California Men’s Colony, San Luis Obispo.

josef jacques

A Vast Strangeness

Prisons invading California

T he United States imprisons nearly 2.2 million people; we have the largest

incarcerated population in the world. If California were a country, it would

have the world’s fourth highest incarceration rate. A study from The Hamilton

Project recently noted that in 2010 the United States spent $80 billion at the federal,

state, and local levels to keep people incarcerated. In 2015 at the state level alone,

California spent $10.7 billion on corrections and rehabilitation.

At any given time, roughly 240,000 people are incarcerated within California’s

borders. Around 160,000 of these have been confined in long-term imprisonment.

In addition to nearly 6,000 state prisoners housed in Arizona and Mississippi, on

proper California soil there are 35 adult and 4 juvenile state prisons; 10 federal prisons;

6 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers; 18 private

detention centers run by the Tennessee-based Corrections Corporation of America

(CCA) and the Florida-based GEO Group; and 124 county jails. Each of California’s

fifty-eight counties also runs its own juvenile hall.

These places of imprisonment are scattered throughout the state with a large con-

centration in the great Central Valley. Many are clustered menacingly along the spine

of the San Andreas fault in a region pejoratively called ‘‘prison alley.’’

This series of photographs illustrates both the scale and the vast strangeness of

California’s Prison Industrial Complex. The prisons are photographed at night from

a distance so that the lights from the prison illuminate the landscape. The light that

controls the prison population stands as an indicator of state control. The visual effect

references the images from the test sites of nuclear bombs, an enormous display of

technocratic power reflecting a truly destructive invasion into otherwise peaceful pas-

toral settings. B

BOOM: The Journal of California, Vol. 6, Number 2, pps 8–21, ISSN 2153-8018, electronic ISSN 2153-764X.

© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for

permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and

Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: 10.1525/boom.2016.6.2.8.

BOOM | S U M M E R 2 0 1 6 9

Deuel Vocational Facility, Tracy.

Golden State Modified Correctional Facility, McFarland.

Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison, Corcoran.

Wasco State Prison-Reception Center, Wasco.

High Desert State Prison, Susanville.

Folsom State Prison, Sacramento.

Valley State Prison and Central California Women’s Facility, Chowchilla.

California Health Care Facility, Stockton.