Haney2010 PDF

Working through Mass Incarceration: Gender and the Politics of Prison Labor from East to
West
Author(s): Lynne A. Haney
Source: Signs, Vol. 36, No. 1, Feminists Theorize International Political Economy Special Issue
Editors Shirin M. Rai and Kate Bedford (Autumn 2010), pp. 73-97
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Lynne A. Haney
Working through Mass Incarceration: Gender and the

Politics of Prison Labor from East to West
F ew developments in the contemporary state arena have been as dra-

matic and consequential as mass imprisonment. In the United States,
the number of citizens directly affected by imprisonment is astound-
ing: the United States now imprisons over 2 million people and places an
additional 4 million under other forms of correctional supervision. With
these numbers, the United States has become the international leader in
imprisonment. Yet the United States is not alone in its use of incarceration
to deal with economic and social insecurity. Mass incarceration is becoming
more of a global phenomenon, linking many states in the North and
South and the East and West (Sutton 2004; Sudbury 2005; Tonry 2008).1
In some areas of Europe, such as Eastern and Central Europe, prison
systems have expanded to record size in the past decade. Across national
borders, there are also striking similarities in who is most affected by mass
incarceration. Communities of color, be they African American in North
America, Aboriginal in Australia, or Romany in Europe, have particularly
felt the effects. And although the majority of prison inmates remain male,
most penal systems have begun to imprison more and more women. In
fact, since the 1980s, the U.S. female incarceration rate has increased
twice as rapidly as the rate for men (U.S. Department of Justice 2006).
These commonalities in global patterns of punishment have led many
scholars to search for similar processes underlying them. This search has
then led many to analyses of the prison-industrial complex and of the ties
between the business of prisons and the corporate economy. Scholars have
Many colleagues and friends offered valuable comments on the ideas in this article, and
I am especially grateful to Shirin Rai, Kate Bedford, Andras Tapolcai, Herta Tóth, Ann
Orloff, Gail Kligman, Rickie Solinger, Nina Eliasoph, Jill McKorkel, Allison McKim, and
three anonymous Signs reviewers.
1
Of course, this is not to say that all states have experienced mass incarceration. In fact,
one of the most interesting aspects of the global politics of imprisonment is precisely its
unevenness within and across regions. For more on global imprisonment patterns, see Tonry
and Frase (2001), Whitman (2003), Cavadino and Dignan (2005); and Tonry (2008).
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2010, vol. 36, no. 1]
䉷 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2010/3601-0004$10.00

74 ❙ Haney
done revealing work showing how prisons have been infiltrated by private
business and how carceral institutions produce enormous profit for those
businesses (Domanick 2004; Elsner 2006; Gilmore 2007). One of the
central ways this is said to happen is through the expropriation of prisoners’
labor. At the center of much of the work on the prison-industrial complex
are arguments about the abuse of prison labor: how it supports corporate
interests, thus aligning the needs of capital and the state; how it aids
globalization, thus securing a vulnerable, docile international workforce;
and how it turns male and female inmates into exploitable subjects, thus
leading to gender equality with a vengeance. These convergences are
largely what led Angela Davis to conclude that women’s prisons around
the world are “uncannily similar.” As she notes, “I have always felt as if
I am in the same place. No matter how far I have traveled across time
and space . . . there is a strange sameness about prisons in general, and
especially about women’s prisons” (Davis and Dent 2001, 1237).
Indeed, from one perspective, these arguments about the prison-
industrial complex make sense. However, while at a structural level prison
labor may end up contributing to the subjugation of a global workforce
and serve corporate interests, as the unit of analysis becomes more con-
crete, things get more complex. Like other aspects of incarceration, prison
work reflects cultural understandings of labor. Just as those understandings
can and do vary across time and space, so can the penal politics of labor.
In fact, after spending much of the past decade serving ethnographic time
in different penal systems, I have been struck by the opposite of Davis’s
observation—by the stunning divergence in the discourses and practices
of women’s prisons. This is especially true of their labor practices, which
can draw on or subvert the broader social meanings assigned to women’s
work. I have also discovered that the denial of work can be as debilitating
as its enforcement; refusing to allow women to engage in wage labor can
even be more punishing than requiring it of them. This article provides
empirical material to support both claims.
Drawing on years of ethnographic research in the penal systems in the
United States and Hungary, including my experiences teaching creative
writing at two prisons, I describe variations in how prisons institute wage
labor within and across institutions and cultures and how such variations
make it difficult to view prison labor as wholly exploitative or abusive.2 To
2
More specifically, my analysis is based on two ethnographic projects in women’s prisons.
The first project was carried out over a three-year period, from 2002 to 2005, in a community-
based prison for mothers in California. During this time, I spent roughly eight months in the

