A Carceral Ecology: Ushuaia and the History of Landscape and Punishment in Argentina

by Ryan C. Edwards

Overview

Closer to Antarctica than to Buenos Aires, the port town of Ushuaia, Argentina is home to a national park as well as a museum that is housed in the world’s southernmost prison. Ushuaia’s radial panopticon operated as an experimental hybrid penal colony and penitentiary from 1902 to 1947, designed to revolutionize modern prisons globally. A Carceral Ecology offers the first comprehensive study of this notorious prison and its afterlife, documenting how the Patagonian frontier and timber economy became central to ideas about labor, rehabilitation, and resource management. Mining the records of penologists, naturalists, and inmates, Ryan C. Edwards shows how discipline was tied to forest management, but also how inmates gained situated geographical knowledge and reframed debates on the regeneration of the land and the self. Bringing a new imperative to global prison studies, Edwards asks us to rethink the role of the environment in carceral practices as well as the impact of incarceration on the natural world.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520381827
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/28/2021
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ryan C. Edwards received a PhD in History from Cornell University and has taught at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Princeton University, and Cayuga Correctional Facility in Upstate New York.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Rethinking Prisons and Patagonia 1

1 Constructing an Open-Door Penitentiary 17

2 Forestry in Fireland 39

3 "I Too Am Ushuaia" 61

4 The Martyr in Argentine Siberia 84

5 The Lettered Archipelago 105

6 Developing an Argentine Prisonscape 126

Epilogue: Curating the End of the World 151

Notes 171

Bibliography 227

Index 251