Cora G Miller

The state of California relies on incarcerated labor to contain, prevent, and recover from massive and proliferating wildfires. This project examines the experiences and impact of incarcerated wildfire laborers who reside in Antelope Camp #25, a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Conservation Camp in northeastern California. By tracing the carceral logic of rehabilitation across carceral and non-carceral ecologies, this research examines how carcerality shapes wildfire fighting, land management, and fire recovery practices beyond the Conservation Camp. As the small, neighboring town of Greenville works to recover from the destruction of the 2021 Dixie Fire, how and where is anti/carcerality enacted? This project investigates how carcerality, defined as “the ways that ‘things’ take features of the criminal legal system, extending the reach beyond the system into other aspects of society,” structures relations between people, wildfire, and land in the mountains of northeastern California and beyond.