S I G N S Autumn 2010 ❙ 75
do this, I journey into two very different penal contexts: a maximum security
facility for women in Hungary and a small community-based women’s
prison in California. Both facilities claim to promote women’s empower-
ment, but their routes to empowerment could not be more divergent. In
the Hungarian prison, labor is omnipresent: the entire prison is structured
around work, and inmate hierarchies emerge from it. By contrast, the Cal-
ifornia prison forcibly excludes inmates from all wage labor, claiming that
the real work of incarceration is to develop the inmates’ selves and rid them
of “inner demons.” So although these penal facilities are not comparable
in strict methodological terms, juxtaposing their modes of control allows
for a critical reflection on the political economy of prison labor.3
Moreover, this juxtaposition allows for a reflection on the relationship
between carcerality and power—and the effects of this relationship on the
gendered bodies trapped in these systems. My analysis takes these empirical
cases as two ways of enacting carceral power, revealing how one uses labor
as a way of disciplining and normalizing women, while the other uses the
idiom of work as a means to self-actualization and taking responsibility.
In the Hungarian case, I suggest that labor as discipline ended up com-
plicating dominant ideas about women’s work and became a platform
from which the staff and inmates thought critically about social respon-
sibility. Something very different occurred when work was understood as
a technique of the self: this conception ended up bracketing all things
social and leaving women to view their struggles as strictly emotional and
laboring as a personal journey devoid of collective significance.
Labor, punishment, and empowerment

There is something absurd, and even oxymoronic, about the idea of penal
empowerment—and about the claims made by so many penal officials that
field, observing and participating in the daily life of the facility. In this work, I had complete
access to all parts of the prison. While conducting this ethnographic work, I began another
study in Hungary’s largest women’s prison. This research involved an intensive six-month period
of fieldwork in 2004 and then a series of two-month revisits. I spent two days per week in the
prison, teaching English and creative writing classes to both the prison staff and the inmates.
All Hungarian quotes were translated into English by the author. Pseudonyms were used to
protect the identities of staff members and inmates from both penal facilities.
3
There are many aspects of these prisons that make a strict comparison between them
methodologically problematic. The prisons were of vastly different sizes, with different histories
and backgrounds; they formed parts of vastly different penal systems in terms of form and
focus; and the broader political economies these systems were connected to were vastly different
in size, scope, and overall development.

76 ❙ Haney
their facilities empower those they incarcerate. Irrespective of whom they

imprison, penal facilities are designed to discipline and punish. Their mo-
dus operandi combines daily doses of degradation, humiliation, and con-
trol. But particularly in female corrections, such doublespeak has been
around for centuries. Since the birth of women’s prisons in the nineteenth
century, penal officials have promised to empower their female subjects.
Initially, the promise was to address women’s special needs through re-
formatories run by other women (Freedman 1981; Rafter 1990). More
recently, the call to penal empowerment has implied a version of gender-
sensitive corrections that equates female empowerment with self-control
and self-esteem (Goodkind 2009). Best described as neoliberal empow-
erment, this approach is often accompanied by therapeutic talk and public
confession (Young 1994; McCorkel 1998, 2003; McKim 2008). As Kelly
Hannah-Moffat (2001) has argued, empowerment projects of the self are
quite appealing to penal officials since they downplay the power imbalances
among women while promising to provide poor women with the auton-
omy and confidence they are so often denied.
Indeed, feminist scholars have been quick to point out how claims to
penal empowerment act as a cover for the pain and suffering of incar-
ceration. There is an enormous body of scholarship documenting women’s
lives behind bars. Through detailed empirical work, feminist researchers
have revealed the struggles women experience while incarcerated. We see
how female prisoners grapple with their roles as mothers: they confront
legal and practical constraints on their parenting at the same time that
prison officials require them to demonstrate maternal fitness as part of
their recovery (Bosworth 1999; Ferraro and Moe 2003). This is all com-
pounded by the guilt and turmoil they feel as they try to parent their
children from afar, with little say over their daily lives (Enos 2001; Bern-
stein 2005). In feminist accounts, we confront the inequalities female
prisoners face in medical care and reproductive rights, with some U.S.
states actively undermining prisoners’ access to abortion (Watterson 1996;
Roth 2004). The devastating realities of imprisonment are all the more
apparent when relayed in prisoners’ own words, which teach of profound
injustices in women’s paths to prison and the difficulties they encounter
in forming supportive relationships with other inmates once there (John-
son 2003).
Yet the realm of labor rarely surfaces in accounts of and by female
prisoners. When work does come up, it is usually discussed in emotional
terms, related to the feelings it produces in inmates. What thus gets em-
phasized are the emotional costs of prison labor—how work becomes part
of the prison’s power-submission dynamic and subjects women to emo-

