Abstract
The vast majority of prison labor goes unnoticed by the public, serving as a microcosm of the invisibility of prisoners as a whole. This perpetuates stereotypical media representations and public perceptions of prison laborers as nothing more than their indentured subjugation. This photo essay presents a more nuanced view of the experience of prison labor. I present images of an exceptional labor program, Arizona’s Inmate Wildfire Program, in order to question what happens when prison labor becomes visible, and when the symbolic markers of incarceration disappear. The program, in which 11 prison crews fight wildfires across the state, is an experiential paradox for its participants. It is at once exploitative, with its low pay for risky work, as well as transformative, with its potential for a re-emergence of complex identities and reclamation of dignity for those involved. Through these images, I argue that the transformative potential of the program is due in part to the program’s visibility, as incarcerated firefighters interact with the public—and their own self-representations—in emergent, meaningful ways. I call to examine the complexities of programs that challenge certain dehumanizing experiences of incarceration while being securely entrenched within the carceral regime.
In a world replete with images and representations, whom can we not see or grasp, and what are the consequences of selective blindness . . . How is visibility possible? For whom, by whom, and of whom? Who remains visible, to whom, and why?
Who we see or do not see
Prison labor is, among many other things, an act of disappearance. Indeed, the modern US carceral apparatus operates as a contradictory space of both hyper-visibility and erasure. Incarcerated people are surveilled at every moment behind prison walls, while they are also effectively erased from society, hidden away in increasingly rural prisons (King et al., 2003). In addition to their physical disappearance, the complex identities of incarcerated individuals are diminished into an abject category of “the criminal.” In this sense, prisoners become cauterized (Simmons, 2011); they are branded as morally “Other” and are thus silenced, sealed off from the polis. This disappearance is more than an affective loss for the families and communities of those incarcerated. As Casper and Moore write in the introduction to their 2009 text Missing Bodies, this disappearance is a fundamentally structural and political process. They note, “The visible and invisible dimensions of human life, including representations of bodies, work together to create social order as we know it” (p. 7).
Although invisibility is a critical component of the punitive nature of modern carceral ideology, resulting in a disenfranchised incarcerated population and a public who relinquishes any social responsibility for those behind bars (Pratt, 2008), the growth of the modern prison continues—and so continue the lives of those inside. Able-bodied incarcerated people in states like Arizona are required to perform labor during their prison sentences (Gibson-Light, 2019), resulting in a workforce of about 45,000 people—the size of a small city—who labors in the shadows. Prison labor is thus a form of “invisible labor,” a phrase explored by scholars over the past several decades (see Crain et al., 2016; Nardi and Engestrom, 1999) that explains the veiled nature of certain forms of work in varying social contexts like domestic or migrant labor. The concept is useful to describe how particular invisible laboring bodies exist in a complex social ecosystem with visible ones, revealing hierarchies of economic and moral value.
There is little public knowledge of the wide range of work done inside correctional facilities, and there are exceptionally few accounts of what people in prison actually think about the work that they do (for notable exceptions, see Gibson-Light, 2019; Goodman, 2010; Silva and Saraiva, 2016). A recent example of this was the uproar surrounding the upscale supermarket Whole Foods sourcing cheese from a company that used prison labor. As media outlets initially took up the story (see Aubrey, 2015), there was not a single quotation from an incarcerated individual who worked at the job in question. 1 Although news outlets rightly covered the economic consequences of prison labor and the troubling trend of private companies partnering with state correctional agencies, the lack of perspective from those inside upheld a black box—void of any complex lived experience—around the very people who individuals on the outside were outraged for. In moments of media flare-up like these, prison labor has a way of remaining an obscured cultural reality even as it is noticed by broader society. I argue that this results in the perpetuation of a flattened view of prison laborers, as individuals at work behind bars who are not easily definable beyond their own exploitation.
The issue for carceral scholars, then, is how prison labor might be made visible in ways that maintain the complexity of the lives inside. Although incarcerated people are still performing labor in cotton plantations and although various correctional departments frequently threaten to bring back the chain gang, confirming a critical link to the racist roots of American indentured servitude, prison labor has proliferated far beyond any singular form and simplistic representation. In rare but analytically meaningful circumstances, prison laborers might conduct non-normative work, and they might do so in spaces beyond prison walls. These exceptional spaces and experiences are important to research as much as the standard, factory-style work most commonly performed in US prisons. In studying these atypical programs, a central question emerges: What happens when a prison workforce steps out from the shadows? What are the consequences—both for the public and the incarcerated workers themselves—of prison labor becoming visible?
