A Prison in the Woods is not a stridently ideological work, and does not make a serious effort to draw from its subject matter a critical thesis that might inform current-day movements against mass incarceration. There are positives and negatives to this approach. 

While subtitled "environment and incarceration", this is primarily a work about local politics and local economics. The chapters on Ray Brook, Gabriels, Lyon Mountain, and Tupper Lake each present a detailed, well-researched account of the local controversies surrounding the construction of new prisons in these communities between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. One useful takeaway is the degree to which locals' bargaining power when dealing with state or federal institutions is highly variable and fluctuates according to regional, political, and historical context. The most useful takeaway, though, is the throughline that opposition to prison expansion in each case was dominated by affluent/seasonal residents of the North Country who view the Adirondacks as an area for outdoor recreation and leisure activities, and worried (in obviously racist terms) about the degree to which new prisons would make these communities more like the downstate communities they were trying to get away from. While the working class year-round residents of these communities did share some concerns relating to local input/control and environmental damage/resource management, ultimately they tended to view prisons as sources of employment in a struggling region that had lost the mining and logging industries it once relied upon. While this form of prison NIMBYism did win some victories in the North Country, it has enormous drawbacks: treating environmental concerns as an instrument for social ends rather than as important issues in and of themself, and fracturing the movement by weakening any long-term effort to link local environmental concerns with the broader concerns about mass incarceration and racial disparity being articulated by anti-penal activists. Further, Jefferson Hall notes that once prisons were established in these communities, seasonal and more affluent residents tended to soften their stance when the free or cheap labor performed by incarcerated men became more integral to the area's infrastructure, local services, and commerce -- further ensuring that opposition to prison construction remained localized and unsustained.  

By contrast, the first chapter, about the 19th century construction of Clinton State Prison in Dannemora, does provide some useful background about New York's role in the development of US penal norms and the North Country's role in the development of New York's correctional system, but ultimately feels fairly inconclusive and disconnected from the much-later case studies that make up the bulk of the book. Jefferson Hall concludes with a brief plea for public memorials and education campaigns to remind North Country residents to what extent their region and its infrastructure today was created by incarcerated labor (even if many of the prisons in question have since closed) -- a point which is well-taken, but also somewhat extraneous and underdeveloped.