Jennifer Klein

Bradford Durfee Professor of History

Yale University

at time of fellowship

2022 to 2023

Visiting Scholar

Academic Discipline:

History

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Yale University Profile

Klein will explore the interconnections between the history of incarceration and the environment in Southeastern Louisiana. She will focus on the institutions that took root on Louisiana’s former sugar plantations: prisons and confinement hospitals, chemical plants, and waste removal facilities. Revealing the profitable processes of waste, the project will highlight the relationships between mass incarceration, coerced labor, and environmental racism.

I'm connecting the questions of incarceration to those of ecological damage degradation. I'm asking why it is that prisons are located in sites of hazardous waste, and waste dumping, and the social consequences of that.