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.Footnote 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.”Footnote ²⁴ Some warned that their bodies would simply lose the ability to perform eight hours of intense, quality work after their release.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁷ This transition happened in a 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.Footnote ²⁸

The regulation of prison-made goods at the federal level has sometimes been analyzed as heralding a new era of “punishment without labor.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote ³⁵ The agency’s recommendations to almost every state included the idea of developing outdoor labor programs (particularly farming and reforestation) as a cure for both prison unemployment and prisoners’ criminality.Footnote 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).Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 “vital need” to develop similar programs providing “healthful work on productive projects of public benefit, preferably in a forest or similar outdoor location.”Footnote ⁴³

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.Footnote ⁴⁴ 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.”Footnote ⁴⁵ 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.Footnote ⁴⁶ 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.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such programs tended to be uniformly portrayed as progressive and hopeful by the press.Footnote ⁴⁸

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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 delinquency, which led experts and officials to fish for new penal structures that would be successful at rehabilitating this newly visible prison demographic.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵⁹ The idealization of forestry work by officials clashed with the experiences of the men and boys who lived it.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁶⁷ When it came 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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).Footnote 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).Footnote 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.Footnote 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, tough job” that ensured the fire was extinguished “to the very last smoke.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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 30^th, 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁸² The wages of the men also suffered when they were transferred for medical reasons, which was no encouragement to seeking aid.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁹⁰ Staffing difficulties resulted in poor supervision at night, and officials suspected that incarcerated men were sometimes assaulted or raped in these dormitories.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 evacuations impossible.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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).Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 Resources (DNR) officials to obtain workers from the prisons.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In practice, the rehabilitative purposes of the camps were overshadowed by the manpower needs of forest agencies.

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.

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.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Sometimes prisoners were so outspoken in their criticism of the camps that they were sent back to the nearest brick-and-mortar prison.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ And sometimes, despite the risk that their sentence would be increased, they escaped.Footnote 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 CommunityFootnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹¹¹ Many families increasingly associated cities with overcrowding, pollution, and stress, and turned to nature as necessary to “good mental and physical health.”Footnote 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.Footnote ¹¹³ In the 1970s and 1980s, even as the 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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 the names and locations of “scenic rock formations” for the benefit of sightseers.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Similarly, in the state of Washington, the DNR regularly pressed corrections officials to increase the population of forestry camps.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹²¹

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.

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.Footnote ¹²² In this, penal forestry programs echoed the longer history of national park management in the United States, and forestry at large.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹²⁴ In Washington state, timber made available by prisoner labor also resulted in the annual injection of several thousands of dollars into state coffers.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹³¹

Some historians have described forestry camps as essential to state correction departments’ public relations.Footnote 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 nonexistant. 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.Footnote 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 used for camping, hunting, fishing, hiking, horseback riding, R.V. Clubs, Motorcycle Clubs, as well as sightseeing.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ¹³⁷ Because the forest had become associated with family enjoyment, it became particularly inhospitable to people perceived as unwanted, problematic, or even “unnatural.”Footnote 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. ^{Footnote 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.