Labor and Punishment

Work in and out of Prison

Erin Hatton

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780520305342
• eBook ISBN: 9780520973374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

The insightful chapters in this volume reveal the multiple and multifaceted intersections between mass incarceration and neoliberal precarity. Both mass incarceration and the criminal justice system are profoundly implicated in the production and reproduction of the low-wage "exploitable" precariat, both within and beyond prison walls. The carceral state is a regime of labor discipline—and a growing one—that extends far beyond its own inmate labor. This regime not only molds inmates into compliant workers willing and expected to accept any "bad" job upon release but also compels many Americans to work in such jobs under threat of incarceration, all the while bolstering their "exploitability" and socioeconomic marginality. Contributors include Anne Bonds, Philip Goodman, Amanda Bell Hughett, Caroline M. Parker, Gretchen Purser, Jacqueline Stevens, and Noah D. Zatz.

1 Working Behind Bars

PRISON LABOR IN AMERICA

Erin Hatton

Work is a centerpiece of American culture. Both the idea and the doing of work are—and have long been—essential to American notions of morality, sovereignty, and citizenship.¹ Most often, as political theorist Judith Shklar observed, its cultural importance is framed in the negative: a deep and abiding abhorrence of idleness.² Stemming from the Protestant work ethic, idleness (whether real or perceived) is construed as an individual moral failing and therefore any consequences of such idleness are perceived to be warranted, as illustrated by contemporary interpretations of St. Paul’s dictum, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.”³ Accordingly, there is said to be “dignity” in all kinds of work, even the very worst of jobs, an ideological tenet that Americans broadly embrace, as they seek and find dignity in labor, even the “dirtiest” of jobs.⁴ Meanwhile, those who are unemployed and underemployed struggle to maintain a basic standard of material well-being, since so many economic and social rights are tied to employment in the United States, while also struggling to maintain a sense of dignity and belonging.⁵ Indeed, for the vast majority of Americans, family-supporting rights-bearing work is the only entrée to full citizenship, as T. H. Marshall conceptualized it, for only through such work can most Americans gain “a modicum of economic welfare and security.”⁶

Yet not everyone has—or has had—access to such work. As a wide range of scholars have shown, the very definition of what rights-bearing work is and who can get it are predicated on logics of race, gender, and nationality.⁷ (Two of many such examples are the gendered exclusion of unpaid domestic labor from cultural and legal definitions of “real” work and the raced and gendered exclusion of paid domestic labor from legal definitions of employment.) Logics of race, gender, and nationality have also infused allegations of idleness and indolence.⁸ (For example, after emancipation, the formerly enslaved people who sought to work for themselves as independent farmers rather than for their former masters were widely accused of laziness, and such accusations were used to justify debt peonage and other strategies deployed to compel and control their labor.)⁹ Thus, work is not only a centerpiece of American culture, it is a centerpiece of American inequality: a splitting wedge used to marginalize, exploit, and exclude some groups of workers while advantaging others.

Given the centrality of work to American culture and inequality, it is perhaps not surprising that it is also a centerpiece of American punishment. Prisoners are the sole exception to the Constitution’s prohibition of slavery, and their compulsory labor has long been an integral component of US prisons.¹⁰ Indeed, prison labor was not only vital to the development of the modern prison system, it was also essential to America’s emergence as a modern, industrial, capitalist economy.¹¹ As historians have shown, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prisoners in the American North were compelled to work in newly modernized corporate factories.¹² In the South, they were leased to private companies and forced to build railroads, mine coal, pave roads, and pick cotton.¹³ In both cases, their labor was central to American modernization and industrialization, yet they labored in horrendous conditions: “worse than slavery,” as historian David Oshinsky said of Mississippi’s notorious (and deadly) Parchman State Penitentiary.¹⁴ For such prisoners, there was no “dignity” in their work, only punishment.

In the South, moreover, prison labor was not solely an economic project to rebuild and modernize the region—though it was that.¹⁵ It was also a racial project. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of thousands of African Americans (including children) were incarcerated in the American South, often on trumped-up charges of “vagrancy” (levied against those who could not prove employment at any given moment) as well as through outright kidnapping.¹⁶ This overtly racialized criminalization and incarceration of African Americans was a broad-based effort to maintain the South’s racial hierarchy and recapture former enslaved people’s labor after emancipation. “For whites no longer able to mete out arbitrary punishment to their former black chattel,” historian Alex Lichtenstein writes, “the criminal justice system served as a prime means of racial control and labor exploitation.”¹⁷ The result, historian Douglas Blackmon observes, was “slavery by another name.”¹⁸

Prison labor remained largely unregulated until the 1930s. Then, in the aftermath of the Great Depression’s mass unemployment, an increasingly vocal coalition of critics—led by business leaders and supported by unions—successfully pressured the federal government to restrict corporate use of incarcerated labor.¹⁹ Yet such restrictions did not actually curb prison labor, only its use by private-sector companies. Even more, as historian Heather Ann Thompson has argued, this same legislation “formalized and legitimated” the institution of prison labor itself by legalizing it in the public sector with the formation of the Federal Prison Industries (FPI), a government program for using prison labor to produce goods and services for government agencies.²⁰ As a result, even as corporate use of prison labor was curbed, public use of it flourished and prisoners were put to work in factories behind bars, making a wide array of products for state and federal governments, including clothes, furniture, mattresses, metal castings, and more.²¹ In such factories, Thompson shows, prisoners’ exploitation and abuse remained widespread. As a result, through the postwar era, incarcerated workers became increasingly organized and militant in challenging their low wages, long hours, harsh treatment, and dangerous working conditions: they went on strike, they refused to eat, they organized sit-ins, and they formed labor unions.²²