The images in this photo essay offer a case study of such a prison labor program, the Inmate Wildfire Program (IWP), comprised of 11 prison labor crews who fight wildfires throughout the state of Arizona. This labor program is atypical compared to other labor programs in Arizona’s Department of Corrections (ADC), in that it is more highly skilled, and offers much more social visibility, than every other program offered by the ADC. I became a wildland firefighter and conducted 15 months of in-depth ethnographic research with these crews, utilizing photography as a central part of my methodology. Taken together, these images re-present the bodies and experiences of incarcerated workers, making visible the complex possibilities of self-making that emerge when prison labor moves beyond the more common physical and symbolic space of work behind bars.
I describe the IWP as an experiential paradox for its participants. It is at once exploitative—with little pay for risky work and little material support upon release from prison—while transformative for those who fight fires. By “transformative,” I mean that certain aspects of the job of wildfire fighting provide individuals with more nuanced and powerful notions of selfhood than might occur in other prison labor programs on the yard. I argue that the transformative potential of the program is due in part to the program’s visibility. It is visible in the practical sense, as crews move through public and private spaces with the ease of firefighters. It is also visible symbolically, as incarcerated firefighters interact with the public—and their own self-representations—in emergent, meaningful ways (Image 1).
An incarcerated wildland fire crew in hiking formation, at the outset of a 3-mile trek to reach a wildfire in June 2015. Arizona prison crewmembers wear no visible markers of incarceration, and as they move through the southwest landscape with the ease of wildland firefighters, they are presented with momentary experiences of social re-inscription.
These images are a call to examine participants’ complex experiences of such programs like the IWP. At the outset of this photo essay, I ask readers to note that I describe the visibility of the program, and yet there are no faces seen in the images herein. This was a requirement both of the university’s ethics board, as well as a precondition set by the ADC. I bring this up here for two reasons. First, I encourage readers to view these images of people and their actions as visible in the symbolic and social sense: to question how their work, and the spaces of wildfire, challenge our perceptions of what prison labor and prisoners who labor look like. Second, I want to underscore the subtle irony that a photo essay on visibility is inherently limited in fully exploring the visual identities of the incarcerated people written about. In this sense, it is important to understand that “visibility” is always a bracketed concept in the prison context, and that while participation in the IWP does challenge certain dehumanizing experiences of incarceration, it is indeed simultaneously securely entrenched within the carceral regime.
Who goes missing
Modern prisons delineate the parameters of what it means to be a “criminal” subject through a myriad of policies and ideologies that incarcerated people are exposed to daily. This exposure might result in individuals recognizing themselves as being no more than this process of social categorization. As one crewmember described to me when we were discussing how his experience of imprisonment has changed over 24 years of incarceration, “The meals get worse, the visits get less, and you end up turnin’ into the scumbag they tell you you are.” This individual aptly summarizes the dehumanizing process of carceral subject formation, in which the penal institution attempts to produce a specific criminal sense of self for those inside.
The construction of the prisoner is an invisibilizing, degrading project, as the carceral geographer Brett Story notes in her 2019 book Prison Land. She writes, “The production of the ‘criminal’ as a racialized category of so-called indisputable depravity provides powerful legitimizing cover for the making of surplus populations and socially differentiating them” (p. 7). Furthermore, as she and other carceral geographers (Moran, 2015; Turner, 2016) note, the “space” of the prison and its impacts on obscuring and dehumanizing large swaths of the population is not limited to the physical prison, but ripples outward through hyper-policed communities, poor neighborhoods, and other social spaces demarcated as “criminal.” This social categorization of entire communities is disastrous for their emotional and economic well-being, and negatively impacts the chances for individuals to escape being surveilled and controlled throughout their life course (Wacquant, 2009).
The continual barrage of this process subject formation in carceral space can result in a sort of “existential death” (Jose-Kampfner, 1990) for those who serve time. The negative implications of this social deadening, or cauterization, are not lost on incarcerated people themselves. One crewmember I interviewed stated, When I was in the courtroom I was a father, I was a [construction worker], I was a basketball player, I was a son. And then as soon as I got my charge, and then especially . . . when I got to the yard, all of that was gone. And I had to start over.
