management of both prisoners and forests, the state sought to avoid the “waste” of resources it had claimed to care for, administer, and improve. Relatedly, forestry programs can be seen as another iteration of what geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has described as “partial geographical solutions to political-economic crises.”<fnref n="20" /> Exporting prison labor to the forest was a way of responding both to the problems of penitentiaries and to the chronic failure of the state to adequately finance the management of publicly-owned natural spaces. In the process, forests became both an exploitable site of “healthy” leisure for free citizens and an annex of the U.S. carceral archipelago.

Yet, as I show below, the deceptively natural connection between the rehabilitation of men and that of forests became more complicated on the ground. Though the penological discourse tends to picture rehabilitation as a unidirectional process where well-thought-out programs succeeded in transforming convicted people, the material reality of forestry programs suggests a circulation that defies the boundaries of the penal apparatus. Substituting trees for prison bars meant sending incarcerated people to an environment that prison administrators could not entirely control, and the constraints faced by participants did not only belong to the penal system but also to the natural world. Despite glowing depictions of “healthy work,” the bodies of incarcerated people were sometimes put at risk in these camps, especially, but not exclusively,

<footnote n="15">¹⁵Terence Young, *Building San Francisco’s Parks, 1850–1930*, (Baltimore, 2008), 3; Gregg Mitman, “In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History,” *Environmental History* 10, no. 2 (April 2005): 184–210.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶Roy Rosenzweig, *Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920* (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 127.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷Karen R. Jones, *Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West* (Boulder, 2015), 33–35. Free forestry workers have also historically associated “manly work” and “healthy forests.” See Erik Loomis, “Masculinity, Work, and the Industrial Forest in the US Pacific Northwest,” *RCC Perspectives*, no.4 (2017): 37–44.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸Margaret Ludwig, Draft, “A Salute to Honor,” folder 8, box 2 (“Adult Corrections Division, Correspondence”), 03-A-116, Department of Institutions, Washington State Archives [hereafter DI-WSA].</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹Jake Kosek, *Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico* (Durham, 2006), 102.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰Gilmore, *Golden Gulag*, 26.</footnote>
when fighting fires. Forestry camps were also isolated and isolating, far away from loved ones and communities. The corporeal and material reality of forestry camps nuances the therapeutic rhetoric that was used to justify their existence.

The attempt to recover these lived experiences draws inspiration from the work of historians who have sought to make sense of material and corporeal carceral realities beyond the discourse of prison officials.<fnref n="21" /> Putting the body at the heart of the analysis of forestry programs allows us to grasp the concrete ways in which the “rehabilitative ideal” affected incarcerated people. It also helps us see the material connections that were created by the labor of incarcerated people beyond the penal sphere, thus building on the work of historians who have underlined the need for environmental histories of incarceration.<fnref n="22" /> Whether or not working in the woods rehabilitated incarcerated workers, they rehabilitated the land, and their physical labor created infrastructure that enabled free citizens to experience healthy exercise outdoors. With outdoor labor programs such as forestry, the notion that penal labor happens behind an impenetrable prison wall, in a space that has nothing to do with free citizens, is revealed to be a fiction.

## The Fear of Idleness and the Rise of Penal Forestry in the Arsenal of Rehabilitation

The roots of penal forestry camps lay largely in the upheavals of the interwar years. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, trade unions and businessmen sought federal legislation to strangle the “unfair competition” of prison labor.<fnref n="23" /> In response, prison administrators and their supporters insisted that any restriction on the commerce of prison-made goods would make it harder for them to find employment for incarcerated men. This would mean not only a larger bill for the taxpayer and increased security risks to institutions but also dire effects on the health and well-being of incarcerated people. “Busy hands keep the body healthy and the mind tranquil,” an Indiana prison administrator explained, “so that when the inmate’s time comes to mingle again among men, he will be mentally, morally and physically fit to do so.” Unemployment, on the contrary, brought “discontent, disorder, mental and moral distress, as well as financial loss to the State.”<fnref n="24" /> Some warned that their bodies would simply lose the ability to perform eight hours of intense, quality work after their release.<fnref n="25" /> Others, like Senator Joe Manlove (R-MO), more fundamentally saw “forced idleness” as a harmful denial of the human need to use one’s body and mind.<fnref n="26" />

In spite of these arguments, federal legislation was passed, gradually restricting the market for prison-made goods. As a consequence, prison administrators faced the challenge of adapting prison industries to this new legal reality. This largely meant starting to sell prison-made goods to state-funded agencies, rather than on the open market.<fnref n="27" /> This transition happened in a

<footnote n="21">²¹Evan Kutzler, *Living by Inches: The Smells, Sounds, Tastes, and Feeling of Captivity in Civil War Prisons* (Chapel Hill, 2019); Talitha LeFlouria, *Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South* (Chapel Hill, 2015).</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²²Clarence Jefferson Hall, *A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York's North Country* (Amherst, 2020); Benedict Taylor, “Trees of Gold and Men Made Good? Grand Visions and Early Experiments in Penal Forestry in New South Wales,” 1913–1938, *Environment and History* 14, no. 4 (2008): 545–562.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³For the longer history of the union and business struggle against the unfair competition problem posed by prison labor, see Rebecca McLennan, *The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776–1941* (New York, 2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴Statement of John L. Moorman in Convict Labor: Hearings before the Committee on Interstate Commerce, United States Senate, 70 Cong. 1st sess., on S. 1940, Feb. 1928, 29.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵James V. Bennett to Michael F. Garrett, Jan. 22, 1940, folder 5 (“Prison Labor”), folder 5 box 73, RG 129, Central Administrative Files of the Bureau of Prisons, National Archives (College Park) [hereafter BOP-NARA].</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶Statement of Louis H. Putnam, in Convict Labor: Hearings before the Committee on Labor, House of Representatives, 69 Cong., 1st sess., on H. R. 8653, March and April 1926, 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷This meant adopting the so-called “state-use” system of prison labor, whereby products of prison labor would be sold to tax-supported agencies, not on the open market. While in 1923 only 13 states employed a majority of their prisoners under the state-use system, by 1932 that number had risen to 21; by 1940, 37 states had adopted the</footnote>
particularly tense context: on the one hand, the punitive trends of the 1920s had led to a sharp rise in incarceration rates, thus increasing the pressure on jobs behind bars; on the other hand, the Great Depression taxed state capacities to the limit, and made it difficult for many to invest in the revamping of prison industries.<fnref n="28" />

The regulation of prison-made goods at the federal level has sometimes been analyzed as heralding a new era of “punishment without labor.”<fnref n="29" /> Some states, however, along with the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), found a partial solution to prison idleness in outdoor penal labor programs. The solution was not entirely new—Southern states had long relied on outdoor labor to occupy their prison populations, and the 1910s had witnessed a Good Roads Movement that had led many states to try using incarcerated men on roadbuilding projects.<fnref n="30" /> The context of the interwar years, however, sparked a new wave of interest in the idea of outdoor prison labor. Sending men out of prison walls to work on roads, farms, or forestry work would require little extra expenditure, and would give healthy occupation to prisoners without risking accusations of unfair competition with free labor. Thus, the open air became a safety valve for prison systems. In West Virginia, for instance, the proportion of incarcerated men employed in public works shot up from 7.9 percent in 1923 to 23.8 percent in 1932, and 26 percent in 1940.<fnref n="31" /> In the federal system, 800 federal prisoners were employed on road-building projects by 1936, and more than 1,200 worked on penal farms or prison construction sites.<fnref n="32" /> The state of Wisconsin opened its first forestry camp in 1931 and soon moved to open two other similar facilities in the two years that followed.<fnref n="33" />

The federal government also promoted the use of outdoor penal work in the states through a New Deal agency called the Prison Industries Reorganization Administration (PIRA), which was tasked with surveying state prisons and offering advice to adapt these systems to new federal regulations without leading to mass prison idleness. The administrators at the helm of the new agency were convinced that outdoor labor was a key solution to problems of unemployment and bad working conditions behind bars. “It tends to keep men in better physical condition and also has a good effect upon morale,” PIRA administrator Gustav Peck noted.<fnref n="34" /> Even in the case of the Southern chain gang, which they found generally objectionable (and which was the object of intense public scrutiny at the time), PIRA administrators considered that prisoners’ work on state highways was “healthful” and “[kept] the convicts in good physical condition.”<fnref n="35" /> The agency’s recommendations to almost every state included the idea of developing outdoor labor