In the 1970s, however, prisoners’ labor activism was dealt two significant blows. First, the 1977 court case Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union restricted prisoners’ First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly, which circumscribed their ability to organize unions.²³ Second, in 1979, in order to exert more control over prisoners and their labor—particularly their labor activism—prison officials and neoliberal politicians pushed through legislation known as the PIE program (or the Prison Industry Enhancement certification program), which lifted restrictions on the private-sector use of prison labor, while also allowing prisons themselves to be privatized so that they could be operated as for-profit entities.²⁴ Meanwhile, incarceration rates had begun to soar. Though US incarceration rates had remained steady for much of the twentieth century (hovering around 0.1 percent of the population), beginning in 1972, they increased dramatically each year.²⁵ This rapidly growing population of prisoners pushed state officials to rethink prisons and prison labor—and, importantly, find new ways to control them.²⁶ The private-sector use of prisoners’ labor was one of many strategies they used to do so.

Incarceration rates continued to increase through the 1990s, peaking at 1 percent of the adult population in 2008, amounting to more than two million people behind bars.²⁷ The United States had unequivocally become the world’s leader in incarceration. And because most prisoners who are deemed able-bodied are required to work, this era of mass incarceration recalls elements of the post-emancipation South.²⁸ For the current entrenchment and expansion of the US criminal justice system is not only a raced and gendered penal institution, it also as a raced and gendered labor market institution. Though concrete numbers of incarcerated workers are not available, estimates suggest that well over half of prisoners have jobs at any given time, and most prisoners work for some substantial portion of their sentence.²⁹ This is not an insignificant population of workers. The combined prison and jail population in the United States equals the number of employees that Walmart, the world’s largest employer, employs across the globe, and the prison population alone (minus jail inmates) is equivalent to Walmart’s US employee base.³⁰ But unlike Walmart’s workers, who themselves are not always adequately protected by US employment laws, incarcerated workers do not have access to even the most basic employment rights: the minimum wage, overtime, unemployment benefits, workers’ compensation, social security, and more.³¹ Thus America’s disproportionately Black and Brown prison population is also a disproportionately Black and Brown population of unprotected workers.

CATEGORIES OF CONTEMPORARY PRISON LABOR

Incarcerated workers are usually assigned to one of four types of jobs: (1) facility maintenance jobs, also known as “regular” or “non-industry” jobs, in which they do much of prisons’ upkeep and operations work, (2) “industry” jobs in the government-run prison factories launched in the 1930s, also known as the “correctional industries,” (3) jobs with private-sector companies that have contracted with prisons for their labor, as restarted in 1979 with the PIE program, and (4) jobs outside of prisons and jails through various inmate labor programs. While evidence suggests that there is significant variation across these types of work in terms of their prevalence, wages, and opportunity for skill development, documenting such variation is an impossible task. There are remarkably little aggregate data available about prison labor in general and any given type in particular. In the remainder of this section, I synthesize a range of primary and secondary research in order to outline—insofar as possible—the contours of these categories of incarcerated labor.

The first category, basic facility maintenance, is the largest. Though concrete data are not available, estimates suggest that the vast majority of prisoners who work perform this type of labor.³² They cook and serve food in prison mess halls; they clean prison dorms, bathrooms, schoolhouses, hospitals, and recreation yards; they cut lawns and shovel snow on prison grounds; they fix prisons’ electrical and plumbing systems; they paint prison walls and wash prison windows. In short, they do the work required to keep the institution running, and because their wages for this work are invariably minimal, they save prison operators significant sums of money by supplanting free-world, full-wage workers.³³ In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas, in fact, state prisoners do not earn anything for these prison upkeep jobs. Meanwhile, in West Virginia they earn $0.04–$0.58 an hour, in Utah they earn a flat rate of $0.40 an hour, and in Wyoming they earn $0.35–$1.00 per hour. Prisoners’ wages top out at $2.00 an hour in Minnesota and New Jersey for this type of work, though their pay scales start at $0.25 and $0.26, respectively.³⁴

Yet prisoners’ already minimal wages are routinely reduced—by 50 percent or more—through wage deductions for restitution fines, family support payments, court fees, and discharge money.³⁵ From such reduced wages, in addition to any money sent to them from family members, prisoners must cover the not-insignificant costs of living behind bars. Most often, studies show, they spend their wages on food, toiletries, and over-the-counter medicines from the priso...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1.   Working Behind Bars: Prison Labor in America
• 2.   From Extraction to Repression: Prison Labor, Prison Finance, and the Prisoners’ Rights Movement in North Carolina
• 3.   The Political Economy of Work in ICE Custody: Theorizing Mass Incarceration and For-Profit Prisons
• 4.   The Carceral Labor Continuum: Beyond the Prison Labor/Free Labor Divide
• 5.   Held in Abeyance: Labor Therapy and Surrogate Livelihoods in Puerto Rican Therapeutic Communities
• 6.   “You Put Up with Anything”: On the Vulnerability and Exploitability of Formerly Incarcerated Workers
• 7.   Working Reentry: Gender, Carceral Precarity, and Post-incarceration Geographies in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Index