Prison Labor in the United States

Asatar Bair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135898397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

This book is the only comprehensive analysis of contemporary prison labor in the United States. In it, the author makes the provocative claim that prison labor is best understood as a form of slavery, in which the labor-power of each inmate (though not their person) is owned by the Department of Corrections, and this enslavement is used to extract surplus labor from the inmates, for which no compensation is provided. Other authors have claimed that prison labor is slavery, but no previous study has made a rigorous argument based on a systematic analysis of the flows of surplus labor which take place in the various ways prison slavery is organized in the US prison system, nor has another study systematically examined 'prison household' production, in which inmates produce the goods and services necessary to run the prison, nor does another work discuss state welfare in prisons, and how this affects prison labor. The study is based on empirical findings gathered by the author's direct observation of prison factories in 28 prisons across the country. This book offers new insights into the practice of prison labor, and should be read by all serious students of American society.

Chapter One
Slavery

WHAT IS SLAVERY?

Before we can discuss whether or not prison labor is slavery, we have to define slavery. This is difficult, for slavery is an institution with a long history and many, varied forms. Any theory employed to understand economics or society must by necessity be limited in its consideration of only a select number of social processes occurring at a given time and place. Societies are complex—each may contain a nearly limitless number of people, objects, ideas, and relationships. This makes it impossible for any theory to hope to be truly comprehensive—it would require an infinite amount of knowledge and time to evaluate all social processes and the relationships between them—if we had such knowledge, presumably we would not need to create theories at all. ¹

Because of the complexity of social relationships, it is necessary for each theoretician to select a few aspects of a society on which to focus, while excluding the rest. In terms of theorizing the causes of whatever social relationship is the object of the theory, different theoreticians may well select different causes. Even when theorists agree to consider a certain aspect of society—say, the ways in which production of goods and services is organized—they often differ on what are the important features of production. After all, each production process is different from every other production process. The task of theory is to show the common elements in each kind of production. Marxists have traditionally called such common elements a ‘mode of production,’ but there is a great deal of disagreement and difference over what constitutes a mode of production, and how one mode of production may change into another.

A classic example is the debate between two prominent Marxist theorists, Paul Sweezy and Maurice Dobb (1976), on the transition between one mode of production, feudalism, and another, capitalism. Each of these theorists had different ideas about what made a mode of production capitalist or feudal, and hence while they agreed that a transition had occurred from feudalism to capitalism, they naturally disagreed about when and for what reasons it took place.

The features that mark one mode of production as different from another are always relative to the theorist. An example is the agreement among many social scientists that free markets, private property, and personal freedom are the core features that distinguish capitalism from other kinds of production. However, it can be shown that even when these conditions are met, the result is clearly not capitalist. In the antebellum South there was widespread exchange of commodities in markets, there was private property—in fact, property relations extended to people, and personal freedom existed—for whites—but the resulting society was not capitalist.²

In discussing slavery, I’ll use the term “slave fundamental class process” or “slave class structure” rather than “slave mode of production.”³ Slavery may be defined in many ways, reflecting the problems discussed above with selecting a few characteristics of a social system as definitional. Slavery at a given time and place may be strikingly different from slavery occurring at another time and place. It may be difficult to distinguish slavery from feudalism or capitalism. Davis (1984), for example, writes, “the more we learn about slavery, the more difficulty we have defining it.”⁴ Fierce (1994) argues that in seeking to determine whether a site is slavery, one’s own theoretical position is critical. Fierce refers to a form of prison labor occurring in the late 19^th and early 20^th century called convict leasing.

A persistent underlying theme is the comparison with slavery, with which convict leasing shares important, if imperfect, likenesses. In several instances the reference to slavery is explicitly. That is so because the evidence of convict treatment under leasing as presented here—that is, length and conditions of the work regimen, medical and health care, diet, clothing, worker-supervisor relationships, general labor exploitation, and perhaps, most of all, punishment—conjure up an image that is a vivid reminder of slavery. In the final analysis readers must decide whether or not the treatment that Black convicts faced in the system of southern convict leasing is mindful of their definition of slavery.⁵

The definition of slavery, then, is always dependent on the theory of slavery being employed. In this sense, there is no such thing as ‘slavery’ in the abstract—there are only particular forms of slavery that exist at given times and places. This means that a different theory of what slavery is may perceive slavery where other theories may have seen capitalism, feudalism, or some other system of production. Furthermore, as the preceding argument implies, it is important to clearly specify what characteristics are seen as definitive of slavery for that particular theorist.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE SLAVE FUNDAMENTAL CLASS PROCESS

