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  5. Modern Prison Labor: Scale, Content, and Wages
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Modern Prison Labor: Scale, Content, and Wages

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (EST)

Hosted By: Union for Radical Political Economics
  • Chair: Geert Dhondt, City University of New York

Prison Labor in U.S. State Prisons, 1974-2016: New Slavery or Enforced Idleness?

Geert Dhondt
,
City University of New York

Abstract

Much has been made of the legality of forced prison labor in assessments of mass incarceration, but the amount and type of work done by prisoners since prison populations began to explode in the 1970s is notably understudied. In this paper, we use the Bureau of Justice Statistics’s Survey of Prison Inmates from 1974 to 2016 to track these facts of prison labor in the U.S. throughout the prison boom and into the modern era. In short, levels of idleness in prisons vis-à-vis labor steadily grew such that at the time of the 2004 survey, the majority of prisoners did not hold a job or they worked up to ten hours per week, and in 2016, this proportion reached nearly two thirds. During those hours that are spent working, prisoners primarily perform the nonmarket domestic chores required to reproduce prisons and prisoners rather than the production of goods and services for state correctional industries or private enterprise, the former consistently comprising about three times as many work assignments as the latter throughout the period in study. These findings suggest a modern incarceration that is characterized more by idleness than by compulsory labor, and they indicate a marked absence of private corporations among the determinants of the contours of modern prison labor, which is less a program of captive labor exploitation than that of a carceral workfare, or, work obligations to the state in exchange for the carceral welfare of prison room and board.

Racial Income Inequality in the American Incarcerated Workforce: A Descriptive Survey Analysis of Reported Earnings, 1972 – 2004

Andrew Keefe
,
Harvard University

Abstract

Despite growing discussion of the unpaid and underpaid labor of incarcerated workers, little is known about how often inmates work, how often they are paid, or precisely how much. We describe the income of incarcerated workers by analyzing data on inmates’ reported earnings from prison and jail surveys.

We find that a large share of workers work for no pay. We also find substantial rates of unpaid labor among non-convicted workers who were incarcerated for pretrial detention. We also find large racial gaps in the wages. The median White incarcerated worker earned, on average, nearly twice as much as his Black counterpart and over four times as much as his Hispanic counterpart in 2004. Between 1972 and 2004, these gaps seem to have widened more than they did in the general workforce.

The findings from our study have four main implications. First, they illustrate just how poorly paid prison work is, for all incarcerated workers. Second, they show elevated racial inequality inside prisons. Third, our findings suggest that social scientists have hitherto mischaracterized the income distribution in the US. This is because prior studies examining earnings either ignore incarcerated workers, impute their wages based on similar workers outside prison, or assume that they receive nothing for their work. This emphasizes the importance of conceiving of incarcerated workers as members of the formal economy. We suggest that social scientists must take the existence of “incarcerated workers” more seriously.

Work in the Post-Fordist Prison: Reproducing People, Prisons, and Racial Capitalism

Hannah Archambault
,
University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Abstract

An analysis of work performed inside prisons by incarcerated people must account for the fundamentally racialized way that capitalism developed and is developing, and the specific history of the carceral system and its social and economic meaning as a site and process that reproduces the totality of racial capitalist relations. The vast majority of work performed by incarcerated people in the post-Fordist American prison is reproductive rather than directly commodity producing, regardless of if the facility is public or private. Incarcerated people perform coercively extracted work to reproduce themselves as human beings and as prisoners specifically, the prison and the carceral system, and racial capitalism overall. An important part of this is the production of “ethical propensities”, namely a specific kind of work ethic, which is crucial to racial capitalist accumulation. Incarcerated workers face capital—mediated by the state— as racialized and alienated waged, semi-waged, or unwaged workers, even if they do not produce commodities. Understanding incarcerated workers as integral and dynamic subjects acting within and against the confines of post-Fordist racial capitalism has political implications in terms of prison abolitionist organizing and the consideration of economic alternatives or post-capitalist systems.

Schooling in Racial Capitalist America: Interrogating the Political Economy of Carceral Schools

Anastasia Wilson
,
Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Abstract

In this paper, I provide an analysis of carceral schools, defined as the nexus of public schooling and the carceral apparatus (policing, prisons, and criminalization) which reproduces not only the potential forms of labor-power of students, but also the carceral logics and enclosures of racial heteropatriarchal capitalism. To do so, I map the historical development of unequal and racialized schooling in the United States. Then, I critically review approaches to understanding the role of schooling in contemporary capitalism, including: mainstream human capital theory, feminist political economy and the understanding of education and children as public goods, Marxist economics and the reproduction of labor-power, and radical approaches towards understanding both the reproduction of particular kinds of labor-power and racial capitalism itself. Comparing these insights, I conclude to demonstrate public schools as a carceral site in reproducing the logics and enclosures of capitalism through racialized and gendered practices of exclusion, discipline, and criminalization. This analysis raises critical questions about the role of public education and the state.
JEL Classifications
  • B5 - Current Heterodox Approaches
  • J0 - General