Camp for Incorrigibles

Camp for Incorrigibles is a remote wartime prison camp in the wild Cascades of northern California, where Jim Shimada is confined after violence over a government loyalty oath at Manzanar. It is presented not as a protective relocation center but as imprisonment without due process. Its setting and conditions make the camp a stark expression of wartime racial policy, while the story of its riot and escape shows how quickly the people confined there could be turned into threatening figures by the press.

Location and Institutional Purpose

The camp is established at the northernmost edge of California for Japanese people deemed incorrigible by the authorities. Jim is transferred there from Manzanar while he is being beaten by a pro-Japan gang over how he will answer the government’s loyalty questions. He had not previously been politically active; the loyalty oath and the violence around it thrust him into a conflict whose terms are imposed on him by others. His transfer separates him from his parents and places him in a new institution with none of the family life or limited amenities described at Manzanar.

The contrast between the two camps is explicit. Manzanar has families and children, weekend dances, opportunities to grow vegetables, and donated books brought by librarians. Camp for Incorrigibles has none of these. It contains no family groups, elderly people, or children, and offers none of the modest communal arrangements that had developed at Manzanar. The difference marks it as a prison rather than a relocation center, despite the absence of due process for its prisoners.

Conditions and Jim Shimada’s Confinement

The camp’s cellblocks are built like horse stables, without heat or hot water for bathing. Jim has bronchitis for almost his entire fifteen-month stay. The prisoners endure repeated violence and verbal abuse, while food is often spoiled or consists of cast-off rations. They eat under the watch of armed guards, some of whom are white boys their own age and sometimes from their own towns. The camp’s routine thus combines physical hardship, racial hostility, and the constant presence of armed authority.

As federal policy changes and Japanese American men in the camps are drafted, Jim refuses. He says the government should first return his parents’ house and recently opened produce stand, compensate them for income lost while they were interned and unable to work, and let the family go home; then he would consider service. He is tried and convicted of draft evasion and transferred to a federal prison. His refusal follows the loss of his family’s livelihood and home during their confinement, making the camp part of a larger sequence of dispossession and punishment rather than an isolated episode.

Riot and Escape

During Jim’s time at the camp, a riot begins in the kitchen and spreads into the mess hall. Its cause cannot later be established; accounts suggest that dinner was again rotten or insufficient. As guards arrive with guns, prisoners flee through the confusion. One man steals a truck, and others climb aboard or cling to its doors. The vehicle crashes through the flattened front gate, creating an opening through which more prisoners run into the night.

Jim is eighteen, thin and weakened by bronchitis, and his camp-issued sneakers are splitting at the soles as he joins the escapees. At first they surge out together; then the mass breaks into small groups. The men fall silent, aware that there is nowhere to go and that they will die in the mountains if they remain free. For the moment, they move down a dirt road beneath the moon. Soldiers with guns will soon capture them. The escape is therefore a short-lived breach in the camp’s control, not a successful flight to safety.

Public Memory and the Camp’s Afterlife

The next morning, newspapers sensationalize the jailbreak, including papers owned by Pauline’s grandfather. Their headlines present the escape as a murderous rampage, although the account of the prisoners describes them moving wordlessly away from the camp, frightened and without a destination. This discrepancy makes the camp’s history a contest over who gets to define Japanese American prisoners: the people caught in an impossible situation, or a public narrative that recasts them as a collective threat.

Years later, Anne researches Jim’s history and traces the McCloud River on a map of California to locate the former camp beside a small lake. The site is almost fifty miles from McCloud Estate, separated from it by high peaks and wilderness. That distance undercuts the supposed danger remembered by a woman at McCloud, who had believed the escapees were coming to murder the people there. Anne’s reconstruction restores the geography that the sensational story obscured. Camp for Incorrigibles remains both a place of confinement in Jim’s life and a point where the book tests the difference between documented conditions, public alarm, and the stories that survive.