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"A Carceral Ecology is an interesting and important contribution to the environmental and social history of Latin America. Ryan Edwards takes a unique topic and does great justice to the individuals and issues within it. He nicely bridges two relatively robust areas of scholarly inquiry—histories of crime and punishment and histories of landscape and the environment—in a clear and engaging way."—Emily Wakild, author of Revolutionary Parks: Conservation, Social Justice, and Mexico's National Parks, 1910–1940
"This is the first extended history of the legendary prison of Ushuaia, spanning a whole century, from its conception and construction to its conversion into a museum at the end of the world for global tourists. The attention paid to the multilayered relation between prison and place makes this book a highly original study of a case with broad relevance."—Lila Caimari, author of While the City Sleeps: A History of Pistoleros, Policemen, and the Crime Beat in Buenos Aires before Perón
List of contents
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rethinking Prisons and Patagonia
1 • Constructing an Open-Door Penitentiary
2 • Forestry in Fireland
3 • “I Too Am Ushuaia”
4 • The Martyr in Argentine Siberia
5 • The Lettered Archipelago
6 • Developing an Argentine Prisonscape
Epilogue: Curating the End of the World
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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.
Summary
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.
