Lenc on Hall Jr., 'A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York's North Country'

H-Environment Lenc on Hall Jr., 'A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York's North Country' Review published on Monday, August 16, 2021 Clarence Jefferson Hall Jr. A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York's North Country. Environmental History of the Northeast Series. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020. Illustrations. 288 pp. $29.95 (paper),ISBN 978-1-62534-536-3; $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-62534-535-6. Reviewed by Xander Lenc (University of California, Berkeley)Published on H-Environment (August, 2021) Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University) Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56163 Are prisons and jails ecological institutions? Do they have distinct environmental footprints? Do they represent a failure to consider the environment, or are they predicated on environmental thinking? While “green” criminologists and their critics have long debated the use of the criminal justice system to tackle environmental problems ascriminal problems, there has more recently been a multidisciplinary push to investigate the ecological dimensions of incarceration itself, especially in the United States.[1] This body of work has generally been critical of prisons and invested in the core tenets of environmental justice: questioning the logic of “green” prison design and rehabilitation programs, probing the promise and limitations of environmental law’s capacity to monitor the ecological impact of prisons, probing the conceptual and social relationships between carcerality and animality, and theorizing prisons as sites of toxic exposure that entrench patterns of environmental racism.[2] But curiously, this emerging multidisciplinary literature on ecology and mass incarceration has so far seen fewer entries from the field of environmental history.[3] Historian Clarence Jefferson Hall Jr.’s book A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York’s North Country is a welcome reversal of this trend, with a rigorous account of the planning, construction, operation, and (in some cases) closure of six state and federal prisons in New York’s vast and forested “North Country” in the Adirondack Mountains from the 1840s to the early 2000s. Unlike other major monographs of incarceration in the state of New York, Hall focuses less on statewide and national political crisis and transformation or inmate resistance and more on efforts by the New York Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) and the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to secure permission to build new facilities, one rural community at a time.[4] As one might expect, the bulk of this drama unfolds from late 1960s onward, when the swiftly rising incarceration rate encountered an ascendent environmental movement armed with new legal tools, such as New York’s State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQR). To this extent,A Prison in the Woods appears at first to be a familiar story of state and federal land-use planning in the United States, where projects rise or fall according to local politics around job creation and property values, the waxing and waning interests of investors, permitting missteps, the political theater of public comment periods, complex transfers of property between private and public landholders, and rivalries between state agencies. In particular, the focus on the rancor of local hearings will inevitably invite comparison to Ruth Wilson Citation: H-Net Reviews. Lenc on Hall Jr., 'A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York's North Country'. H- Environment. 08-16-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/19397/reviews/8083335/lenc-hall-jr-prison-woods-environment-and-incarceration-new-yorks Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Environment Gilmore’s now-canonical account of a municipal debate over prison construction in the economically troubled small town of Corcoran, California (Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California [2007]). But unlike Gilmore, who uses Corcoran as a singular case of a spatial fix for a statewide and global crisis of capital accumulation,A Prison in the Woods offers a more localized history of incarceration in five different villages and hamlets: Dannemora, Ray Brook, Gabriels, Lyon Mountain, and Tupper Lake. State and federal bureaucracies, such as DOCS and BOP, are of course key players, but rather than rehashing the complicated legal and political causes of mass incarceration in New York (which Hall largely ascribes to the Rockefeller drug laws), A Prison in the Woods focuses more on its regional material and cultural effects. The result of this approach is not a compromise in depth but an effective demonstration of how mass incarceration developed (and, in some cases, contracted) along surprisingly diverse trajectories, even in superficially similar communities in a common region. While less-localized studies might collapse these heterogenous communities into the undifferentiated category of “surplus land” experiencing part of a generalizable global economic crisis, attending to different prison towns one at a time, chapter by chapter, yields a more complicated set of stories. While BOP converted a private college into a new federal prison in the economically threatened hamlet of Ray Brook over the fierce objection of environmental activists (chapter 3), DOCS ultimately withdrew plans for a facility in the declining former logging village of Tupper Lake out of environmental concerns despite decades of vigilant local pro-prison activism (chapter 5). Communities that did experience prison development also had different levels of success in harnessing facilities as engines of economic and social revival and development. Results could even vary within a single town. A state prison converted from Olympic athlete housing in Ray Brook won over many skeptical local residents by using prisoner labor to refurbish churches, clear vegetation for industrial sites, cut firewood, and battle forest fires and flooding, a relief for a region struggling to grapple with regional austerity and disinvestment. But just half a mile away, a federal prison’s “insubstantial, ad hoc attempts at integration” with the non- incarcerated community led to enough local resentment to scuttle plans to build a third prison in Ray Brook (p. 84). Hall is careful to note that environmentalist opposition to the rise of the Adirondack prisonland was not a monolith either. While groups like Stop The Olympic Prison (STOP) in Ray Brook expressed seemingly sincere concerns about the risks that prison proliferation posed for the local environment and Black and Latino communities, groups like Tupper Lake Concerned Citizens (TLCC) or Gabriels’s Citizens Against More Prisons in the Adirondacks (CAMPA) deployed environmentalist rhetoric as a convenient cover for their “uniquely racist brand of environmentalism,” where the increasingly Black and Latino incarcerated population was seen as an a priori threat to the environment and region’s racial and class hierarchy. What united the affluent residents who spearheaded most of these opposition campaigns was the understanding of a park as “a place solely dedicated to the promotion of health, leisure, and recreation,” a definition that excluded not only correctional facilities but also many other potential sources of employment for their working-class neighbors (p. 94). But Hall argues that the notion that “prisons did not conform with the Adirondack environment effectively denied the area’s history” of incarceration dating back to the mid-nineteenth century (p. 123). In fact, all but one facility covered in A Prison in the Woods (Clinton State Prison, built in Dannemora in 1844, covered in chapter 1) was built in an area trying to revive towns whose non-recreational sources of employment were languishing, a far cry from the unspoiled nature described by bucolic prison supporters and opponents. Ultimately, some influential residents came to value the benefits of Citation: H-Net Reviews. Lenc on Hall Jr., 'A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York's North Country'. H- Environment. 08-16-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/19397/reviews/8083335/lenc-hall-jr-prison-woods-environment-and-incarceration-new-yorks Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Environment a local unfree labor force improving recreational facilities, or the new water treatment infrastructure that could be shared with areas already struggling with contaminated groundwater. But working- class residents were often disappointed when the reality of new job opportunities fell short of the rosy forecasts of carceral boosters or when prisons such as Camp Gabriels and Lyon Mountain Correctional Facility were shuttered entirely within only a few decades. Even if organizations like TLCC and CAMPA were only nominally or provisionally concerned with the welfare of local wildlife, the actual ecological harms of new carceral facilities could be considerable, including multiple alarming cases in which damaged or malfunctioning prison sewage systems polluted local wetlands and threatened the safety of the town’s water supply. But what distinguishes these problems from the impact of non-carceral forms of development? Do prisons follow aunique pattern of material environmental change? The facilities described inA Prison in the Woods were planned, debated over,

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