Reform on Fire: The Role of Skilled Labor Programs in the Era of Mass Incarceration

• In Event: Beyond the Label Offender: Prisoners' Reflections About Prison Programs

Abstract

Rehabilitation was not a monolithic penal policy in the United States. Arizona never truly adopted a rehabilitative model due to its economic conservatism and ‘get tough’ attitude towards crime. Its penal policies continue to serve as an exemplar of punitive incarceration. However, there are certain prison programs that complicate the totalizing austerity of Arizona’s penal policies. This paper focuses on one, the Wildland Firefighting Program, which serves as a case study to examine the paradoxical role of skilled labor programs in the nonrehabilitative era. This and other labor programs are sometimes classified as a form of slave labor. Yet they also offer meaningful and potentially transformative experiences for those who participate. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with inmate wildfire crews in Arizona, this paper will explore how incarcerated individuals navigate both sides of this paradox on a daily basis. I will examine how individuals conceptualize their position as a laborer within neoliberal penal policy while unearthing the non-economic, affective meanings of wildland firefighting. The meanings that this job holds for incarcerated individuals offer penal reform scholars a theoretically rich arena to evaluate how certain aspects of the rehabilitative ideal are transformed to fit the new reality of mass incarceration.

Author

• Lindsey Raisa Feldman, University of Arizona