Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a Black geographer and prison abolitionist, has been credited with the invention of “carceral geography.” Her work analyzes the relationship between space, place and incarceration and how racial capitalism influences these dynamics. Carceral geographies are not limited to the borders/boundaries/spaces of the prison, however. Carceral geographies tell stories of our pasts and futures, and they realize structures of violence and power that extend far beyond the physical boundary of a prison facility.

The lens of carceral geographies becomes a useful tool in cutting through the fog of abstraction, a mode of thought and action related to racial capitalism that collapses categories, evacuates specificity, and obscures history in order to deny Black people personhood and maintain the dominance of the white supremacist capitalist state. Abstraction is a violent tool to control, oppress, and limit the futurities of People of Color. For Black people in particular, both abstraction and carcerality (i.e. imprisonment, confinement, and surveillance) inform our existence as previously-enslaved individuals.

Carceral geography: geographical and space-centered research into the practices and expansion of incarcerating institutions ranging from prison facilities to detention centers to borders and beyond
(Moran, et al 2011).

This use of abstraction too is entangled with our relationships with the land. From the advent of the plantation to slave patrols to our contemporary understanding of policing, geographic mobility and freedom have been structurally limited for the descendants of enslaved Africans. Slave patrols were organized groups of often self-deputized white men who monitored and disciplined slaves in the antebellum South and beyond. They were forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan, which had a strong presence in Oregon and Idaho, and continue to exert influence throughout the Pacific Northwest. Oregon in particular is a place that articulated itself in opposition to Blackness, leading to it being one of the whitest states in the nation and a place where many Black people still feel unwelcome and unsafe. This segregationist stance is evident in the implementation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, too, as my StoryMap [linked below] illustrates. The Pacific Northwest was, and continues to be, a carceral geography, a landscape inflected by control over Black people.

That the unbearable whiteness of the PNW is a symptom and ongoing cause of carceral geography is evident in PNW prison demographics, which show unequal representations of people based on race versus the general population in the prison systems. In Washington, Black people make up 5% of the population but 18% of the prison population while white people make up 72% of the population but only 60% in prison (2015 data). In Oregon, Black people today make up 2% of the total population of Oregon, but they account for 9% of the prison population. Idaho’s numbers are slightly less lopsided (1% Black in general to 3% of the prison population) and yet still exhibit a bias against in favor of white offenders (84% of the total population to 74% in prisons). In all three PNW states, Black and other People of Color make up a small fraction of the overall population compared with white people and yet are overrepresented in each state’s incarcerated population, with Black individuals being the most overrepresented relative to overall population numbers.

These demographic inequalities in the incarcerated populations of the PNW have implications for labor relations due to the use of forced and/or unequal prison labor. Take Oregon as an example, where incarcerated individuals are required to work. The state of Oregon contracts with prisons for office and park furniture and, until recently, the University of Oregon contracted with prisons to build dorm room furniture. During the scariest period of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, incarcerated workers at Oregon State Penitentiary were responsible for doing most of the laundry for hospitals, meaning that these workers were dealing with biohazards and organic waste, often unprotected.

Racial capitalism: coined by Dr. Cedric J. Robinson, author of Black Marxism; recognizes that the exploitation of workers and the exploitation of racialized people are interrelated and co-evolving.

 

Plantationocene: In contrast to the Anthropocene, the Plantationocene seeks to identify specifically how the plantation economy shaped human influence over the land, particularly as it relates to public land usage, incarceration and labor relations and how Black people reclaim agency and space through collective practice, poetry, oral histories and art.

Since 1951, the Oregon Department of Forestry has partnered with the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) adults in custody (AIC) to help reforest and protect state forest lands, including fighting wildfires. Indeed, Washington, Idaho, and Oregon all use incarcerated individuals for firefighting (along with states throughout the West including Utah and, notably, California.) While incarcerated firefighters often express appreciation for the experience, whether from being out in nature or from being able to do impactful work, the fact remains that incarcerated firefighters are paid a fraction of the wages of non-incarcerated firefighters, lack the life and injury protections afforded to other firefighters, and often cannot find work as firefighters after their release due to bias or governmental laws banning the hiring of people with criminal records. In Oregon, the relative popularity of jobs in woodworking and firefighting must be weighed against the forced work requirement and the limited alternatives.

With the increase in wildfires and their extremity due to global warming, the incentive to change the use of incarcerated labor to fight them will need to come from public awareness and pressure. As Stacy Selby writes in an opinion piece for Crosscut, “As long as we lack the resources to have a long-term and healthy relationship with fire, we’ll have fire seasons that require cheap, exploitative labor.” Thus the research of Dr. Leigh Johnson and graduate students Troy Brundidge and Charlotte Klein in this Atlas draw back the curtain on the current state of carceral geographies of firefighting labor in Oregon.