Abstract
The debate over penal labor has been a vociferous one, as advocates and proponents have, for at least a century, made their case for or against the practice of putting prisoners to work. Nonetheless, conspicuously absent from this discussion have been the very people who most directly and intimately experience that work: prison inmates. In this article, I examine penal labor as it unfolds in one particular carceral site, namely California's prison fire camps in which state prisoners do manual labor and fight fires. The results reveal that binaries in which prison labor is positioned as either entirely good or entirely exploitative do not mesh well with the multifaceted experiences of those on the ground, who find elements of both at play. The fire camps are, therefore, an atypical case study that will hopefully serve as impetus for more research into the experiences of prisoner workers, as well as a starting point for deepening and complicating the existing debate over work and punishment.
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