tional degradation (Buck 2004). In fact, it is this tendency to focus on

the emotional aspects of imprisonment that leads some feminist scholars
to go to the other extreme and to dispel the myth of empowerment
through macroeconomic analyses of the political economy of prison. As
Julia Sudbury (2005) puts it, feminists’ preference for qualitative methods
often leads them to focus on prisoners’ psychologies, which unintention-
ally contributes to their individualization. The response has thus been to
“move beyond micro-level analyses” by exposing the interests driving mass
imprisonment (Sudbury 2005, xvi). So instead of reflecting the system’s
individualized focus, the idea is to bring new questions to the fore: Who
benefits from hyperincarceration? What is the political economy of the
prison based on?
The answer to at least the last of these questions seems clear: profit.
Much of the work on the political economy of prison highlights the direct
benefits of incarceration for national and global business. This is partic-
ularly true of research on U.S. imprisonment: with the 1979 Justice Sys-
tems Improvement Act’s repeal of many restrictions against prison labor,
there was a resurgence of prison work programs.4 Since then, roughly
thirty-six states have enacted policies allowing companies to set up shop
in prisons, especially in traditionally feminine areas like textiles, data entry,
and light industry (Parenti 2001). As a result, companies ranging from
IBM to Starbucks to Revlon to Boeing to Microsoft now use prison labor
(Evans 2005). And their profits can be enormous: not only do minimum
wage requirements not apply to the incarcerated, but large portions of
inmates’ wages can be deducted to cover their room and board, leaving
them with only pennies for take-home pay (Lafer 1999). Prison labor is
often marketed in precisely these terms: in its promotional materials, Cal-
ifornia’s Joint Venture Program promises to give business a “competitive
edge” while instilling a “work ethic in idle prisoners.”5
Alongside these analyses of the direct link between corporations and
the prison industry are arguments about the more abstract corporate in-
terests underlying the penal system. Here the argument is that prisons are
economically beneficial to capital because they secure a vulnerable, docile
workforce and turn inmates into exploitable subjects (Davis and Dent
2001). In part, this happens through the use of prison labor as an ex-
pendable pool of surplus labor; incarceration is a way to warehouse and
4
U.S. Department of Justice, Justice Systems Improvement Act, Public Law 96-157, 109th
Cong, 2nd Sess. (December 27, 1979).
5
This quotation is taken from a pamphlet, “Joint Venture Employers,” circulated by the
California Department of Corrections in June 1994.

78 ❙ Haney
neutralize those rejected by the deregulated service economy (Beckett and