<footnote>state-use system as their main prison labor system. Bureau of Labor Statistics, *Convict Labor: 1923* (Washington, D. C., 1924). Richard F. Jones, “Prison Labor in the United States, 1940,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin no.698, 1941.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸On the punitive trend of the 1920s, see Jeffrey Adler, “Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century America,” *Journal of American History* 102, no. 1 (March 2015): 34–46.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹McLennan, *The Crisis of Imprisonment*, 417.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰Vivien E. Miller, *Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida’s “Sunshine Prison” and Chain Gangs*, (Gainesville, 2012); Robert Perkinson, *Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire* (New York, 2010); Alex Lichtenstein, “Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South: ‘The Negro Convict is a Slave,’” *The Journal of Southern History* 59, no. 1 (1993): 85–110; Elinor Myers McGinn, *At Hard Labor: Inmate Labor at the Colorado State Penitentiary, 1871–1940* (New York, 1993), 119; John Jeffrey, *Progressives and Prison Labor: Rebuilding Ohio’s National Road during World War I* (Akron, 2022).</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹Bureau of Labor Statistics, *Convict Labor: 1923* (Washington, D. C., 1924); Richard F. Jones, “Prison Labor in the United States, 1940,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin no.698, 1941.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³²Federal Prison Industries, Inc., “Annual Report of the Board of Directors,” Fiscal Year 1936, 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³John C. Burke, “Prison without Walls,” *The Prison World* (Jan.–Feb. 1942): 13–15.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴Gustav Peck, “The Prison Labor Problem in Tennessee,” Draft, folder 5 (“Tennessee”), box 4, General Correspondence of Gustav Peck, National Archives (College Park).</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵Vernon J. Clarke, *Convict Road Camps in Georgia, 1937*, folder 1 (“Georgia”), box 4, Records Relating to Construction Work for Prisoners and Maintained by V. J. Clarke, National Archives (College Park) [hereafter VJC-NARA]. See also: LeFlouria, *Chained in Silence*, 168.</footnote>
programs (particularly farming and reforestation) as a cure for both prison unemployment and prisoners' criminality.<fnref n="36" />

Among the different options offered by outdoor penal labor, forestry occupied a unique position, in that it resonated with a broader interest in the forest during the New Deal. The CCC created forestry work for thousands of unemployed youths, while the importance of forest conservation was being recognized at the highest levels of government (as well as by organized labor).<fnref n="37" /> The CCC was promoted not just as a solution to unemployment, but also to the physical decay induced by urban decadence and chronic unemployment. Hard forestry work would physically rehabilitate these men, and, in the process, reshape them into wage-earning citizens.<fnref n="38" />

The forests had thus become a precious reservoir of healthy work, and some prison officials could not help but think that it could provide a solution to their own quandary. When it came to the unemployed and the incarcerated, after all, the problem was the same: there was a need for the state to create work that the free market apparently did not require. Thus, as early as the late-1930s, federal and state officials saw opportunities to convert abandoned CCC camps into penal forestry camps.<fnref n="39" /> The interwar years planted the idea of penal forestry, which would truly blossom in the following decades.

The development of forestry camps can be traced to pragmatic, as well as ideological considerations. At the federal level, the use of incarcerated men in the forests initially occurred on an ad-hoc basis. Prisoners would sometimes be asked to help out in a case of wildfire in national parks and state forests, but this use of prison labor was not initially formalized.<fnref n="40" /> The acute labor shortages of the war years and the end of the CCC, however, led federal forest service administrators to increase their reliance on incarcerated men for the suppression of fires in national forests.<fnref n="41" /> Formal agreements between the U.S. Forest Service and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (along with some state prison departments) were gradually established during the war years.<fnref n="42" /> The agreement between the two agencies created an implicit connection between the conservation of natural resources and the exploitation of prisons' human resources—between the rehabilitation of unproductive men and the rehabilitation of “wasted” land. The first experiments proved successful, and federal forestry camps underwent a modest expansion after the war, earning the praise of some U.S. congressional leaders, who concluded that there was a

<footnote n="36">³⁶For instance, see Prison Industries Reorganization Administration, “The Prison Labor Problem in West Virginia,” (Washington, D.C., 1937); Prison Industries Reorganization Administration, “The Prison Labor Problem in Kansas: A Survey,” (Washington, D.C., 1938); Prison Industries Reorganization Administration, “The Prison Problem in Idaho,” (Washington, D.C., 1939).</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷Neil M. Maher, “‘A Conflux of Desire and Need’: Trees, Boy Scouts, and the Roots of Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps,” in Henry L. Henderson and David B. Woolner, eds., *FDR and the Environment* (New York, 2005) 52, Erik Loomis, *Empire of Timber: Labor Unions and the Pacific Northwest Forests* (New York, 2016), 94–95.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸Simon, “New Men in Body and Soul.” Moran, *Governing Bodies*.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹Vernon J. Clarke, “Possibilities of Converting Abandoned CCC Camps into Prison Camps,” folder 3 (“CCC Camps”), box 2, VJC-NARA. See also: “Suggestions for Additional Employment of State Prisoners in Oklahoma,” n.d., folder 6 (“Oklahoma”), box 2, RG 209, Records Relating to Industrial Work for Prisoners and Maintained by Fred Holladay, National Archives (College Park). The Governor of Florida likewise expressed an interest for the conversion of C.C.C. camps into penal camps: L. F. Chapman to James P. Davis, June 4, 1937, folder 3 (“CCC Camps”), box 2, VJC-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰R. H. Armstrong, Proposed Legislation for Work on Federal Lands, Aug. 6, 1945, folder 2 (“Prison Labor”), box 73, BOP-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹C. A. Merker to Charles B. Mead, March 2, 1942, folder 2 (“Prison Labor – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴²R. H. Armstrong, Memorandum to the Director, Feb. 3, 1943, folder 2 (“Prison Labor – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA.</footnote>
"vital need" to develop similar programs providing "healthful work on productive projects of public benefit, preferably in a forest or similar outdoor location."<sup>43</sup>

At the state level, the rise of penal forestry truly started in the postwar years. California, which had spearheaded self-styled progressive experiments with outdoor penal labor in the interwar years, increased its reliance on forestry camps in the 1950s and 1960s.<sup>44</sup> Some of the camps had originally been operated by the CCC, but all were seen as a type of medical "treatment" for wayward youth—one that had a "beneficial effect on twisted personality," while turning any delinquent into a "husky, sunburned boy."<sup>45</sup> At the same time, officials recognized that agencies in charge of the forests would not have been able to entice free workers to move to the remote locations where penal camps had been built; penal forestry camps fulfilled needs that would have remained unanswered otherwise.<sup>46</sup> The California forest camps were promptly imitated by the state of New York; Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington had likewise developed penal forestry camps by the late 1950s.<sup>47</sup> Such programs tended to be uniformly portrayed as progressive and hopeful by the press.<sup>48</sup>

This sudden interest in the idea of penal forestry was fueled by the assumptions of the rehabilitation era. The camps provided a “minimum-security” type of institutions, which would allow penal administrators to carry out their philosophy of individualized treatment by providing an appropriate place for juvenile delinquents and prisoners deemed less dangerous.<fnref n="49" /> Forestry work would also help “cure” incarcerated men of their criminality by attacking two root causes of crime: the lack of “good work habits” and the lack of marketable skills.<fnref n="50" /> Finally, there was a physical and psychological component to the rehabilitation operated by forestry camps. The fact that forestry took place outdoors led to better health and well-being, and both elements were seen as directly connected to rehabilitation.<fnref n="51" /> The “healthy” nature of forestry work helped to dispel any potential association of prison labor programs with exploitation and differentiated it from other outdoor labor programs like road building, which appeared increasingly outdated as the postwar period unfolded.<fnref n="52" />

The appeal of forestry programs was also reinforced by the challenges faced by the criminal justice system at the time. First, the 1950s were marked by widespread concern with juvenile

<footnote n="43">⁴³Richard E. McArdle to James V. Bennett, Feb. 18, 1959, folder 4 (“Prison labor – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA; H. R. 9341: A bill to authorize certain work projects as an aid in rehabilitating inmates of Federal and State penal and correctional institutions, 88 Cong., 2nd sess., folder 2 (“Prison Labor – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴Janssen, “When the “Jungle” Met the Forest.”</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵Statement of Harold Butterfield in "Institutions for Rehabilitation and Treatment of Juvenile Delinquency," Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 85 Cong., 2nd sess., Pursuant to S. Res. 237, March 4, 1958, 15. Gertrude Samuels, "One Answer to Delinquency - Work Camps," *New York Times*, Sept. 8, 1957, 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶Kenyon Scudder, *Prisoners Are People* (New York, 1952).</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷Gertrude Samuels, “Visit to a California Work Camp,” *New York Times*, Oct. 4, 1959, 16; Gertrude Samuels, “Open Doors For Young Prisoners,” *New York Times*, Feb. 12, 1961, 41; M. C. Koblentz to Sanger B. Powers, July 23, 1958, folder 6 (“Camps: Forestry Camps [1955–1959]”), box 3, Division of Corrections: Division Subject File, 1930–1990, Wisconsin Historical Society [henceforth DCDSF-WHS].</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸For instance, see Robert Alden, “A Work Camp Assessed: Better Boys, Better Forest,” *New York Times*, Sept. 7, 1959; Lawrence Davies, “Convicts to Work on Conservation,” *New York Times*, July 11, 1963; and Daryl Lembke, “Convicts Put to Work at Showplace Prison,” *Los Angeles Times*, July 22, 1963.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹Joseph F. David, “Correction-Conservation Work for Young Offenders,” *American Journal of Correction* (Jan.–Feb. 1961): 14–37.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰Glenn E. Clark to Charles C. Smith, Feb. 23, 1959, folder 8 (“Adult Corrections Division, Correspondence”), box 2, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹“Correctional Camps Present an Answer,” *American Journal of Correction* 17 (May–June 1955): 3–11.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵²Joseph E. Ragen, Report and observations on inspection of facilities and operation of the Georgia penal system, May 1963, folder 1 (“Ragen’s Report”), box 2, Prison Study Commission Working Papers (1963–1965), Georgia Archives.</footnote>
delinquency, which led experts and officials to fish for new penal structures that would be successful at rehabilitating this newly visible prison demographic.<fnref n="53" /> Forestry work resurrected positive memories of the CCC camps and thus appeared as a progressive and innovative solution to a range of social problems. In the U.S. Senate, for instance, Democrat Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) introduced a bill to establish a Youth Conservation Corps in 1959 that was consciously patterned after the CCC. The bill (which eventually failed to pass) was seen as a way to prevent delinquency by giving structure to youth growing up “without an adequate home,” and whose “physical as well as ... moral health [was] jeopardized” by the environment they came from.<fnref n="54" /> Working in the woods would set teenage delinquents on the right path, and cure them of their criminal tendencies before it was too late.