Another crewmember refuted the idea that prison had any negative effect on his identity, stating, “I wasn’t gonna let being in prison change who I am.” But even this response indicates that it is solely up to the imprisoned individual to resist this process of existential death. This quote indicates that the modern prison has successfully constructed the pains of imprisonment as an individual fight, instead of a social responsibility by the state and the community at large. During my research, this individual, while initially hopeful, subsequently described how the myriad ways prison’s harsh social conditions, as well as his estrangement from his family, wore down his self-fortifying attitude. Without access to strong social support networks and identities shaped by affective relationships of kin and community, individuals in punitive prison systems show higher rates of violence, self-harm, and despair (De Viggiani, 2007).
Of all the ways that incarceration diminishes a person’s sense of self, one of the most insidious is the sheer boredom of daily prison life. This boredom stems both from the mundanity of the hyper-regulated prison environment as well as the daily acts of low-skilled repetitive labor enforced by the state. Although there was a short period of time in the late 1960s and 1970s where certain state’s prison policies were at least nominally focused on rehabilitation, 2 the increased use of prison labor for private sector endeavors in subsequent decades erased the possibility that prison labor could be separated from economically exploitative practices. Recent studies have shown that engaging in such menial labor has deleterious effects on a person’s mental acuity and psychological wellness (Lipsey and Cullen, 2007; Meijers et al., 2015).
For example, on one prison complex where I conducted research, there was a job that was considered by certain prisoners as a “good” one: a private tomato-growing operation paid prisoners $5 an hour for their labor. “Good” prison jobs mean different things to different people. According to the sociologist Gibson-Light (2019), it means a higher pay as well as a sense of the job being a non-carceral one (p. 69). Similarly, according to the individuals whom I interviewed who held these “good” jobs prior to becoming a wildland firefighter, they were simply considered good because of the pay, as a nearly minimum wage rate was rare.
However, at the tomato-picking plant, the mirage of a good job started crumbling as soon as an employee started, with prisoners quickly realizing how profoundly tedious the job was. One crewmember described, Oh it was bad, bad. Every day, eight hours a day, in a greenhouse, no breaks. You are picking little cherry tomatoes . . . It felt like, I hate to say this but like I was on a plantation. Back breaking . . .
He attempted to stay at the tomato-picking plant for as long as he could because his charges had resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in fines. He thought the nearly living wage would get those fines paid faster, but he ultimately decided his sanity was not worth it. The word on the yard spread that this job paid well but at a high psychological cost.
The invisibility of prison labor is compounded by factors that reach beyond the jobs themselves, whether deemed good or bad. Just as it is in broader society, structural factors like race, gender, and class shape the way a workforce is recognized as having worth, and thus is symbolically “seen” as worthy of social and economic equity. There is a large body of scholarship about, for example, the invisibility of day-laborers and farm workers (see Bail et al., 2012; Benson, 2001); the labor is backbreaking and dangerous, but because a high number of non-White, oftentimes non-citizens are the ones conducting it, this work is written off and its consequences are uncared for. Women working as maids in hotels, for example, suffer the double bind of gender and race, rendered invisible in the same way as other laborers, while their labor reifies gendered expectations of women’s domestic duties (McDowell et al., 2007).
Less has been written about the way race and class shape the experience of labor visibility in the prison context, yet Gibson-Light (2019) provides a granular analysis of the prison workforce to describe how such work confirms and in some cases intensifies racial and class disparities already present on the yard. He argues that prior work skills, labor market knowledge and education, social ties, and demographic features . . . are each influential in hiring decisions . . . as a result, particular prisoner groups—often sorted along the lines of class, race, and nationality—are privileged in the pursuit of desirable prison jobs and have greater mobility between stations within such work sites. (p. 117)
The IWP simultaneously upheld and challenged this fact. For example, there was only one person who identified as African American on the three crews I worked with, indicating that the crews operated as an exclusionary space for certain populations in prison. However, racial statistics on the crews ranged from 30% to 40% Mexican American, Mexican national, and Native American, which is in fact a higher percentage than is found on most US Forest Service crews (Desmond, 2008). In the next section, as I discuss the “visibility” of the IWP and its positive impact on dignity and selfhood, it is necessary to keep in mind these racial complexities, as it underscores the experiential paradox mentioned in the introduction, with only select individuals who join the IWP gaining certain opportunities to be seen and thus be assigned different social and moral valuation.