Western 2001; Smith 2005). Just as Loı̈c Wacquant (2001) argues that
prison contains those African Americans displaced by mass unemployment
and welfare retrenchment, feminist scholars claim that many women suffer
a similar fate (Dı́az-Cotto 1996, 2005; Neve and Pate 2005). This then
results in a vicious cycle through which neoliberal policies make groups
of women economically superfluous, leading them to engage in crimi-
nalized activities that land them in prison where they become part of a
captive workforce. The cycle has become increasingly global through pat-
terns of migration, cross-border imprisonment, and transnational prison
corporations (Angel-Ajani 2005; Kempadoo 2005; Sudbury 2005).
In this way, as feminist scholars have debunked claims to penal em-
powerment, they have ended up at the other extreme: whether viewed
from the individual lives of female inmates or from the global economy,
things look uniformly bleak. Prisoners’ individual life stories expose the
painful losses of incarceration, while the economic base of hyperincarcer-
ation reveals how much is gained from the business of prison.
Yet in between individual women and the structures of capital are real
institutions with real people engaged in real practices. Together, these
institutions, people, and practices form the interactions through which
penal power actually operates. And when these institutional interactions
are reinserted into scholarly analysis, something very important happens:
the uniformity that characterized the micro- and macro-level extremes
gives way to divergence—to variation in how power is expressed in carceral
systems and how the bodies of women caught up in these systems are
marked by this power. From these variations we can begin to tease out
the different ways in which labor and punishment can be combined, as
well as the possibilities and limitations of different conceptions of prison
labor.
When work is omnipresent: Wage labor as societal integration

At first glance, Kalocsai Fegyház és Börtön (KFB) seems like a nightmare
born out of the prison-industrial complex. Located in the small town of
Kalocsa, KFB is Hungary’s largest women’s prison. It houses over four
hundred inmates, close to half the Hungarian prison system’s female pop-
ulation. It is also Hungary’s only maximum security facility for women;
approximately 30 percent of its inmates are under maximum security con-
finement, while the remaining 70 percent are medium security. Upon
entering the prison, among the first things to strike visitors are the inmates’
uniforms: some are blue, others green, and still others have black and

white stripes. While in most U.S. prisons such color coding denotes pris-
oners’ security classifications, in KFB the coding signifies the inmate’s
work assignment. It is a visual representation of an inmate’s position in
the world of work. Not that they need a visual reminder: during my visits,
the KFB inmates talked incessantly about work. They spoke about the
work they were engaged in or wanted to be assigned to, as well as the
calluses on their hands from hours of scrubbing and the pain in their feet
from long stints standing. All this for close to nothing in the way of take-
home pay. The exploitation seemed obvious.
Yet when I probed a bit deeper, another side of KFB’s world of work
emerged. During my time in the facility, I was continually struck by the
staff’s insistence on inmate rehabilitation—a concept that had long dis-
appeared from most U.S. penal facilities. What is more, their definition
of rehabilitation seemed equally dated: the KFB staff conceived of it as
the process through which inmates would become reintegrated into the
institutions of work and family. Thus, wage labor formed a centerpiece
of their rehabilitative agenda. After observing the practices that accom-
panied their approach, I came to view this fixation with work as creating
an interesting set of possibilities and limitations and as having unintended
effects on how female inmates conceptualized their own labor and the
entitlements stemming from it.
The world of work

Whenever I entered KFB, I felt like I was traveling back in time. The
KFB warden bore a striking resemblance to many state socialist party
leaders in that he claimed complete control over the facility but was clueless
about its day-to-day workings. The KFB administration was enormous
and overburdened by a litany of bureaucratic rules no one could keep
track of. The infrastructure was plagued with chronic shortages of re-
sources and space. The staff insisted on military-style discipline, requiring
inmates to stand at attention when passing by in the hallway. It was as if
the prison displayed social artifacts from a bygone era.
Of all these artifacts, the most prominent was KFB’s use of wage labor.
As under state socialism, participation in wage labor at KFB is a right and
an obligation; it is an activity inmates are entitled to and expect to engage
in. In fact, there is a direct parallel to the past: the Hungarian Penitentiary
Code was first constructed in 1979 and only slightly amended in 1996.
It instituted a strong focus on work into national penal policies and dic-
tated that penal institutions provide work to all able-bodied prisoners. If
anything, this focus on labor was only elaborated on in postsocialist penal
reforms. In 1996, the Ministry of Justice introduced the Lenient Executive