Finally, penitentiaries at the time faced overcrowding and unrest. Forestry camps were cheaper and quicker to build than penitentiaries and thus provided a “partial geographical solution” to the crisis of overcrowding.<fnref n="55" /> In addition, starting in the 1950s, waves of riots and protests erupted in the nation’s prisons, leading many to conclude that the omnipresent goal of rehabilitation (itself a medicalized vision of law-abiding behavior) was not being achieved behind the walls.<fnref n="56" /> The growing challenge to the traditional penitentiary helped showcase the potential of forestry camps as alternatives to traditional incarceration. The state of Washington, for instance, established its first adult forestry camps one year after the 1955 uprising at the Walla Walla state penitentiary.<fnref n="57" /> Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as the prison crisis intensified in the state and beyond, the camps and their vaunted “open air” remained the flagship of a penal system that was increasingly challenged from without and from within. Even as the rehabilitation ideal was starting to crumble in the face of repeated crises and the resistance of incarcerated people, officials repeatedly pointed to forestry camps as an example of a successful program that should have received more attention from the media.<fnref n="58" />

## Incarcerated Bodies in the Woods: The Corporeal Experience of Penal Forestry

Historian David Rothman observes that reform discourses tend to “[become] irrelevant to the daily routine” of carceral institutions, and forestry programs were no exception.<fnref n="59" /> The idealization of forestry work by officials clashed with the experiences of the men and boys who

<footnote n="53">⁵³About concern about juvenile delinquency in the postwar years, see James Gilbert, *A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s* (New York, 1988). See also Parsons, *From Asylum to Prison*.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴Hubert H. Humphrey to A. Harmon, July 20, 1959, folder 27, box 53, DI-WSA; Hubert H. Humphrey, "A Plan to Save Trees, Land, and Boys," *Harper's Magazine*, Jan. 1959, folder 27, box 53, DI-WSA; "In Support of a Youth Conservation Corps," *Youth Board News*, May 1959, folder 27, box 53, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵Indiana officials, for instance, became interested in the idea of forestry camps when they realized that their Reformatory, which had been designed to house a maximum of 1,800 men, now held over 2,800. A similar situation was observable in Wisconsin, and Oregon: Paul L. Myers to Sanger B. Powers, April 15, 1960, folder 7 ("Camps: Forestry Camps [1940-1963]"), box 3, DCDSF-WHS; Sanger B. Powers to Wilbur J. Schmidt, Feb. 24, 1961, folder 4 ("Population Pressures, camp McCoy [1961]"), box 15, DCDSF-WHS; Virgil J. O'Malley, "The Oregon State Penitentiary - Its Recent History - The Program - And the Needs for the Coming Biennial Period," March 9, 1953, folder 26 ("OSP; O'Malley, 1953"), box 10, Oregon Prison Association papers, Oregon Historical Society.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶As early as 1950, some lawmakers concluded that “the belief that our prisons fit men to live normal community lives, develop individual initiative, and teach them to earn an honest living, has not been realized.” H.R. 9341: A Bill to Authorize Certain Work Projects as an Aid in Rehabilitating Inmates of Federal and State Penal and Correctional Institutions, 88 Cong., 2nd sess., Aug. 1950, folder 2 (“Prison Labor – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷For an overview of the history of Walla Walla penitentiary, see Dan Berger, Preface, in Ethan Hoffman and John A. McCoy, *Concrete Mama: Prison Profiles from Walla Walla*, (Seattle, 2018), viii–xxv.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸For instance, see Dixy Lee Ray to Renee Moe, Feb. 15, 1980, folder 6 (“1980”), box 7, 03-A-205, Social and Health Services – Division of Adult Corrections, Washington State Archives [hereafter SHSDAC-WSA].</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹David Rothman, *The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic* (New York, 2002 [1971]), 239.</footnote>
lived it.<fnref n="60" /> Though it was often claimed that forestry work created healthiness via the “therapy of the woods,” the reality was that men were selected for forestry on the basis of their physical fitness for the work.<fnref n="61" /> Administrators were always looking for “fully able-bodied” men to work in the forests, and the contract between the Washington prison system and the state forest services stipulated that those who were “not physically fit for strenuous fire line duty” should not be sent at all.<fnref n="62" /> Men were regularly returned to penitentiaries for failure to keep up with the work routine at the camps. This policy was connected to the need to meet the demands of forest agencies, but it was also an implicit recognition that forestry was hard work indeed. Thus, if forestry camps were supposed to rehabilitate incarcerated people’s bodies and minds, they also came with expectations about which bodies belonged in the woods. Because of long-standing associations between hard physical labor out of doors and masculinity, for instance, it seemed obvious to administrators that penal forestry workers, like CCC participants, would be not only “able-bodied,” but also exclusively male.<fnref n="63" /> In both CCC and penal camps, the ideal of the wage-earning citizen fostered by these programs was indissociable from normative conceptions of masculinity and sexuality.<fnref n="64" />

The woods had also been historically associated with whiteness. In the late nineteenth century, elite white men had conceptualized rugged sojourns in the wilderness as a means of buttressing their masculinity—in ways that differed from both white working-class and African American workers—and recreation in the outdoors was still imagined to be a predominantly white and middle-class practice.<fnref n="65" /> However, the demographic realities of the carceral system, where working-class people and people of color were overrepresented, meant that penal forestry camps did not conform to these expectations. Volker Janssen has shown that, in California, forestry camps effectively became extensions of urban ghettos, to the surprise of the rural residents who came into contact with them.<fnref n="66" /> In Arizona, many of the incarcerated workers who manned the federal Tucson forestry camp were undocumented Mexican men, while white and Black Americans were also present. There, as in Washington state, African American prisoners could be faced with racist behaviors, especially on the part of prison employees.<fnref n="67" /> When it came

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰In the federal system, some were as young as 16 years old; in California, the minimum age was 13. G. L. Finney to James M. Stambaugh, Oct. 19, 1959, folder 4 (“Prison – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA; Gertrude Samuels, “One Answer to Delinquency – Work Camps.”</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹Milton Luger, “Edward R. Cass Youth Rehabilitation Camp,” *American Journal of Corrections* (Mar.–Apr. 1962): 30–31.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶²Agreement between the Department of Institutions of the State of Washington and the Division of Forestry of the Department of Conservation and Development of the State of Washington for Use of Prisoners under Custody of the State, Feb. 1957, folder 6 (“Honor Camps, Forestry, 1956–7), box 41, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³However, the association of firefighting with masculinity started to be challenged in the 1970s as an increasing number of women became firefighters on the outside, leading prison officials to scramble at first for plans to keep male incarcerated workers away from “civilian” crews on the fireline: Harold Bradley to William Baxter, Apr. 2, 1978, folder 12 (“Natural Resources Dept., 1974–75”), box 30, SHSDAC-WSA. For an example of struggle for the inclusion of women in firefighting forces, see Nancy MacLean, “The Hidden History of Affirmative Action: Working Women’s Struggles in the 1970s and the Gender of Class,” *Feminist Studies* 25 no. 1 (1999): 43–78. By the 1980s, Washington state officials had included incarcerated women in forestry camps, but still wondered if they could “physically compete” with men when doing forestry work: Richard D. Bosse to Hartzel L. Black, Nov. 16, 1988, Command C Subject Files, Washington State Archives [hereafter CC-WSA].</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴On the way the CCC participated in reshaping masculinity in the Depression era, see Margot Canaday, *The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America* (Princeton, 2009), ch. 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵Dorceta E. Taylor, *The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection* (Durham, 2016), 80; Carolyn Finney, *Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors* (Chapel Hill, 2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest.”</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷L. O. Batchelor, Forest Fire – Chiricahua Mountains – Narrative Report, Sept. 9, 1948, folder 2 (Prison Labor – Forest Service), box 74, BOP-NARA; Lawrence Delmore to Glenn Clark, March 19, 1970, folder 14 (Honor Camps), box 19, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>
to Mexican men, some federal prison administrators saw little point in carrying out the full promises of forestry programs; since they were not American citizens, officials felt “little training responsibility” towards them, and also questioned the need to pay them systematically for their labor in the forest.<fnref n="68" /> At the same time, even prior to the 1950s and 1960s national push to desegregate prisons, the reality of forestry work made segregation impossible. In the late 1940s, federal officials at the Tucson camp indifferently assigned duties to white and nonwhite prisoners.<fnref n="69" /> Sleeping arrangements, whether in small barracks or, while on a firefighting mission, on rough terrain under the stars, did not allow much room for consistent racial separation. In fact, firefighting in the forest did not even allow for separation on the basis of criminal conviction: officials frequently found that they could not prevent incarcerated people from coming into contact with free firemen and civilians.<fnref n="70" /> Meanwhile, forestry agencies seemed primarily interested in extracting labor from as many “able-bodied” prisoners as possible, irrespective of race.