Who is found
In a 2012 article by Goodman about the intricacies of experience of incarcerated people in California’s fire camps, he writes, “Most women and men ‘doing time’ in a fire camp think of grade work and firefighting as partially exploitative and partially something to appreciate as good, useful, or at least better than the alternative” (p. 368). The duality of exploitation and rehabilitation that Goodman found in his interviews with prison firefighters indicates that incarcerated individuals are able to hold multiple, sometimes conflicting, feelings surrounding their work at once, an important starting place to seeing incarcerated workers as full and complex individuals, whose pragmatism must be accounted for in debates surrounding prison labor (Goodman, 2012).
However, Arizona’s IWP is significantly different than California’s fire camp program in key ways, and as such offers a different starting point for analysis in regard to the “good” or “useful” aspects of the program. Some examples are that Arizona’s IWP participants wear no markers of incarceration compared to California’s orange fire jumpsuits; another is that correctional officers work alongside IWP participants whereas they often do not in California; and finally, a major difference is that IWP crewmembers live on general population prison yards and then leave the prison every day for work or for weeks at a time on fires, thus being seen by and interacting with the community only in non-prison clothes. This differs from California’s designated “fire camps” where community members see incarcerated wildland firefighters both in their prison jumpsuits and fire clothes (Images 2–5).
An incarcerated firefighter battles the flames deep into the night. On the fire line, they work alongside non-incarcerated crews to save property and lives.
The crew leans on each other for support as a correctional officer gives bad news about a former crewmember who passed away suddenly only weeks after release.
A crewmember pauses to look out over an expansive vista while on a fire. It was in these spaces where conversations about selfhood beyond incarceration frequently took place.
A crewmember in full protective gear, walking with his head down to protect his face from the flames.
In this way, Arizona’s IWP offers a unique case study in contrast to California’s prison fire program, and also offers a case study of exceptional physical and social visibility that stands in stark contrast to a prison job like the tomato-picking factory, or any other myriad monotonous jobs across Arizona’s prisons. Here I want to underscore that understanding the IWP as an exceptional prison labor program does not mean I conceptualize it as in some way apart from the prison. The low pay for IWP participants cements its place within the punitive ideologies of the modern carceral apparatus. Indeed, the IWP is enthusiastically undersigned by prison officials because it easily satisfies the dual rhetorics of cost-savings and “responsibilizing” logic (O’Malley, 2014).
Yet I found that this enthusiastic formal consent resulted in a program that was allowed to operate with a much longer operational leash than other programs, which then led to experiences that seemed to defy certain dehumanizing aspects of imprisonment. Although I describe several examples of this defiance elsewhere, here I point to the visibility of the job of wildland firefighting, and the possibilities that emerge when prison laborers are not just in view of the public (rare in and of itself), but witnessed in a way that is antithetical to common societal notions of criminality.
Prison labor is not equally visible across the country. Individuals who live in urban spaces might not ever come across incarcerated workers. For those who commute to work via interstates or highways, prison laborers may only be seen at 75 miles per hour, a blur of orange or blue-clad bodies picking up trash on the side of the road. However, as prisons have proliferated in rural areas, prison labor has become a fixture in towns and villages across the country. Within the span of a week during my fieldwork in the rural town next to one of the prison complexes that held thousands of minimum-security prisoners, I saw incarcerated people planting geraniums beneath the town founder’s statue, wielding shovels and asphalt for a road improvement project, sorting plastics from cans at the recycling center, and sitting packed inside dozens of re-purposed white school buses, headed to other small towns dotting southern Arizona.
What I came to discover, though, is that visibility does not equal being seen, in the affective sense of the term (Casper and Moore 2009). In other words, the increased presence of prison laborers does not result in the general public having a different or more nuanced view of incarcerated people as bodies worth knowing, as people worthy of care. Nor does it necessarily result in the form of identity work (Snow and Anderson, 1987) that offers transformative potential for program participants. For most prison laborers, the divide between outside and inside persists even when conducting work outside prison walls. This has much to do with the symbolic barriers that surround most prison work crews, from their branded orange outfits to the omnipresence of an armed correctional officer nearby.