80 ❙ Haney
Rule (LER), which allowed inmates with at least half their sentences com-
pleted to work outside the prison.6 The idea was to have the LER serve
as the last in a series of retraining steps: early in their sentences, inmates’
work would be confined to prison and then later it would be extended
to the outside labor market.
During my time at KFB, prison officials often questioned whether these
steps would actually lead to full-time employment for the inmates. With
national unemployment rates soaring in the 1990s and 2000s, the prison
staff were keenly aware of the employment obstacles the women prisoners
would face upon release. The situation was even more dire in those parts
of Hungary to which the majority of inmates would return—the east and
the south, where unemployment rates reached 20 percent because of the
demise of their industrial base. When race and gender are taken into
account, the employment picture was even bleaker. In fact, in the prison
itself there were signs of an employment crisis: KFB was overcrowded and
operating at 180 percent of capacity. This meant the prison could no
longer secure full employment for its inmates; instead, about 70 percent
of them had regular work assignments. This troubled most prison officials,
who recalled fondly the 1970s and 1980s when the system could provide
“jobs for everyone” (Tóth, Zentai, and Krizsán 2005, 17).
The KFB staff had no illusion that they were retraining inmates or
teaching them marketable skills. Most staff members recognized how
grueling prison work could be, with one even describing it to other re-
searchers as “robotic” (quoted in Tóth, Zentai, and Krizsán 2005, 17).
Yet this did not prompt the KFB staff to turn away from wage labor. Far
from it: KFB officials insisted on maintaining the centrality of wage labor
to prison life. For them, wage labor serves two essential social functions.
First, it is a model for how to organize a productive life. It gives life a
purpose. It provides a clear, predictable routine. It is a method for struc-
turing the day, a way of orienting oneself and organizing daily life. As a
high-ranking KFB official put it, work shows women how to “be useful”
and not “die of boredom.” Indeed, as social scientists have argued, the
establishment of a daily routine is critical to female inmates’ ability to
survive serving time (Richie 2004; Kruttschnitt and Gartner 2005). For
example, inmates who carve out practices that make them feel useful are
more able to distract themselves from the harsh realities of incarceration.
In KFB, those practices revolve exclusively around work.
This call to labor was so strong that the most effective method of
6
Hungarian Ministry of Justice, Penitentiary Code, Article 44. (Budapest: Central Statistical
Office, 1996).

punishing an inmate was to banish her from work and force her into the
dreaded black-and-white-striped uniform. These uniforms carried enor-
mous stigma; the women wearing them sat together, on the sidelines of
the prison yard, isolated from the others. The stigma of the unemployed
was not merely symbolic but also implied their exclusion from the facility’s
everyday life. The prison’s daily rhythm was structured around work.
Inmates were up at the crack of dawn, given a hearty breakfast, and then
sent off to work for eight hours. After a late-afternoon meal, they rested
and prepared for the next day’s work. The staff allowed no exceptions to
this schedule. The unemployed remained idle amid all this, day in and
day out.
The isolation of the unemployed relates to the second social function
of work at KFB: labor as an important form of social integration. This
echoes the state socialist ideal of equating institutional and individual well-
being—promising to secure the welfare of particular groups by strength-
ening the institutions they are a part of. But there were also practical
considerations: since the KFB staff had limited resources, it is not entirely
surprising that they looked to other social institutions to do the work they
could not. As one of the national directors of the prison system explained
to me, “We [prison officials] cannot be held responsible for engineering
the kind of broad social changes female inmates need. The big institutions
of society, like the economy, schools, the family, have failed them, so how
can we be held accountable for all their problems? The best we can do is
to prepare inmates for their return to those institutions and hope they
will encompass and incorporate them.”
Officials at KFB thus framed prison work as a way of contributing to
the common good. On the one hand, this meant using prisoners’ work
to secure the smooth functioning of the prison. When they cleaned the
floors, washed the windows, and swept the prison yard, inmates were
lauded for making KFB a more livable space. At the same time, prison
work was said to hold the promise of a reorientation of inmate behavior
away from selfish, self-centered actions and toward those that contributed
to the greater good. Through work, the women learned to rely on each
other. In effect, prison officials presented work as offering the social skills
needed for inmates’ future social integration and thus as critical to a sense
of empowerment upon release.
Not surprisingly, then, work assignments formed the central social hi-
erarchy in the prison. Where an inmate worked was quite literally a state-
ment about where she was located in this hierarchy. There were two
general types of work. Some inmates had jobs related to prison mainte-
nance, in which they did everything from kitchen work to cleaning to

