A Carceral Ecology: Penology, Forestry, Exploration, and Conservation in Southernmost Argentina (2016)
Edwards, Ryan Christopher (Author)
Cornell University
Physical Details: 287 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation explores how a supposed natural prison became a national park in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Combining methods and literatures from history, geography, political ecology, comparative literature, and science and technology studies, it tells the story of prison and place at “the end of the world.” The Ushuaia Penal Colony, referred to as the “Argentine Siberia,” operated from roughly 1902-1947. Using this austral prison as a case study, this work offers an environmental history of incarceration, what I call a “carceral ecology.” Ushuaia was a hybrid modern penitentiary-penal colony that was not confined to its stone walls, and bridged institutions such as modern and pre-modern carceral forms. Prison engineers spoke back from Latin America to foreign experts by offering an “open-door” incarceration method in response to failed penitentiary systems throughout Europe and the United States. This method brought together forestry and incarceration sciences, and also brought foreign experts to this distant outpost. Inmate labor and rehabilitation was centered on a sub-Antarctic timber industry, and therefore the prison and forestry department were co-constitutive through resource management and a transatlantic economy. When a military coup took the Argentine capital in 1930, political prisoners were exiled to Ushuaia where they refashioned their nationalist visions based on their confinement to incorporate Patagonia into a modern Argentina. Finally, this project follows the transition from the closing of the prison in 1947 to creation of sites of national memory. In 1960, the forests once labored by inmates were conserved as a national park, and various parties placed Argentine national history within a longer natural history. This work ends by exploring how national memory is shaped in order to preserve or elide socio-environmental relationships.
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