Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Camp, a style of performance in queer subcultures, is being re-imagined in the online video portal of YouTube. Online vloggers – mostly young and queer – have infused camp with a neoliberal sense of individuality, emotional authenticity and personal development, thereby challenging historical understandings of camp as wholly ironic and disengaged or politically charged. These shifts in self-presentation are reflected in statements made by performers in interviews and in their videos.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: California’s many wildfires routinely make regional, national, and sometimes even international news. Despite this attention by newspapers and other media outlets, little coverage is given to the fact that for many wildfires, a substantial proportion of the personnel doing the tough work of cutting fire lines are state prison inmates. Today, in a political era of increasingly punitive measures to control crime and deviance—one in which incarceration is becoming a first, and a not a last, resort—California’s prison fire camps appear to stand out as an important exception to a larger trend. As such, the CCP offers rich grounds to contribute to scholarship that asks in what ways macro-narratives of punishment in the U.S. have overstated the coherence and scope of changes that occurred in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and how to account for elements that do not fit larger apparent trends. In my dissertation project I use the past and present nature of the CCP, as well as its effects on offenders’ future lives, to deepen our understanding of the diverse nature of punishment in the U.S., and how elements that appear anomalous fit into the larger systems that shape the public management of crime and those convicted of felonies.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) currently incarcerates more than 170,000 men and women—including more than four thousand people housed in forty-two fire camps across the state that comprise the Conservation Camp Program (CCP). The men and women who are incarcerated in these camps are trained and employed as firefighters, forming the backbone of California’s large and very well-regarded wildland firefighting force. It was widely reported in the media that during the recent devastating fires in southern California, more than a quarter of those on the frontlines fighting the blazes were inmates. In this paper I discuss research conducted at the California State archives examining the history of the CCP, which was created in the aftermath of WWII and which, at its peak, housed approximately 20% of all state prisoners. Specifically, I compare the nature and structural position of the CCP during the 1960s and 1970s with the situation today, and ask what the history of the fire camps can tell us about larger changes in how California (and the U.S., more broadly) punishes, dynamic notions of rehabilitation, and the usefulness of some contemporary scholarship on punishment for understanding this history.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Social science research on summer youth camps has ranged from descriptive studies that explore the lived experiences of individuals at camp to explanatory approaches that analyze the historical and social conditions that produce, reproduce, and transform camps. In this review, a typology is used to identify four general approaches to the study of summer camps; descriptive, evaluative, exploratory, and explanatory. Analysis of 425 peer-reviewed articles and academic books on summer camping reveals that researchers have devoted more attention to the social science in camping (i.e., describing and evaluating) than to the social science of camping (i.e., exploring and explaining). An overview of the summer camp industry, the origin and development of summer camps, and details of each approach are discussed in this paper. Suggestions for future research within each approach are recommended.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper will present a cost-benefit analysis based on 234 inmates randomly assigned to serve six-month terms at either a correctional boot camp or traditional prison. We use official data from the department of corrections, parole, and police to estimate costs and benefits of the two programs. Finally, we present a “policy-experiment” in which we estimate how costs and benefits would change if the boot camp began targeting bed-space to those subgroups which benefit the most from participation.