I am a postdoctoral scholar at the UCSB Blum Center for Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy. My research brings together environmental justice, carceral geography, and labor studies. I use archival, interview, and ethnographic methods to study the interface between mass incarceration and environmental hazards. My research has been supported by the Switzer Foundation, the Forest History Society, the Bancroft Library, and the UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation.My writing has appeared in Environment and Planning E, Spectre, Global Environmental Change, Crime, Media, Culture, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacobin, and Prism. My book, "Lightning In the Air: How Incarcerated Workers Became the Backbone of California's Environmental Workforce" is under contract with University of California Press.I earned my PhD in Environmental Studies with a designated emphasis in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2025. I have also worked on research projects with Californians United for a Responsible Budget, No New Jails NYC, and the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Project.

Thousands of virtually unpaid incarcerated workers have served as the bedrock of the state’s environmental workforce and have protected California’s post-war industries from the worst impacts of wildfires and other natural disasters. All the while, these workers have been overexposed, underpaid, and entrapped in the increasingly punitive system of mass incarceration of the late twentieth century.By shedding light on the laboring lives and political struggles of this workforce, my book "Lightning in the Air: How Incarcerated Firefighters Became the Backbone of California’s Environmental Workforce," reveals how incarcerated workers have been swept up as surplus labor into the carceral system and then set to work on managing the effects of extractivism and climate change, as California’s capitalist expansion pushes its residents physically closer to ecological disaster every year. My book is under contract with the University of California Press for publication in 2027.

Photos by Brian Frank and California Department of Corrections

Prison Abolition in Fire Camp

"The Abolitionist Labor Politics of California’s Incarcerated Firefighters." Spectre
October 7, 2025Despite the newfound concern about incarcerated workers’ wages in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires, the problems facing this workforce are anything but new. I wrote in Spectre about the political position and history of the incarcerated workers upon whom we rely for mitigating and fighting megafires.

Courtesy of the Berkeley Freedom Archive

The Revolutionaries Who Organized California's Prison Fire Camps

“On the Fire Line and on Strike: Collective Action by Incarcerated Firefighters 1971–2.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space May 2025Between 1968 and 1972, several groups of revolutionary prisoners organized themselves to foster Black revolutionary critiques of the Conservation Camps Program. This article recounts the history of Black revolutionary organizing in conservation camps and centers, focusing on a series of work stoppages that serve as an extraordinary example of collective action by incarcerated workers. The four documented work stoppages in 1971 and 1972 illuminate three interrelated activities of incarcerated workers in the Conservation Camp Program around this period: communication across the porous boundaries of the conservation camps and centers, enunciation of Black revolutionary politics, and labor organizing as resistance to the structural exploitation they experienced in conservation camps.

Breaking Down the Nordic Model of Prison Reform

“The Nordic Distraction: Prison Reforms Threaten Prison Closure Plans.” Prism Reports, September 2024Carceral geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore and I co-wrote an article for Prism opposing the “Nordic” model of California prison reforms and instead arguing for prison closures and concrete steps toward decarceration.

Photo by Jitze Couperus, 2010

Tulare Lake Flooding Threatened Two of California's Largest Prisons

Map by John Blanchard for the SF Chronicle

After a record-breaking year of snowfall and precipitation in early 2023, the refilling of Tulare Lake threatened to submerge entire towns as well as two of the state's largest prisons. These prisons were left out of local planning considerations and national news coverage of the impending disaster, so I teamed up with the Ella Baker Center to amplify the voices of incarcerated people threatened by the floods. I broke the story in Truthout and underscored the vulnerability of the thousands of incarcerated people with disabilities held in these two prisons.The impending disaster was quickly picked up by the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, and Governor Newsom addressed the prisons within several weeks of this news coverage. My research for this reporting was later covered by the Sierra Club.

CBS's Fire Country Takes on Prison Fire Camps

In 2022, I heard rumors that CBS was developing a television drama about the incarcerated workers of California's prison fire camps. I wrote one of the first reviews of the show for Jacobin, in which I considered the veracity of the show's representation of the camps as well as the importance of showing these workers as a critical part of Cal Fire.Check out my review here: Fire Country is Brought To You By Austerity, Mass Incarceration, and Climate Change

Reviews of Judah Schept's Coal, Cages, Crisis

Photo by Jill Scott

Carceral geography opens many lines of inquiry about how mass incarceration has been spread across urban, rural, and suburban landscapes, including why prisons are built in some cities and not others, and the environmental impact of prisons.Judah Schept's new book Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia tackles these questions head on: how and why federal prisons are concentrated in Eastern Kentucky and the relationship of these prisons to the extractive history of the coal industry.I reviewed Judah's book with prison scholar Jarrod Shanahan in The Brooklyn Rail, and hosted an event discussing the book's findings with Judah Schept.I also reviewed the book for Crime, Media, Culture, which you can read here.

Against the Feminist Jail

The problem of jailing in New York City is much bigger than Rikers Island. When a new jail was proposed for women and gender-expansive people in Harlem in 2022, I decided to pull back the veil on the self-proclaimed feminist organizations that were supporting the expansion of the carceral state.Check out the article here: NYC Activists Push Back Against Proposed “Feminist” Women’s Jail in Harlem

Photo by Design As Protest

Arsenic in Prison Drinking Water

Photo by Jack Norton

Between 2007 and 2011, thousands of incarcerated people had little option but to drink water contaminated with unsafe levels of arsenic. My colleague Summer Sullivan and I interviewed several of the 18 people who filed lawsuits against the prison over medical concerns stemming from drinking contaminated water. Our research uncovered that the prison had been constructed without a safe source of drinking water and had been cited several times for failing to remediate their water quality issues, revealing that prison administrators were aware of the contamination and the likely health effects on thousands of incarcerated people.Read the full story here: This Prison in California Forced Incarcerated People to Drink Arsenic for Years
I also appeared on Kiteline Radio to discuss the findings of our investigation: No Choice But Poisoned Water

California Dreams: Making Environmental History and Shaping Geographies in the Golden State
UC Santa Cruz, Fall 2024Just as settler colonialism, racial capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy have shaped the social world we live in today, these structures have also shaped the natural world around us. In this course, we will engage with the interplay between social systems and ecological change. This course will cover several theories of environmental history as well as the key moments of environmental transformation in California, from Indigenous environmental stewardship, Spanish colonization, resource extraction and industrial capitalism, and struggles for environmental justice in the twentieth century. Students produced class-long research projects about grassroots environmental struggles, many of which were published on a website made by students.Environmental Policy, Economics, and Justice, Environmental Studies UC Santa Cruz, Summer 2024This course is an introduction to environmental policy and justice in the United States. It introduces legal and legislative frameworks for addressing environmental problems by exploring case studies on justice and equity dimensions of climate policy, electronic and plastic waste, wildlife trade, and mass incarceration. These case studies reveal key insights about colonialism, global capitalism, development, and climate justice.