If officials attempted to select certain bodies over others in their quest for productive forestry camps, the corporeal realities of labor in the forests also created constraints for both officials and incarcerated people. Precisely because of the physically taxing nature of the work, for instance, prison administrators recognized that without proper incentive, prisoners might not be persuaded to labor with the intensity required by forestry officials, especially during the fire season. The wages were not very high—15 dollars a month in the state of Washington, 10 cents an hour for federal prisoners engaged in forestry work (amounting to 12 dollars a month per prisoner on average) in the early 1960s—but they were set higher than the wages obtainable in the industrial branches of penitentiaries (at least initially).<fnref n="71" /> Beyond money, prison officials believed in the importance of good, varied, and abundant food to reconstitute the strength of the men, and keep camp morale high—an objective they also planned on fulfilling through a surprisingly liberal distribution of cigarettes, this despite the risks involved for the forest (predictably, some cigarette-related fires did occur).<fnref n="72" /> The need for officials to extract intense labor from the bodies of incarcerated people rendered these compensations essential to the success of the program. In effect, this means that while incarcerated men’s bodies were an “object and target of power” for the state, as Michel Foucault has observed, that power was hardly total.<fnref n="73" /> Instead, officials implicitly recognized that they needed to convince the men to fully cooperate.

Work at forestry camps could include cutting, thinning, and planting trees, building or maintaining forest roads, creating firebreaks, and, in the summer, fighting forest fires. Incarcerated workers faced raging blazes, but also did the mop up work that followed, a “dirty,

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸James V. Bennett to Harold A. Patton, Jan. 18, 1950, folder 2 (“Prison Labor – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA; C. R. Hagan, Forest Service Work on Mount Grahma, Oct. 31, 1961, folder 4 (“Prison Labor – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹L. O. Batchelor, Forest Fire - Chiricahua Mountains - Narrative Report, Sept. 9, 1948, folder 2 (Prison Labor - Forest Service), box 74, BOP-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰L. R. Jones, Establishment and Operation of Fire Camps, ca. 1955, folder 25 (Fire Camps, Staffed by Inmates), box 30, DI-WSA; Bert L. Cole to Garrett Heyns, June 6, 1958, folder 25 (Fire Camps, Staffed by Inmates), box 30, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹C. R. Hagan, Forest Service Work on Mount Grahma, Oct. 31, 1961, folder 4 (“Prison Labor – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA. “Adult Honor Camps in Washington State,” 1963, folder 4 (“Honor Camps – Forestry”), box 41, DI-WSA. By the early 1970s, however, forestry camp wages were actually lagging behind jobs in prison industries. Bert L. Cole to Sidney E. Smith, March 22, 1972, folder 14 (Honor Camps), box 19, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷²Leonard R. Jones, Establishment and Operation of Fire Camps, 1956, folder 25 (“Fire Camps, Staffed by Inmates”), box 30, DI-WSA, C. B. Mead to R. H. Armstrong, Sept. 23, 1943, folder 2 (“Prison – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³Michel Foucault, *Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison* (New York, [1975] 1995), 136.</footnote>
tough job” that ensured the fire was extinguished “to the very last smoke.”<fnref n="74" /> The work was exhausting and sometimes dangerous, especially when it came to firefighting. Some fighters never came back from the forest. Raymond Pike, a Washington state prisoner who had tried to keep a vicious crown fire from leaping a firebreak, died in a long, painful agony after a gust of flame turned him into a “living torch.” Fellow prisoners fashioned improvised stretchers to transport him and donated blood, to no avail.<fnref n="75" />

While Raymond Pike's death was memorialized in the prison newspaper as a selfless sacrifice for the welfare of the community, other experiences suggest that the long exposure to danger and exhaustion could lead to more complex feelings on the part of incarcerated firefighters. Consider, for instance, the May 1948 Chiracahua Mountains fire. On May 28, 1948, a fire was spotted in the Chiracahua Mountains, about a hundred and thirty miles east of Tucson, Arizona, and a first crew of twenty-six federal prisoners was immediately dispatched there. Late on May 30th, the fire which had seemed to be under control was raging again, but the men were so exhausted that they could not be sent there straight away. After a short and uncomfortable night spent sleeping on the ground at a makeshift camp, in an area so rough that supplies had to be sent by parachute, the men were sent back to the fire line, and managed to control the fire “by almost supernatural efforts.”<fnref n="76" /> From these four days of struggle against the blaze, the men emerged with torn clothes, ruined shoes, and minor injuries. The experience was so harrowing that all of them “swore by everything that was holy they would never find them around a forest fire again.”<fnref n="77" /> That, however, was not their decision to make, and the warden of the camp remained characteristically confident that the same prisoners would be just as effective if a new fire were to start in their general area—a prediction that was verified just a few months later.<fnref n="78" /> The only alternative for the prisoners, after all, was to be sent back inside the high walls of a federal penitentiary, along with a negative report that would diminish their chances in front of a parole board.

Fire was not the only source of danger, however. At the federal camp near Tucson, for instance, the men were exposed to snake and wasp bites, as well as to the draining experience of laboring at an altitude of 10,000 feet, which led at least one man to experience a “mild heart attack.”<fnref n="79" /> In all forestry camps, work-related injuries from axes and chainsaws were also frequent. Indeed, even for free workers, forestry was a notoriously hazardous occupation.<fnref n="80" /> In the course of one month in August 1962, the penal camp of Clallam Bay, in the Northwestern corner of the state of Washington, tallied among a group of about sixty incarcerated workers injuries that included “a severed finger, a fractured toe, two severe power saw lacerations, one axe laceration of a hand, plus the usual minor incidents.”<fnref n="81" /> Because their camps did not possess adequate medical facilities, men frequently had to be returned to the state penitentiary or the Reformatory at Monroe in order to receive treatment for serious injuries incurred in the performance of forestry work.<fnref n="82" /> The wages of the men also suffered when they were transferred

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴Bert L. Cole to Lawrence Delmore, May 21, 1958, folder 25 (“Fire Camps, Staffed by Inmates”), box 30, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵“Inmate Gives Life Fighting Fire,” *Agenda*, July 1960, https://jstor.org/stable/community.34644611 (accessed Apr. 7, 2025).</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶C. B. Mead, Re: Forest Fire, June 7, 1948, folder 2 (“Prison – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷*Ibid.*</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸L. O. Batchelor to Superintendent C. B. Mead, Sept. 9, 1948, folder 2 (“Prison – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹*Ibid.*</footnote>

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰Loomis, *Empire of Timber*, 128.</footnote>

<footnote n="81">⁸¹James C. Helmick, C.B.H.C. Superintendent's Report for August, 1962, Sept. 1, 1962, folder 16 (Honor Camps, Forestry, Monthly Reports, 1961-3), box 41, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="82">⁸²For instance, L. Delmore, Jr., Re: Cole, Floyd W., WSP #20173, Memorandum, Sept. 16, 1957, folder 3 (Adult Corrections Division, Correspondence), box 2, DI-WSA.</footnote>
for medical reasons, which was no encouragement to seeking aid.<fnref n="83" /> Moreover, fears that prisoners were malingering sometimes led officials to delay access to medical attention. In one particularly gruesome case, a man who had been cut with a chainsaw waited for nine days before he was authorized to go to the hospital, where the surgeon had to cut the tissues open again and perform ten stitches to ensure the wound would heal correctly.<fnref n="84" /> During the 1960s and 1970s, human exposure to chemicals was deemed a potential hazard, this on account of their increased use for thinning the forest prior to commercial development.<fnref n="85" /> The use of chemicals was contested by free workers at the time, but even if it had been recognized as an occupational threat, it would have been a moot point for prisoners, as they were not protected under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970.<fnref n="86" /> A direct consequence of incarcerated people's relocation on the margins of citizenship was the fact that the protection of their bodies lay almost entirely at the mercy of state authorities.

