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When the "Jungle" Met the Forest: Public Work, Civil Defense, and Prison Camps in Postwar California
Volker Janssen
| For suggestions on how to use this article in the U.S. history classroom, see our "Teaching the JAH" Web project at http://www.indiana.edu/~jah/teaching/.
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| In January and February 1969, winter rains pounded southern California counties mercilessly. The wettest winter in eighty years caused millions of dollars in losses in the region's agriculture, ravaged canyons with flash floods, and buried roads and freeways east of Los Angeles and neighboring Orange County. Matters went from bad to worse on February 25 when six thousand Southlanders fled their canyon homes in fear of mudslides. Many stayed behind, such as the Quick family: mother, father, and their four children. Five of the Quicks' neighbors died in the disaster. Cut off from the outside world for three days in Silverado Canyon on the western slopes of the Santa Ana Mountains, the Quick family was rescued by a team of convicts from the region's prison forest camp.1 |
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The Quicks were no "bleeding-heart" liberals likely to mollycoddle criminals. Volunteers in Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial campaign, they supported the Vietnam War and cracking down on Berkeley student protests. But the 1969 flood washed out their law-and-order stand. Grateful for the "heroic deeds" of the sleep-deprived, soaked, and starving "men who put their life on the line for others," Mrs. R. Quick asked the governor in a letter to reduce their sentences. She showed no interest in the men's criminal record—it was their race that caused Mrs. Quick's biggest surprise: "Everyone always shows the worst side of negroes. None were there to record the negro prisoners up to chests in water (raging water) forming a human chain passing children and people to the other side." It was not just their courage and strength that seemed remarkable, but "the gentle way they handled the children." Like most of the flood victims, Mrs. Quick saw model citizens in these black men, not public enemies. "Perhaps there is some way you can use this as an example to show a lead to the rest of the country," she concluded.2 |
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Such encounters were the result and purpose of California's prison labor camps, which had kept a ready army of inmate so-called volunteers for fire fighting and disaster relief since World War II. During the war, California's wardens had eagerly turned their prisons into factories for federal defense industries and moved prisoners into the depression-era forestry camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and California's State Relief Agency (SRA) to suppress both natural wildfires and possible arson by Japanese Americans. In 1944, Gov. Earl Warren took advantage of flush wartime state revenues and his popularity to replace the Board of Prison Director's old system of penal patronage with a modern Department of Corrections. Within a few years, the prison system of the Golden State went from being one of the worst in the nation to being a national and international model of modern corrections. Forest labor camps were the flagship of the department's new approach. Blending civil defense with public works, the camps combined the familiar routines of road gang labor with the political appeal of military service. They enjoyed broad public support at a time when the state's bolder therapeutic experiments, such as its therapeutic community projects, remained controversial.3 |
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