In contrast, crewmembers of the IWP move through the landscapes of Arizona with the ease of firefighters. The physical space of wildland fire work offered a fundamentally different experience compared to all other work crews I observed during my research period, and are at least partially captured in the photos in this essay. Visibility in the IWP is 360°—it reaches from the imprisoned crewmembers seeing and moving through the world in anti-carceral ways, to correctional officers having to see those crewmembers in more complex ways, to the public who had to grapple with what a prison laborer typically “looks” like.
The crews rode in imposing and impressive wildfire buggies, rather than correctional buses. Their uniforms were federally mandated protective gear, blurring symbolic boundaries between themselves and non-prison crews, and their shirts were emblazoned with their crew logos rather than ADC stamps. Significantly, the very nature of their job led them into fundamentally anti-carceral spaces, like the cozy private properties of rural homeowners, bustling restaurants after a week on the fire line, landscapes with spectacular features and open vistas, and the humbling and spontaneous heat of forest fire. The physical space of the work, therefore, shifted the foundations of visibility for incarcerated people—crewmembers began to see themselves as capable of emplacement and self-making within the non-punitive landscape of wildland fire (Images 6–8).
A wildfire buggy, not marked as an Arizona Department of Corrections vehicle, parked precariously on a remote hilltop, with the sunset colored by fire. Wildland crews will spend anywhere between a day up to 3 weeks on wildfires.
Re-orientation of space and the self: The crew is barely visible in contrast to the enormity of the desert landscape. In addition to the crew being seen in complex ways by the public, the non-carceral landscape of the desert southwest can allow crewmembers to re-conceptualize their own sense of self, often with the openness of the physical space acting as an impetus.
Upon close inspection, one can see the grip of a crewmember’s hand on a safety handle inside a transport helicopter. The crews fly in and out of fires several times a year to access remote locations.
Crewmembers had to adjust to their ease of movement through the physical landscape, and similarly had to re-consider their social and symbolic visibility in their frequent interactions with the public. In her chapter on carceral boundaries, Turner (2017) describes that prisons exist on the margins of society, and this peripheral existence results in prisoners being rendered literally and metaphorically “untouchable” through the process of incarceration (p. 154). On the IWP, physical distance from the prison grows, and tactile boundaries are erased. Crewmembers exit the prison yard and ride in their buggies through the non-carceral landscape to encounter both spectacular (stargazing in spectacular desert landscapes) and mundane (chatting and shaking hands with homeowners) experiences of both physical and symbolic visibility that non-incarcerated people may take for granted.
One crewmember described to me how he adjusted to coming in contact with homeowners and other individuals on a daily basis, saying, At first it felt like [the public] were staring at me. I was paranoid. It felt like all eyes were on me . . . I would hang back behind [the crew boss], watching him and how he’d interact, kinda slinking in the background you know? I didn’t want anyone to look at me ’cause I was worried what they would think. But then I realized it wasn’t bad. They wanted to make eye contact with me or talk to me. It was just that they were seeing me. I was being seen like a human being again.
Another crewmember explained, “When I’m out here, I’m not a piece of trash anymore. I’m me, I’m a person. Have I fucked up? Yeah. I’m in prison! [laughs] But I’m not something to just throw away.”
Both of these quotes underscore the notion of visibility as something both physical and symbolic, with effects that ripple into reconceptualizations of the self. They point to one of the most common impacts on identity that IWP participants noted, which is being regarded—and slowly learning to accept being regarded—as a human again, after having survived years of incarceration in a subhuman status. Identity here is positioned as inherently relational, based both on the inner self and the social system. The wildfire program is foundationally a public-facing program. Nearly every workday, prisoners communicated with non-prisoners, whether they were homeowners, non-prison wildfire crews, or the occasional starry-eyed child, who in one instance ran up to one crewmember at a restaurant where the crew was eating after a fire and exclaimed (of course, not understanding the irony), “I want to be like you when I grow up!” (Images 9–12).
Crewmembers climb steep terrain at sunset, demonstrating the immense physicality of wildland firefighting.