The theory of slavery employed here is one possible way of understanding and defining what slavery is, and hence what separates slavery from other social systems. This particular definition does not represent what Anderson calls an “easy supra-historical mélange” in other words, an ahistorical, absolute theory of slavery.⁶ Rather, the elements selected here to define slavery are only a few of the infinity of possible specific social processes that exist along with different forms of slavery. Slavery is seen here as having two distinct parts. First, slavery has a class structure, defined as the form of production and appropriation of surplus labor that takes place at a given point of production.⁷ This particular class structure is called the slave fundamental class process. As noted earlier, within the slave class structure, the producers of surplus labor are called “slaves,” while the appropriators of surplus are called “slavemasters,” or simply “masters.” Exploitation occurs in the SFCP because the masters appropriate a surplus that they did not produce themselves. The class structure of the SFCP has the following features.

The slave performs necessary and surplus labor and is required to deliver his or her total output to the slave master. This clearly separates the SFCP from feudalism, in which the serf producers do not deliver the entire product of their labor to their lord qua appropriator. However, in capitalist production, like the SFCP, the total product of the worker’s labor is appropriated by the capitalist, so this criterion by itself is insufficient to define the SFCP. A further defining characteristic of the SFCP is that the reproduction of a slave’s labor-power is intertwined in the relationship between master and slave. In other words, the master must provide to the slave a portion of the slave’s labor, if the master wishes the slave to be able to continue to labor. This quantum of labor is the necessary labor, while all else is surplus labor. These features of the class structure of the SFCP separate it from other fundamental class process.

The processes necessary to “reproduce’ workers” labor-power, i.e. to make it possible for workers to continue to labor, may include cooking and eating meals, rest, cleaning, child-rearing, entertainment, and so forth takes place outside of the productive process, and is not a direct concern of the capitalist appropriator. Capitalists may be concerned with the general features of the market for labor-power, but are not directly involved with the reproduction of labor-power, which generally takes place in the private households of workers.⁸ In slavery, the reproduction of labor-power is bound up in the relationship between master and slave due to the master’s ownership of the slave’s labor-power. Since the master owns the slave’s labor-power, if the master wants the labor-power to be reproduced, so that slaves can continue to provide labor, the master is obligated to maintain the slave, just as a horse must be fed, or a machine must be serviced and maintained if it is to operate properly.

In feudalism, serfs typically worked their own land part of the time, and their lord’s land part of the time. Serfs have traditional rights to the land (tenure) which separate them from slaves, which have no right to land or other property.⁹ Serfs are not required to deliver the total product of their labor to their lords; the products of the labor serfs perform on their own land is kept by the serfs themselves. Again, in feudalism the reproduction of laborpower takes place outside of the relationship of appropriation between lord and serf.

Communism also differs from slavery in that there is no master—those who perform surplus labor are the same as those who appropriate surplus labor. Furthermore, this appropriation is done collectively.¹⁰ Thus, in communism there is no exploitation, while in the slave, capitalist and feudal class processes there is exploitation. This is one reason Marxists have long regarded communism to be superior to these other class processes, making a communist society their goal.

The above is a ‘thin’ definition of slavery. The class features of the SFCP are few; nothing has been said about culture, politics, the law, etc., not because the social processes occurring in these areas are less important, but in order to keep class conceptually distinct from all else.¹¹ In addition to the class structure, slavery also has a “non-class structure” composed of a potentially infinite number of social, political, physical, religious, political and other sorts of processes; as the name implies, these forces are not directly related to the production and appropriation of surplus labor, but rather they form the conditions of existence for the slave class structure. Neither the class structure nor its conditions of existence is seen as the “essence” of slavery, rather the two sides exist in a complex, overdetermined, dialectic.

It is these conditions of existence, in short, that answer the question: what is it that creates the situation where person or group of people must deliver the entire product of their labor to another person or group, where the entire sustenance of the producers is in the hands of the appropriators?

Not all definitions of slavery, even those which use a notion of class as an entry point, include or make explicit any reference to the production and appropriation of surplus labor. Eugene Genovese uses the concept of the ownership of people to define class in his work on slavery in the U.S. South.¹² This is a different concept of class, which does not explicitly refer to the labor process; I will discuss this approach in more detail shortly.

Each specific occurrence of the SFCP will have different political, cultural, and economic conditions of existence, which means that different forms of the SFCP may vary widely. For example, the particular form of the SFCP existing in Jamaica in 1798 was strikingly different from the SFCP existing at the same time in West African households.¹³ Despite these differences, I believe there is one element of the non-class structure which is common enough and important enough to merit further discussion, a political condition of existence for the SFCP which, from my perspective, is important to consider in any discussion of slavery as a class process.

This element is the ownership of a slave’s labor-power by a person other than the slave. Every person has a ...