Though they enjoyed better access to medical care and workplace safety laws, the staff of the camp was not spared either, and suffered from smoke inhalation or serious back injuries; on one occasion, a forestry supervisor was almost killed by a falling tree while working with incarcerated men during a severe storm.<fnref n="87" /> Because of exhaustion, and poor sanitary conditions, forestry camps were also plagued with seasonal epidemics of flu and other respiratory infections that could leave prisoners and staff bedridden for days.<fnref n="88" />

Living conditions were generally spartan. Despite prison officials' boast that incarcerated men enjoyed the benefits of a television and other recreational opportunities in their spare time, comfort hardly defined the men's experience. At two Washington state camps in the late 1960s, for instance, though there was a TV, the men had no place to sit except for their bed or a "stiff-backed chair" —a situation that the director of the Department of Institutions himself judged "most unreasonable."<fnref n="89" /> The men lived in poorly ventilated dormitories with bathrooms that afforded no privacy, and the absence of drapes on the windows meant that they were frequently awakened by the early morning sun after long days of hard labor.<fnref n="90" /> Staffing difficulties resulted in poor supervision at night, and officials suspected that incarcerated men were sometimes assaulted or raped in these dormitories.<fnref n="91" /> Recreational opportunities varied from camp to camp, but in at least some of them they were virtually non-existent until the mid-1970s. The men complained that there was nothing to do around the place once their work was done. Even some of the camp employees opined that they "were better off back at Walla Walla [prison]" in that regard.<fnref n="92" />

In Washington state, bad weather could leave the camps with no power, and no access to the outside world. In March of 1962, for instance, the Clallam Bay camp was buried under three feet of snow. The water system threatened to break down and the electricity went out, disabling the camp's intercom system. The roads were impassable for five days, which made both forest work and medical

<footnote n="83">⁸³Clarence Schrag, "Inmates Injured in Camp or Unable to Do Work in the Forests," Memorandum, Apr. 18, 1957, folder 6 ("Honor Camp, Forestry 1956-57"), box 41, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴Cecil D. Baker to the Department of Social and Health Services, n.d., circa 1971, folder 14 ("Honor Camps"), box 19, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵Thomas G. Pinnock to Thomas E. Scroedel, Sept. 2, 1970, folder 14 ("Honor Camps"), box 19, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶Loomis, *Empire of Timber*, 189.</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷James C. Helmick, Superintendent's Monthly Report for November 1962, folder 16 (Honor Camps, Forestry, Monthly Reports, 1961-3), box 41, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸James C. Helmick, C. B. H. C. Superintendent's Report for August 1962, folder 16 (Honor Camps, Forestry, Monthly Reports, 1961-3), box 41, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹William R. Comte, Memorandum to L. Delmore about the Honor Camps, May 19, 1969, folder 8 ("Adult Corrections, Correspondence"), box 2, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰*Ibid*.</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹Richard Vernon, "Honor Camps," Memorandum, Oct. 6, 1972, folder 7 ("Escapes and Incidents, 1971-1974"), box 16, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="92">⁹²James D. Thorne to Slade Gorton, November 4, 1972, folder 14 ("Honor Camps"), box 19, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>
evacuations impossible.<fnref n="93" /> In events such as these, the forest camps were akin to islands in the middle of the woods, where isolation from the outside world was at least as deep as it was in penitentiaries.

Whether or not this rugged life led to the rehabilitation of incarcerated men is unclear. Though the camps were often depicted as “treatment” centers, therapy was not generally permitted to interfere with the work program.<fnref n="94" /> Other aspects generally deemed important for rehabilitation—such as education or sustained contact with family members through visits—were rendered much more difficult at the camps. Planting trees and clearing the way for service roads was the sole “treatment” on offer, with the understanding that it would lead incarcerated men to adopt the “work habits” so highly valued in free society, and somehow immunize them from taking part in new criminal activities. In this way, forestry camps reinforced a larger disciplinary regime that was rooted in the physiological training of individuals for ends deemed socially desirable.<fnref n="95" />

The disciplinary dimension of work is especially perceptible in the fact that administrators organized participants' time around work, expecting even “official” days off to be devoted to the maintenance of the camp, or side projects for the community.<fnref n="96" /> Whether or not the forestry program achieved the goal of rehabilitating incarcerated men, for a large portion of the day, the coerced movements of their working bodies were supposed to act as a surrogate prison wall in the middle of the trees.

The system also pre-selected incarcerated workers in ways that almost insured better results than average.<fnref n="97" /> Men who had committed violent crimes tended not to be selected for forestry camps, thus keeping the risks of potential public relations disasters down to a minimum. Even a history of drinking and an “unsettled marital situation” (not to mention unfavorable psychiatric reports) could disqualify a man from housing at a forestry camp.<fnref n="98" /> Those who were chosen were seen as the most “reclaimable”—juvenile delinquents, and largely nonviolent adult offenders. Additionally, in Washington state, only those who came near the end of their sentence could be considered, thus implying that the rest of the system had already done the bulk of the rehabilitation work.<fnref n="99" /> The camps were credited with the rehabilitation of men, but these men were already considered low security risks. Thus, the favorable statistics of recidivism often brandished by officials cannot be accurately compared with the recidivism rates of nearby penitentiaries.<fnref n="100" />

Similarly, one may wonder whether the expectation that camps would provide a more wholesome atmosphere than penitentiaries actually proved true. Overall, officials were convinced that despite the accidents, illnesses, and dangers related to firefighting, incarcerated men were content with their new life of hard work. In their reports, they perennially claimed

<footnote n="93">⁹³James C. Helmick, Re: Clallam Bay Honor Camp Superintendents Monthly Report - March 1962, Apr. 5, 1962, folder 16 (Honor Camps, Forestry, Monthly Reports, 1961-3), box 41, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴Lawrence Delmore, Jr., Re: Group Therapy, Sept. 30, 1957, folder 3 (“Adult Corrections Division - Correspondence), box 2, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵Foucault, *Discipline and Punish*, 170.</footnote>

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶Don Lee Fraser to Clarence Schrag, July 23, 1957, folder 25 (“Fire Camps, Staffed by Inmates”), box 30, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷Similarly, in the contemporary prison system, sociologist Michael Gibson-Light has shown that classification for institutional jobs compounded inequalities instead of reducing them. Michael Gibson-Light, *Orange-Collar Labor: Work and Inequality in Prison* (New York, 2022), 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸Clarence Schrag, Re: Recent Classification Committee Actions, July 29, 1957, folder 3 (“Adult Corrections Division - Correspondence), box 2, DI-WSA. L. Delmore, Jr., Re: Camp Transfers, Memorandum, Sept. 20, 1957, folder 3 (“Adult Corrections Division - Correspondence), box 2, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹Information Services Staff, “Adult Corrections in Washington State,” *American Journal of Corrections*, November-December 1962, 5-10.</footnote>

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰Additionally, these statistics were not always favorable. In the early 1970s, the state of Washington realized that recidivism figures were now worse for forestry camps releasees than for the general penitentiary population. Richard Vernon, “Honor Camps,” Memorandum, Oct. 6, 1972, folder 7 (“Escapes and Incidents, 1971-1974), box 16, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1.** Men from the Clallam Bay Honor Camp fighting a forest fire. Taken by a *Seattle Post-Intelligencer* photographer, the picture was reprinted in *Agenda*, a magazine made by people incarcerated at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. "Honor Camp Fighting Forest Fire," *Agenda* 6, no. 3 (January 1, 1961). American Prison Newspapers, 1800s-present: Voices from the Inside. Reveal Digital, JSTOR, https://jstor.org/stable/community.34644584.</figcaption></figure>

that their men's morale was excellent. There are indications that some incarcerated men did take pride in the work they were accomplishing, especially when it came to firefighting (Figure 1).<fnref n="101" /> However, though direct testimonies from incarcerated people about forestry camps are difficult to obtain, those that exist are hardly universally positive. In Washington state, the men increasingly complained that the promise of the camps was not being fulfilled; such criticisms quickly spread within the penal system to the point where by 1971 officials found it hard to recruit enough prisoners for the camps.<fnref n="102" /> One man probably summed up the opinion of many when he declared that "About all I got from Larch Mountain honor camp was five months' hard labor with no consideration for it."<fnref n="103" /> That same year, a group of prisoners elected by their peers wrote a letter of complaint, concluding, "This is an Honor Camp without the Honor."<fnref n="104" /> Administrators themselves came to recognize the existence of structural problems in the camps. "We have insufficient staff, no program, and we have been pushing men into the camps because of low population," said one, hinting at the pressure exercised by Department of Natural

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹In the late 1950s, incarcerated workers from the Larch Mountain camp traveled to the fire line with a sign that read, “through these portals pass the best fire fighters in the world.” Bert L. Cole to Lawrence Delmore, Jr., Aug. 21, 1958, folder 25 (“Fire Camps, Staffed by Inmates”), box 30, DI-WSA. This also matches the conclusions of sociologist Philip Goodman in his study of California penal fire camps; he notes that “many camp inmates view the work they perform as simultaneously heroic, dignified work and a form of labor exploitation.” Philip Goodman, “Hero and Inmate: Work, Prisons and Punishment in California’s Fire Camps,” *WorkingUSA - The Journal of Labor & Society* 15, no. 3 (2012): 353–376.</footnote>

<footnote n="102">¹⁰²Resident Governmental Council to Thomas Pinnock, Aug. 31, 1971, folder 14 (“Honor Camps”), box 19, 03-A-205, Social and Health Services - Division of Adult Corrections, WSA; Tom Pinnock to Laurence Delmore, Oct. 7, 1971, folder 14 (“Honor Camps”), box 19, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³Charles W. Sherrill, Letter to the Department of Social and Health Services, n.d., circa 1971, folder 14 (“Honor Camps”), box 19, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="104">¹⁰⁴Resident Governmental Council, Larch Mountain Honor Camp to Thomas Pinnock, Aug. 31, 1971, folder 14 (“Honor Camps”), box 19, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>
Resources (DNR) officials to obtain workers from the prisons.<fnref n="105" /> In practice, the rehabilitative purposes of the camps were overshadowed by the manpower needs of forest agencies.

