Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Sellers, Christopher C | Tomes, Nancy | Rilling, Donna | Chase, Robert | Chiang, Connie.
Date
2015-08-01
Keywords
Economy, Environment, Health, Incarceration, Parks, Prisons | American history
Department
Department of History.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77725
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
My dissertation explores the social experience and environmental politics of mass incarceration in five communities in New York's Adirondack Park, with a focus on the period 1975-1999. Historians, sociologists, and criminologists have enhanced our understanding of criminal law and its impacts on lawbreakers, their families, and communities. By the same token, environmental historians have expanded our knowledge of the dynamic forces that contributed to the making of parks and recreational spaces across the United States. With rare exceptions, scholars in these fields have left unexplored one of the consequences of postindustrial decline, namely, the mass incarceration of predominantly urban, non-white men in penal institutions situated in overwhelmingly white, rural communities far from their homes. This project, therefore, seeks to begin a conversation about the many people, environments, and economies that have been implicated in the United States' criminal justice system. I argue that city dwellers' desire for " law and order," and Park residents' clamor for economic development, outweighed the failures of mass incarceration, leading to construction of a crimescape in the Adirondacks in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Anti-prison rancor in affluent parts of New York pushed correctional planners to the North Country, where they encountered communities whose permanent residents, seasonal dwellers, history, and natural environment greatly complicated the state's carceral objectives. While many locals welcomed the prospect of increased economic activity, second homeowners and other outsiders bristled at the idea of their vacationland becoming a gulag. Environmental regulators found themselves in the crosshairs of locals suspicious of state power, elite vacationers demanding a halt to penal expansion in the Park, and prison officials eager to fill more cells. In the end, corrections leaders hashed out compromises with environmental bureaucrats that mollified supporters and opponents and paved the way for nearly a dozen new prisons. While escapes, violence, and unrest were ever-present in the area's prison towns, the free labor of inmate workers in communities across the region helped facilitate the slow naturalization of the Adirondacks' crimescape. | 316 pages
Recommended Citation
Hall, Clarence Jefferson, "Prisonland: Environment, Society, and Mass Incarceration on New York's Northern Frontier, 1845-1999" (2015). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3512.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3512