Carceral Landscapes: The Prison Industrial Complex in Central California

My research will focus on carceral landscapes in the Tulare Basin. I will study and catalog their socio-spatial conditions, the landscape-based systems they participate in, and their potential for liberatory futures. My research begins with the existing conditions of the prison industrial complex in the Tulare Basin and their impact on prisoners cycling through the carceral system. I hope to create a clear analysis of the specific siting of prisons in the Tulare Basin and the unique implications of California’s central valley landscape on a socioeconomic, racial, and spatial level. My research will span the arenas of labor, migration, criminal justice, rural economies, punitive architecture, climate resilience, and abolitionist futures. I will also collect extensive existing precedents for the removal of prisons, the repurposing of former prison sites for future public good, and exploratory innovations in restorative and transformative justice. I will aim to answer these two questions: 1) How do prisons shape the landscape of the Tulare Basin, and vice versa? And 2), how can we design liberatory futures in a landscape of mass incarceration?