Trevor Paglen

The environmental impact of prisons on California’s San Joaquin Valley has come under close scrutiny during the legal proceedings around the construction of the controversial new Delano II prison. Prisons are blamed by CalTrans for increased traffic flow in rural areas, which in turn contributes significantly to the rise of air pollution in the Central Valley. In addition, prisons place enormous burdens on the availability of water, already one of California’s scarcest resources. Some people have compared the construction of prisons in the Central Valley to the creation of small, densely populated, hinterland cities in terms of the toll that they exact on the existing landscape.

The prison boom in the 80’s and 90’s was (and is) not the first time that California’s hinterlands have been used to confine populations of people in the largely invisible recesses of the State. Historical antecedents to contemporary incarceration litter the landscape: Native American reservations, ghost towns where mining-era Chinese were segregated, and internment camps that housed Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Outside Tule Lake, near the site of the Modoc tribe’s last stand against the American army, are the remnants of a concentration camp for people with Japanese ancestors. A plaque next to the highway invites viewers to contemplate these structures as a racist blight on the landscape. The dilapidated buildings appear to be inhabited by migrant workers.

Delano II Located in the fields where the United Farm Workers first organized California’s agricultural workers, the Delano II prison (the second prison built in Delano) under construction has been mired in controversy since its inception. At a time of record-low crime rates and a prisoner population far below earlier CDC projections, the prison carries a price tag of hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when California faces unprecedented budget deficits.