Cañon City, Colorado holds the highest number of prisons per capita in the United States, yet the dominant narrative of incarceration is situated in the American south and its legacy of slavery. In this paper, I examine the potentials for Southern ideology on Coloradan penology. I focus on the ways in which the Southern penal "reform" of chain gangs influenced the Coloradan penal practice of roadwork in the early twentieth-century. I begin by analyzing the national discourse that led to roadwork as a replacement of convict leasing, and how this new system reified the racial order it replaced. I then examine how roadwork operated at Colorado State Penitentiary, and the ways it both differed and resembled the Southern road camps occurring simultaneously. Finally, an examination of the matron's reports at C.S.P. reveals the potential for a racial-gendered order to have been operating in these Coloradan penal workspaces. Taken together, this paper argues that social ideologies of race and gender have the ability to travel across regions through penal practices. I present roadwork as an example of penal practice that produced ideologies of race and gender, and argue for its potential as a space of to transfer an antebellum racial-gendered order to Colorado.