Evidently, the “work habits” inculcated at the camps were not always as morally and mentally fulfilling as officials claimed. Sometimes, the men found ways to enhance their days by illegally concocting or smuggling alcohol; in fact, by 1972, officials realized that a “sort of Ho-Chi Minh trail” had come to connect Larch Mountain camp to a nearby road, servicing the camp with contraband items.<fnref n="106" /> Sometimes prisoners were so outspoken in their criticism of the camps that they were sent back to the nearest brick-and-mortar prison.<fnref n="107" /> And sometimes, despite the risk that their sentence would be increased, they escaped.<fnref n="108" /> Never entirely under the control of either administrators or incarcerated men, the forest was both a factor of isolation and a porous interface with the outside world.

## “Can You Mix Convicts and Recreation in Safety?” Penal Forestry and the Wellbeing of the Community<fnref n="109" />

One of the stated goals of forestry camps was to preserve forests, as well as the well-being of local inhabitants. For many, the forest was a source of health and comfort—especially in times of extreme heat—and it also made a range of outdoor activities possible. American society had long associated the “great outdoors” with health; even American doctors readily prescribed it as the key to healing and wellbeing. In the nineteenth century, wealthy Americans had turned to resorts in mountains, forests, or islands, as a way to address nervous problems associated with taxing urban living.<fnref n="110" /> The postwar years, however, were marked by a general “return to nature,” especially visible in the massive development of suburbia, and in the massification of nature-based tourism.<fnref n="111" /> Many families increasingly associated cities with overcrowding, pollution, and stress, and turned to nature as necessary to “good mental and physical health.”<fnref n="112" />

The development of outdoor leisure was not inconsequential for local, forest-related economies, especially in the Northwest. In the postwar years, the lumber industry presented recreational opportunities as proof that its new intensive timber management practices led not just to profits, but also to enhanced public well-being.<fnref n="113" /> In the 1970s and 1980s, even as the

<footnote n="105">¹⁰⁵Gerald E. Thomas to Robert Tropp, Oct. 20, 1972, folder 7 (Escapes and Incidents, 1971–1974), box 16, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="106">¹⁰⁶Richard Vernon, Report, “Honor Camps,” Oct. 6, 1972, folder 7 (“Escapes and Incidents, 1971–1974), box 16, SHSDAC-WSA; B. J. Rhay, Report of Fact-Finding Team Regarding Larch Mountain Honor Camp, Dec. 30, 1969, folder 14 (“Honor Camps”), box 19, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="107">¹⁰⁷David Gerecht, Report, “WSP #24980 Tucker and WSP #25006 Cavanaugh (Larch Mountain Honor Camp),” folder 6 (“Honor Camps, Forestry, 1956–7”), box 41, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="108">¹⁰⁸Thomas G. Pinnock to William R. Comte, June 16, 1970, folder 14 (“Honor Camps”), box 19, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹Mrs Conrad Newman to Governor Dixy Lee Ray, Sept. 10, 1979, folder 2 (“Cedar Creek Youth Camp”), box 3, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰Drew A. Swanson, *Beyond the Mountains: Commodifying Appalachian Environments* (Athens, GA, 2018), 116–117; Lawrence Culver, *The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America* (New York, 2010); Andrew Egan, *Adirondack Hard Times: Evolution of a Rich Man’s Paradise* (Charleston, 2021).</footnote>

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹Christopher Sellers, *Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth Century America* (Chapel Hill, 2012); Yolanda Youngs, “Shaping Tourism,” in Craig E. Colten and Geoffrey L. Buckley (ed.), *North American Odyssey: Historical Geographies for the Twenty-First Century* (Lanham, MD, 2014), 309–334.</footnote>

<footnote n="112">¹¹²Phoebe Schroeder Kropp Young, *Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement* (New York, 2021), 224.</footnote>

<footnote n="113">¹¹³Robert E. Walls, “Green Commonwealth: Forestry, Labor, and Public Ritual in the Post-World War II Pacific Northwest,” *Pacific Northwest Quarterly* 87, no. 3 (1996): 117–129.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 2.** An incarcerated worker puts the finishing touches on a sign that reads "National Forest Campground Steamboat Falls." The work of incarcerated men allowed forests to become recreational forests, even when they stayed inside penitentiaries. "Prisoners making campground signs," 1945–1965, Department of Corrections, McNeil Island Corrections Center Photograph Collection, 1855–2010, Digital Archives, https://digitalarchives.wa.gov/Record/View/E6367837C8742B57DD51AEBD89D40C73.</figcaption></figure>

lumber industry started to falter, “healthy” leisure in parks and forests continued to grow in popularity, ultimately opening the door to an alternative, tourism-based economic model.<fnref n="114" />

The recurring association of personal wellbeing with outdoor leisure eventually became a way for prison administrators to entice new employees to work in forestry camps—institutions that had become very difficult to staff.<fnref n="115" /> By the 1980s, Washington state prison administrators were advertising the Olympic Peninsula as “one of the world’s purest air environments” and as a “pristine wilderness . . . that creates a solitude far different than in any other part of Washington State.” Beyond the qualities of the landscape for health and contemplation, it was also pictured as a site of enjoyment. “The entire park,” the heavily illustrated brochure noted, “is a recreational wonderland—a paradise for the outdoor person.”<fnref n="116" /> The recreational qualities of the landscape had become a marketing tool to entice prison workers to the area.

Ironically, as outdoor recreation became increasingly popular among the general public, the workplace of incarcerated men became a place of leisure for free citizens. The hiking trails, the swimmable ponds, the picnic and parking areas with scenic views were all made possible through the use of an incarcerated workforce and, in Washington state, the benches and picnic tables themselves were routinely produced at the Walla Walla penitentiary.<fnref n="117" /> Incarcerated men at the federal penitentiary of McNeil Island also manufactured campground signs (Figure 2). Meanwhile, federal prisoners at the Tucson, Arizona camp were asked to set up signs indicating

<footnote n="114">¹¹⁴William G. Robbins, “The Social Context of Forestry: The Pacific Northwest in the Twentieth Century,” *Western Historical Quarterly* 16, no. 4 (1985): 413–427. Similarly, in the forests of the Adirondacks, the tourism sector became increasingly important in the second half of the twentieth century, transforming both the economy and the environment. Hall, *A Prison in the Woods*, 48–49.</footnote>

<footnote n="115">¹¹⁵Don Lee Fraser to Clarence Schrag, July 23, 1957, folder 25 (“Fire Camps, Staffed by Inmates”), box 30, 03-A-116, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="116">¹¹⁶“Clallam Bay Corrections Center,” Brochure, n.d., ca. 1985, folder 1 (“Clallam Bay Corrections Center”), box 51, CC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="117">¹¹⁷Lawrence Delmore, Jr., “Advance in Program During Past Calendar Year,” folder 4 (“Adult Correction Division Correspondence”), box 2, DI-WSA.</footnote>
the names and locations of “scenic rock formations” for the benefit of sightseers.<fnref n="118" /> The road they built into the Catalina National Forest enabled visitors to access the park, and they took care of garbage collection in picnic areas. In many cases, public agencies would not have been able to afford these amenities were it not for prison labor. In fact, when the Bureau of Prisons closed its camps in Arizona, forest officials struggled to keep up with garbage collection and had to close some recreational areas for part of the year.<fnref n="119" /> Similarly, in the state of Washington, the DNR regularly pressed corrections officials to increase the population of forestry camps.<fnref n="120" /> If outdoor recreation had become, in the terminology of historian Phoebe Young, an “implicit right of citizenship,” it was also partially made possible by the work of people who stood on the margins of citizenship: incarcerated people and, increasingly in the late twentieth century, immigrant workers.<fnref n="121" />

From early on, penal forestry programs saw the preservation of forests as an opportunity to allow for its exploitation by the recreating public and commercial interests, not as an effort to protect them from the touch of civilization.<fnref n="122" /> In this, penal forestry programs echoed the longer history of national park management in the United States, and forestry at large.<fnref n="123" /> As commentators and officials frequently noted, the point was not just the rehabilitation of men, but also the rehabilitation of land, whose benefits would otherwise have been lost to the community. In addition to recreational activities, the work of incarcerated workers enabled the economic exploitation of timber, by making available wood that private loggers could then harvest.<fnref n="124" /> In Washington state, timber made available by prisoner labor also resulted in the annual injection of several thousands of dollars into state coffers.<fnref n="125" /> Forestry camps meant, quite literally, that neither incarcerated men nor the land would be “wasted.” This can be read as a variation of what social scientist Judah Schept’s has called the “wastescape” of the Appalachia, where a land wasted by coal extraction has been repurposed as a vast storage space for both landfills and prisoners, that is, the disposable products of capitalism.<fnref n="126" /> Forestry camps, whose creation preceded the phenomenon described by Schept, show the same confluence of what is seen as wasted land and wasted people; though in their case they aimed not just at “storing” them, but at infusing them with productivity.