82 ❙ Haney
laundry. They also did office work, staffing the prison’s well-stocked library
or doing paperwork for administrators. Other inmates had jobs in the
small private company that operates in the prison. Opened in 1960, the
small factory produces industrial and medical apparel. The inmates em-
ployed by the company work on an assembly line cutting material, sewing
the clothing, and packaging the final products. The company also puts
out a glossy promotional catalogue to sell its goods. The catalogue makes
no mention that the company operates out of a women’s prison; it simply
promotes its merchandise as “expertly made” and “affordable.”
Given the company’s ties to broader labor markets, not to mention its
fancy advertising materials, one might assume that factory work is most
coveted. In fact, I found just the opposite to be the case: work within the
prison, or state-sector jobs, were at the top of the institutional hierarchy.
Never mind that factory work might actually impart skills transportable
beyond KFB walls: everyone wanted the prison-upkeep jobs. In part, this
was because those jobs paid slightly higher wages. But, in reality, the pay
was abysmal for both kinds of work.7 Far more significant were the non-
material rewards. Jobs with the prison gave inmates access to social con-
nections that factory work lacked. They did upkeep work in groups or in
pairs, which allowed for a sociality that assembly line work lacks. Prison
upkeep was also done out in the open for all to see. The public appearance
of productivity can itself be very productive, particularly since prison of-
ficials put such emphasis on serving the collective. Moreover, since many
of these positions actually involved working directly with prison admin-
istrators and guards, they gave inmates access to those with power and
allowed them to butter up the bureaucratic machine a bit.
In short, KFB used work to articulate the importance of collective,
social responsibility rather than inmates’ personal responsibility or poten-
tial marketability. While this difference in focus may seem minor, it is
significant. It is the difference between viewing work as the basis of the
social contract binding the state and its citizens versus appropriating work
as a technique of self-transformation; it is the difference between the logic
of the social state versus that of the neoliberal state. When the staff em-
phasized labor, they did not seek to entrepreneurialize the inmates or to
turn them into enterprising women ready to market themselves upon
7
The pay for KFB workers ranged from the equivalent of thirty-five to ninety U.S. dollars
a month prior to the mandatory deduction to offset the cost of imprisonment. At twenty-five
dollars for all workers, this deduction left many women with virtually no take-home pay. One
staff member estimated that 75 percent of the inmates end up with about ten dollars a month
after working full time.

release. Although not always in the ways intended, this sense of social
responsibility was often what the inmates took from their practices.
Learning to labor
Assessing the effects of penal practices is tricky business—so tricky, in fact,
that many prison researchers avoid it, preferring instead to make abstract
arguments about abstract economic or cultural effects. But such abstrac-
tion can itself be tricky, as the KFB example illustrates: in theory, its labor
practices could be read in opposing ways. On the one hand, its ties to
state socialism may indicate the resurrection of past forms of control. After
all, for over forty years, wage labor was experienced as less of a choice
and more of a public imperative—particularly for women. So from this
perspective, the coercive connotations of KFB’s practices are highlighted.
On the other hand, this is no longer how wage labor is used by the
Hungarian state. Labor is not mobilized as an official way of impressing
the collective will on the population. In fact, given the soaring unem-
ployment rate, work has arguably moved from being a social obligation
to a privilege. In this context, KFB’s labor practices might come across
as resistive, even subversive, just like its links to the state socialist past.
As in other penal facilities, the proof of KFB’s approach is in the in-
stitutional pudding—in the interactions it produces. Indeed, one of the
most striking aspects of these institutional interactions is their social qual-
ity. When the KFB staff assessed inmates’ problems, they always did so in
social terms. All KFB staff refused to assign individual culpability to female
inmates. Instead, they insisted that the women’s problems were social in
nature. Their problems stemmed from institutional neglect; from failed
families; from violent, abusive men; and from failed economies. Or they
stemmed from a legal system that remained unresponsive to their prob-
lems. When the KFB staff evaluated particular inmates, it was through
social lenses: Was she diligent and responsive to others? Was she hard-
working and collectively oriented?
In large part, these assessments were what led the KFB staff to use
wage labor as a way of rewarding and punishing the women—that is, to
reprimand them through social isolation and remunerate through social
inclusion. This also led the staff to seek collective solutions to institutional
problems and even to expand inmates’ rights. Whenever the staff spoke
about overcrowding, which they did quite often, they always related it to
inmate employment. Never mind that overcrowding also led to constant
shortages in resources and cramped cells: the staff was most concerned
about its effects on inmates’ access to work. “With so many women here,
we can’t find work for everyone,” a counselor once explained to me as