Crewmembers debrief after a hard fire. In the foreground, a dog stays close to the crewmember who saved her from the flames. Her week-old puppies did not survive; crewmembers buried what remained. The family whose property burned expressed their gratitude toward the crew for their efforts and their care.
Crewmembers become certified sawyers; this crew spent 6 weeks in a remote mountain range cutting down trees burned by a large wildfire. Saw teams were often comprised of two crewmembers who identified as different races, creating a racial inclusivity that challenged strict racial boundaries on the prison yard.
Crewmembers as well as community members stand on top of a small hill above the nearby town, where they supervised a bonfire for the high school football team. Events like this one were representative of the relative visibility of the fire crew in the local community, even deemed “guests of honor” in the town newspaper.
The impact of these public interactions go beyond a simple “feel good” story. They act as a fundamental reinscription of selfhood and allows for a temporary reversal of social cauterization for prisoners by the broader public. I argue that this differentiates the IWP from other labor programs that are personally meaningful, like service dog training, and even sets it apart from certain non-labor programs like creative writing or art workshops (Turner, 2017), where prisoners conduct non-carceral work while still obscured by the confines of the prison yard. It is the inherent immersion into non-penal landscapes and non-punitive social interactions that I identified as exceptional, and that participants identified as transformative in ways that challenged the inhumanity of normative prison labor experiences. And although the visibility of the IWP offers an impermanent shift in social categorization, as program participants are still incarcerated and will still face structural barriers when released (Goodman, 2012), the experience of been regarded as someone beyond one’s incarceration was noted as one of the top three meaningful aspects of the program for over 70% of participants I interviewed.
The visibility of the IWP allows everyone involved to re-consider what being a prisoner means. The lack of any identifying clothing or linguistic markers provides a symbolic fluidity for those who participate. This shaped the perspective of rural homeowners in particular. In my informal interviews with them, they noted that they were initially anxious about having crews of incarcerated people on their property, until they met and got to know them. This shift in perspective also occurred for family and friends of crewmembers. Children, spouses, and parents of program participants referred to them as firefighters, thus offering an alternative to the societal stigma of prison that has been shown to be damaging not just to incarcerated people but to their social networks and families as well (Patillo et al., 2004). This, in turn, provides emotional and psychological room for crewmembers to question who they are, or who they can choose to be, questions not often posed in the prison context (Jones and Schmid, 2000).
The social category of “criminal” is anything but natural. It is crafted through policies, language, and embodied procedures each day for people in prison. Therefore, the conscious refusal of this cauterization time and time again on the crew—often stemming first from their public visibility—serves as an important form of identity work for IWP participants. Crewmembers would chide each other for describing themselves disparagingly or accepting their fate as “inmates.” On one fire, a group of crewmembers were huddled under a broad mesquite tree scarfing down their lunch. One said, “Man, I love it out here. I don’t even want to get out!” He was slated to be released from prison that month, and was anxious about finding work and a place to stay. A crewmember next to him forcefully put down his food and grabbed his forearm, made eye contact, and said, “Do. Not. Ever. Say that you want to stay inside, buddy. You are better than that.” The soon-to-be-released crewmember laughed, but shook his head in agreement.
For some program participants, being on the crew also made visible the gendered and racial structures that can become entrenched on Arizona’s prison yards. Because the IWP crews were explicitly not segregated by race, certain program participants came to realize over the course of their work how damaging the arbitrary racial boundaries that are drawn and enforced on the prison yard are. One crewmember noted, “I got out here [on the crew] and realized that every sort of . . . race politics we play with on the yard is not the way it works in the real world. I forgot about that for a minute.” This crewmember describes yet another way of thinking about visibility in relationship to the IWP. Visibility is the crewmembers being seen by the public in non-carceral ways, and the crewmembers seeing themselves as beyond their own subjugation, but it also is crewmembers seeing the prison (and their experiences within it) through a new lens. The same held true for their perspectives on what it meant to be a man in prison; even though the normative performance of prison masculinity is a hegemonic, often violent one (Toch, 1998), after time spent on the crew, several crewmembers indicated that the care they showed for one another on the fire line changed their perspective on manhood in profound ways, both in prison and beyond.