While prisoners had been brought to the forest for the express purpose of taking care of the land, they were always suspected of bringing damage and chaos to the environment and local

<footnote n="118">¹¹⁸J. Homer Boyd to G. L. McLane, Mar. 7, 1951, folder 2 (“Prison – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="119">¹¹⁹Bob Thomas, “Sabino Canyon Use Fee Menace to Outdoorsmen,” *Arizona Republic*, Feb. 23, 1967, 33; “Fees Open Undeveloped Coronado,” *Arizona Republic*, June 20, 1971, 42.</footnote>

<footnote n="120">¹²⁰For instance, see Lawrence Delmore, Jr. to B. J. Rhay, Sept. 26, 1957, folder 3 (“Adult Corrections Division, Correspondence”), box 2, DI-WSA; Bert Cole to Lawrence Delmore, Jr., Aug. 21, 1958, folder 25 (“Fire Camps, Staffed by Inmates”), box 30, DI-WSA; and Lawrence Delmore, Jr. to B. J. Rhay, May 24, 1963, folder 17 (“Honor Camps, Forestry, Personnel”), box 41, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="121">¹²¹Young, *Camping Grounds*, 10; William James Philpott, *Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country* (Seattle, 2013), 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="122">¹²²In Michigan, for instance, an early report stressed explicitly the need to “develop these areas for effective use by Michigan citizens and the valuable tourist trade.” S. J. Gilman, “The Michigan Prison Camp Program,” (1953), 3, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001120543 (accessed Mar. 5, 2025).</footnote>

<footnote n="123">¹²³Yves Figueiredo, “Inventing Yosemite Valley: National Parks and the Language of Preservation,” *Historical Geography* 35 (2007): 12–37; Geoffrey L. Buckley, “Progressive Legacy: Fred Besley and the Rise of Professional Forestry in Maryland,” in Geoffrey L. Buckley and Yolanda Youngs (eds.), *The American Environment Revisited*, 199–215; Kosek, *Understories*, 13.</footnote>

<footnote n="124">¹²⁴Sam Angeloff, “Wrongdoers Do Right at Honor Camp,” *Agenda*, Jan. 1961, https://jstor.org/stable/community.34644584 (accessed Mar. 5, 2025).</footnote>

<footnote n="125">¹²⁵“Adult Honor Camps in Washington State,” 1963, folder 4 (“Honor Camps – Forestry”), box 41, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="126">¹²⁶Judah Schept, *Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia*, (New York, 2022), 87–88.</footnote>
inhabitants. The contract signed by the federal Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Forest Service, for instance, stipulated that the compensation usually paid by the latter agency to the men in case of firefighting would be withheld if a fire broke out in the vicinity of a penal forestry camp—hinting at the possibility that penal forestry workers might deliberately start fires in order to earn extra compensation.<fnref n="127" /> In the state of Washington, a similar contract evoked the possibility that the men would refuse to work, malinger, or otherwise hinder the work needed by the state forest agency.<fnref n="128" /> Tellingly, however, the need for incarcerated manpower was such that these suspicions proved no obstacle to the program.

Officials were not the only ones to perceive prisoners as a hazard. Echoing a more general "not in my backyard" reaction when it came to prison siting, local communities often resisted the establishment of a camp near their homes.<fnref n="129" /> They feared that the green walls of the woods would not be thick enough to keep incarcerated men from leaving a trail of crimes in the wake of their escapes. The tourism industry was especially quick to see incarcerated people as a potential problem for their business, as they were presumed to drive away potential customers.<fnref n="130" /> Authorities managed to pacify most of the criticism by carrying out local projects for the communities with prison labor and letting nearby residents watch incarcerated forestry workers in action. Firefighting was considered particularly helpful in fostering good relations with the community.<fnref n="131" />

Some historians have described forestry camps as essential to state correction departments' public relations.<fnref n="132" /> It is not clear, however, that the wider public ever fully realized the benefits they drew from the work of incarcerated people. In the first place, the public often failed to appreciate the work of fully operational camps. One sign of this was that citizens regularly suggested that the state of Washington create penal forestry camps—as if at that juncture they were nonexistent. When the public did come to appreciate the operational camps in their midst they frequently responded with perplexity and frustration. When a local paper described one juvenile forestry camp near Olympia (in its twenty-sixth year of operation) as “good for the community,” nearby residents were incredulous. “That takes the cake,” wrote an angry homeowner, who saw his enjoyment of the forest and the presence of incarcerated people as incompatible, and therefore opposed the projected conversion of what had been a juvenile camp into an adult camp.<fnref n="133" /> Another irate resident likewise opposed the plan on the grounds that Capitol Forest, where the camp was located, was “a multi-use recreational area

<footnote n="127">¹²⁷Memorandum of Agreement - Jefferson National Forest and Bureau of Prisons, Jan. 17, 1947, folder 2 (“Prison – Forest Service”), box 74, BOP-NARA.</footnote>

<footnote n="128">¹²⁸Agreement between the Department of Institutions of the State of Washington and the Division of Forestry of the Department of Conservation and Development of the State of Washington for Use of Prisoners under Custody of the State, Feb. 1957, folder 6 (“Honor Camp, Forestry, 1956–7), box 41, 03-A-116, DI-WSA. In 1963, officials proudly reported that, contrary to what might have been feared, “no forest fires of major consequence have occurred in areas where the honor camps are situated.” “Adult Honor Camps in Washington State,” 1963, folder 4 (“Honor Camps – Forestry”), box 41, DI-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="129">¹²⁹For instance, see “Forest Service Seeks New Site for Prison Camp,” *Los Angeles Times*, Mar. 30, 1951, 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="130">¹³⁰In Wisconsin, for instance, the creation of an honor camp in the middle of the Flambeau River State Forest led to immediate opposition from local resort owners. George M. Keith, Forestry Camps Operated by the Division of Corrections in Conjunction with the Conservation Department, folder 5 (“Camps: Forestry Camps [1931–1954]”), box 3, DCDSF-WHS.</footnote>

<footnote n="131">¹³¹Bert L. Cole to Calvin D. Prater, Apr. 29, 1958, folder 8 (“Honor Camps, Forestry, 1957–9”), box 41, DI-WSA; B. J. Rhay, “Community Relations,” *Agenda*, July 1960, https://jstor.org/stable/community.34644611 (accessed Mar. 5, 2025).</footnote>

<footnote n="132">¹³²Philip Russell Goodman, “Hero or Inmate, Camp or Prison, Rehabilitation or Labor Extraction: A Multi-Level Study of California’s Prison Fire Camps,” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine), 2010, 109; Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest.”</footnote>

<footnote n="133">¹³³William Walls to Governor Dixy Lee Ray, Nov. 7, 1979, folder 2 (“Cedar Creek Youth Camp”), box 3, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>
used for camping, hunting, fishing, hiking, horseback riding, R.V. Clubs, Motorcycle Clubs, as well as sightseeing.”<fnref n="134" /> For these and hundreds of other residents who petitioned the governor in opposition to the project, the labor of incarcerated workers was neither necessary to recreational infrastructures in the forest, nor reconcilable with free people’s outdoor leisure. Yet another resident further explained that because the facility “would have immediate access to a multi-use recreational area,” “vacationers there would be particularly vulnerable to loss of vehicles,” suggesting potentially disastrous effects on the local tourism economy.<fnref n="135" />

These reactions certainly fit with a broader context of rising fears of crime, but they also reveal deeply ingrained public expectations concerning natural spaces. Scholars have observed, for instance, that American vacationers have long expected National Parks be “uninhabited.”<fnref n="136" /> Adepts of outdoor leisure have sought these spaces of “pristine wilderness” as antitheses to the tensions and pollutions of the urbanized world in which they live. This expectation of purity effectively divorces natural spaces from the material infrastructure and labor that enable visitors to enjoy them. In the eyes of many visitors, the forest has to remain purely “natural,” untainted by social dilemmas and the fears of daily life, in order to be truly recreational. Outdoor tourism boosters in the post-World War II years certainly encouraged these assumptions by marketing natural spaces as wholesome, safe places of self-improvement and family bonding, even as the effects of tourism effectively remade the landscapes where it took place.<fnref n="137" /> Because the forest had become associated with family enjoyment, it became particularly inhospitable to people perceived as unwanted, problematic, or even “unnatural.”<fnref n="138" /> Thus, if working in the forest was supposed to erase incarcerated men’s criminality, the reverse was also true: the outdoors could be tainted by the presence of men who had been convicted of crimes.

It is safe to assume that most inhabitants remained unaware of the connection between their ability to enjoy the recreational opportunities of the forest, and the work of incarcerated people. This invisibility can be read as another example of historian Lori Flores’ description of forests as “amnesic landscapes,” especially when it comes to the hardships faced by marginalized forestry workers. <fnref n="139" /> In the case of incarcerated forestry workers, that invisibility was partially by design. Forestry camps hidden deep in the woods were even less conspicuous than the remote rural places in which penitentiaries tended to be built; they combined the advantage of being useful while remaining out of sight. As far as the public was concerned, at any rate, the labor of incarcerated men seemingly disappeared under dense canopies.

Conclusion

In 1986, Cash L. Hopkins, a man incarcerated at the Indian Ridge Correction Center in the state of Washington, was fatally hit by a falling tree while fighting a fire at Ace Creek, near the Idaho border. Some reported that he “froze in his tracks” instead of running away, while witnesses countered that he was an experienced forestry worker who had already faced several fires in the

<footnote n="134">¹³⁴Lois Miller to Governor Dixy Lee Ray, Aug. 30, 1979, folder 2 (“Cedar Creek Youth Camp”), box 3, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="135">¹³⁵Judith M. Colwell to Governor Dixy Lee Ray, Sept. 1, 1979, folder 2 (“Cedar Creek Youth Camp”), box 3, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="136">¹³⁶Katie Algeo and Collins Eke, “Migration and Social Justice in Wilderness Creation,” in Geoffrey L. Buckley and Yolanda Youngs (eds.), *The American Environment Revisited*, 81–99.</footnote>

<footnote n="137">¹³⁷Philpott, *Vacationland*, 6; 42; 152.</footnote>

<footnote n="138">¹³⁸Hall, *A Prison in the Woods*, 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="139">¹³⁹Lori A. Flores, “Wreathed in Worry, Pining for Protection: Latino Forestry Workers and Historical Traumas in Maine,” *Journal of American History* 109, no. 1 (Mar. 2023): 828–854.</footnote>
course of his incarceration; the crew simply had not had enough rest.<fnref n="140" /> The tragedy prompted Washington prison administrators to conduct an inquiry into the training given to incarcerated forestry workers. Echoing complaints by incarcerated men that their training was insufficient, officials found that it did indeed lack both systematicity and depth.<fnref n="141" /> Men could be herded off to forest work within two days of their arrival at the camps, and the emphasis was then put on “getting the job done,” rather than on preparedness.<fnref n="142" /> This realization contrasted with decades of idealization of forestry work as a uniquely healthy improvement on traditional incarceration. During the rehabilitation era, forestry programs had exemplified reformers’ faith in the reformative virtues of work and the great outdoors. To work outside, in the forest, they felt, was a fitting transition for incarcerated people from the artificiality of penitentiaries to the “real world” that awaited them upon their release. Reformers’ praise of forestry did indeed reify the notion that outdoor work equaled health and rehabilitation. By extension, this imperative placed the bodies of incarcerated people at the heart of the state’s political objective to turn incarcerated people into law-abiding men and women.

The lived experiences of incarcerated forestry workers were often more complex than the reformer's dream, however. From chainsaw wounds to severe dehydration and deadly conditions: working in the forests meant discomfort, the constant presence of physical danger, and the lingering potential of death. The forest was not a magical cure-all for criminal acts either, and incarcerated people managed to find ways around the disciplinary regime of the forestry camps, developing contraband networks or designing escape plans. These lived experiences rarely registered in the public consciousness, however. Ever-adaptable, the idea of penal forestry programs had an enduring appeal to administrators and citizens alike, even in the tumultuous 1970s, when the prison system came under unprecedented levels of criticism, and in the 1980s, when the rehabilitation era gave way to heightened punitiveness.<fnref n="143" />

Incarcerated workers continued to suffer forestry-related injuries well into the 1970s and early 1980s. This ran counter to the interests of forestry officials who, by their own admission, needed “healthy, alert and confident individuals” to carry out necessary work in the forest.<fnref n="144" /> At the same time, the early stages of mass incarceration affected the labor supply in forestry camps. “We are receiving an increasing amount who cannot physically handle the work assignments given to us,” observed a DNR official in 1978. He blamed the overcrowding of other prisons, which caused officials to authorize transfers in hurried and indiscriminate fashion, with little regard for the reality of forestry work.<fnref n="145" /> One proposal to create special crews for men with physical disabilities was rebuked, as top administrators worried it would create “inferior arrangements.”<fnref n="146" /> The primary concern was for the efficiency of the program, not the extension of the presumably therapeutic virtues of forestry work to categories of prisoners who had been excluded from forestry programs during the rehabilitation era.

<footnote n="140">¹⁴⁰Richard Fuller, “After Inmate’s Death,” Everett Herald, Sept. 19, 1986, folder 300.1 (“Indian Ridge Correction Center”), box 22, CC-WSA; Unsigned letter to Jennifer Scott, Aug. 8, 1986, folder 300.1 (“Indian Ridge Correction Center”), box 22, CC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="141">¹⁴¹Richard D. Bosse, “DNR Safety Issues,” Aug. 29, 1986, folder 300.1 (“Indian Ridge Correction Center”), box 22, CC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="142">¹⁴²Richard D. Bosse, “Inter-Agency Agreement with Department of Natural Resources - Safety Issues,” Sept. 11, 1986, folder 300.1 (“Indian Ridge Correction Center”), box 22, CC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="143">¹⁴³For instance, see Renee Moe to Dixy Lee Ray, Jan. 17, 1980, folder 6 (“1980”), box 7, SHSDAC-WSA; and Martin Palmer to Lloyd W. Peterson, Sept. 18, 1980, folder 7 (“1980”), box 7, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="144">¹⁴⁴Robert Reis, Indian Ridge Treatment Center - Department of Natural Resources - Resident Safety Policy ad Procedure, March 2, 1982, folder 300.1 (Indian Ridge Correction Center), box 22, CC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="145">¹⁴⁵C. R. Dederick to E. C. Gockerell, Feb. 14, 1978, folder 14 (“Natural Resources Dept., 1978–79”), box 30, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="146">¹⁴⁶Robert Tropp to John Duffy, Mar. 7, 1978, folder 14 (“Natural Resources Dept., 1978–79”), box 30, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>
By the 1980s, officials had also started to picture healthfulness as incarcerated people's individual responsibility. So it is that those who failed to follow safe procedures or to use protective devices would face disciplinary sanctions ranging from a verbal reprimand to infraction reports (which could affect their release date).<fnref n="147" /> Whereas forestry camps had originally been conceived as a tool to remake incarcerated men's bodies in the New Deal era, they were now places where incarcerated men were expected to conserve their own bodily strength (in the same way that one conserves a clean record), or else face punishment.<fnref n="148" /> Echoing Loïc Wacquant's analysis of the neoliberal era, the celebration of individual responsibility merged with the intensification of the state's punitive capacities. However, whereas Wacquant primarily sees carceral spaces as ways to "warehouse" society's most "disruptive" and "superfluous" elements, the persistence of penal forestry camps also shows that under certain circumstances incarcerated people continue to represent a useful resource for the state.<fnref n="149" />

By the 1980s it was still assumed that forestry programs would help bring down recidivism rates. In an era of taxpayer anxiety, however, administrators also stressed another long-standing advantage of these programs: they served the public interest at low cost. Ideologically shaped by the rehabilitation era, forestry programs proved adaptable to the punitive turn thanks to their inherent material benefits to the public. In the words of Arizona administrators, where letting incarcerated people work the outdoors beyond the pentitentary's walls is concerned, the "savings outweigh the risks."<fnref n="150" />

Anaïs Lefèvre is a PhD candidate at Sorbonne-University, France, and a 2024 Fulbright Fellow. She is working on a dissertation tentatively entitled "‘These Men Must Work or Die’: Perceptions of Carceral Work in the United States, 1919-2000".

<footnote n="147">¹⁴⁷Robert Reis, Indian Ridge Treatment Center - Department of Natural Resources - Resident Safety Policy ad Procedure. Mar. 2, 1982, folder 300.1 (Indian Ridge Correction Center), box 22, CC-WSA.</footnote>

<footnote n="148">¹⁴⁸Philip Goodman has similarly observed about California that the meaning of the word “rehabilitation” has shifted in the neoliberal era; individuals were increasingly “considered responsible for their own rehabilitation.” Thus, rehabilitation has been reshaped in ways that make it “largely compatible with the neoliberal penality.” Philip Goodman, “Another Second Chance’: Rethinking Rehabilitation through the Lens of California’s Prison Fire Camps,” *Social Problems* 59, no. 4 (2012): 437–458.</footnote>

<footnote n="149">¹⁴⁹Loïc Wacquant, *Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity* (Durham: 2009), 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="150">¹⁵⁰John Schmidt and Mark Shaffer, “Prison-Labor Savings Outweigh Risks, Officials Say,” *Arizona Republic*, May 7, 1986. See also: Alan Ariav, “Arizona Prisons Save $7 Million by Using Inmates on 56 Projects,” *Arizona Republic*, Sept. 1, 1984; and Dick Paulson, “Inmate Forest Firefighters Save Taxpayer Dollars,” Nov. 6, 1979, folder 3 (“News Releases, 1979”), box 31, SHSDAC-WSA.</footnote>