Over the course of my research, I found that it was between crewmembers and the public, and between crewmembers themselves, that the reversal of the social cauterization of criminality occurred each day on the IWP. And as such, being firefighter in prison offered a site of radical potential to discover new forms of self-relation, and in so doing, is an act of resistance toward the dehumanization of modern incarceration.
What emerges from the flames
To return to the question I posed at the beginning of this essay, what happens when prison laborers step out from the shadows? Over the course of my research, I witnessed the re-presentation of incarcerated individuals as visible laborers who played an integral role within the broader social landscape of meaningful work in the rural United States. In addition, I witnessed the reclamation of complex identities of crewmembers over 15 months, and came to conceptualize the visibility of the IWP as a key aspect of this transformative potential for program participants. The public nature of the work of wildland firefighting disrupted the normative optics of modern prison labor, destabilizing public perceptions of incarcerated workers and re-framing notions of selfhood for those fighting fires (Image 13).
A crewmember looks at a tree torching on a fire.
The visibility that I describe here did not result, however, in a straightforward move from one social category to another. Although fire crews were seen as individuals beyond the category “criminal” by the public, this does not mean that they were seen—or saw themselves—as the category’s ontological opposite, “hero.” Identities are not linear, and prisoners themselves did not pose their identity work in such binary terms. Indeed, positioning “heroism” and “criminality” as two opposing categories, or even accepting them as bounded categories at all, does not pay credence to the multifaceted ways that IWP members construct their senses of self both as firefighters and beyond. In the process of symbolic and affective re-emergence, I found that crewmembers simultaneously held multiple truths about themselves and their work (Goodman, 2010)—that they had committed crimes but were not “bad,” and that the work was simultaneously transformative while also being exploitative.
The very nature of being an imprisoned firefighter, with its inherent contradictions in public and self-perception, required program participants to think critically about their identities. Therefore, following from the complex formulations of self that emerged for prison firefighters, I similarly avoid representing prison fire crews in binary terms. It may be tempting to see the archetype of the hero/criminal, or even “antihero” of myth, in images of the IWP. But I argue that the social categories of heroism and criminality must be problematized (Desmond, 2008), and I found that prison crewmembers internalized the visibility of the IWP to do this nuanced work. In this sense, we can broadly see the potential of visibility as resulting in a more nuanced, and therefore less cauterizing view, of the categories of “criminal” or “hero” alike.
I end with a call to carceral scholars to consider the role of photography in expanding representations of the lived experiences of incarceration. The images in this essay are meant to provoke a different way of looking at prison labor. They are images that represent what I and what the general public sees of IWP crewmembers as they conduct highly skilled, dangerous, and meaningful work on the fire line. These images, as a whole, present a non-carceral view of prison labor, and offer a starting place to discuss the importance of questioning what images can do to shape the important scholarly and public discussions of those who work while incarcerated.
The images included in this photo essay are, in part, a result of the practicalities of my research: I had more latitude to take pictures on the fire line than I would have had in the prison complex. Although at first I felt like my project was “missing” the standard images one would expect from a dissertation on incarceration, I instead followed the ethnographic trail, giving analytical weight to the phenomenon of emergent, meaningful visibility described here. I turned to the literature on identity work, transformation, and the affective potential of being seen to ground my observations. What has emerged, in addition to my words and images, is a possible template for expanding the literal and figurative lenses through which we view the daily lives of incarcerated people.
The photographs here characterize incarcerated firefighters in the same way that the public sees them as they move through public spaces in newly visible ways. They also represent the way certain crewmembers described how they saw themselves after time spent in the program. Most succinctly, this view can be described as meaningful; both in terms of the work they conduct, and in terms of the dignity assigned to incarcerated laborers themselves. Centering dignity or meaning in photographs of incarceration can re-invigorate the “ocular ethic” of prison research. Carceral scholars aim to conduct research that “refuses to assign . . . value to some bodies at the expense of others,” and utilizing photography in non-normative prison experiences enhances this mission, by treating incarcerated people “in the fullness of their lived, embodied experiences” (Casper and Moore, 2009: 16). As researchers increasingly re-enter the space of the prison to conduct in-depth ethnographic research, it is vitally important that we maintain an “ocular ethic” that challenges typical, flattening media representations of incarcerated people, recognizing we too participate—and can shape—the politics of visibility of a population rendered invisible for too long.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