84 ❙ Haney
we walked by two inmates washing the same window. “There is only so

many times they can wash the floor or clean the windows.” Or, as another
prison official put it, “At 100 percent capacity, we could do it. We could
give everyone a job like in the past. But not now. This is very unfortunate,
a real pity.”
Their inability to employ all eligible inmates led some KFB officials to
fight with national-level prison officials in an effort to reduce overcrowd-
ing. Even more telling was the way KFB’s conception of labor prompted
the staff to recognize the inmates’ broader social rights. An issue of great
concern to the staff was that the Hungarian social security system failed
to take into account the work inmates did while incarcerated. Inmates’
participation in this system stopped during their incarceration. This put
them at a real economic disadvantage upon release, since many social
provisions—from unemployment benefits to maternity leave to family al-
lowances to pensions—are linked to participation in the social security
system. The KFB staff were outraged by this; many believed it was the
most pressing injustice facing inmates. Claiming that the current code
subjected inmates to economic hardship later in life, they drew out the
collective value of prison labor and its centrality to social integration. In
the process, wage labor was once again positioned as a social entitlement
and the foundation upon which inmates’ future well-being rested.
For a variety of reasons, it was difficult to gauge what the inmates made
of all this or what they took from KFB’s labor practices. They were an
incredibly diverse group of women, who had learned to keep their
thoughts, emotions, and reflections hidden. Moreover, as an American
sociologist, I was constrained in my ability to access and understand those
thoughts and reflections. There were cultural references and linguistic
subtleties that I frequently missed. There were also restrictions put on me
by the KFB staff. For instance, while they did give me enormous freedom
in conducting my classes, they insisted on escorting me to and from class
every day, thus narrowing what I could see in the prison. So my lenses
were clearly quite partial.
That said, during my time at KFB, I got several glimpses into the
complex ways that the prison’s approach to wage labor rubbed off on the
inmates. First, there were all the battles between staff and inmates, often
about work assignments. Decisions about who got which jobs were a
constant source of argument and strife. Because the staff used these as-
signments to reward and punish inmates, they insisted on maintaining
control over them. For similar reasons, the inmates sought to gain influ-
ence over the process, or at least to make assignments more transparent.
When the inmates did this, they demonstrated a striking degree of

entitlement, insisting on their right to work. Like the staff, the inmates
drew on their own memories of the past when asserting this right. Some
pointed out how the assignment process was reminiscent of state socialist
labor practices. They complained that the best jobs were allocated on the
basis of one’s ability to butter up the bureaucratic machine rather than
on skill level or work experience (Tóth, Zentai, and Krizsán 2005). For
instance, the most coveted work positions were in the library. These jobs
provided enormous autonomy and gave inmates control over sought-after
reading materials. Yet the two women occupying the jobs were snitches,
and the other inmates made no secret of it. “They have no experience
working with books. We all know how they got those posts,” Kati once
blurted out as the librarians were escorted to class one day by a guard.
“I’d love to see our comrade librarians do just one day in the factory,”
Maria later noted to another guard, making clear allusion to state socialism.
The effect of KFB work practices also came across quite clearly in the
classroom—in the relationships the women formed with each other and
in their strong sense of camaraderie. In contrast to their clashes with the
staff, the inmates developed real friendships and networks of support. After
years of working and living side by side, these friends could finish each
others’ sentences and anticipate each others’ thoughts. Then there was
the time Timea came to class with her arms covered with wounds from
hot oil that had spilled during her kitchen shift. Her kitchen colleagues
acted as transcribers for her so she could continue coming to class while
her arms healed. There were all the days that Magda came late because
her shift was delayed—and all the times her shiftmates cleared a space for
her at her favorite desk in the front of class because she “had a hard day
at work.” And there were the seating patterns of my large English class,
which was divided into two sections: factory and maintenance workers in
the back and kitchen workers and office workers in the front. Whenever
I tried to mix up the seating, the inmates resisted, claiming they wanted
to sit by those they felt comfortable with as they learned English.
Even more interesting was their insistence on using the world of work
to situate the characters they created in their fiction writing. The inmates’
characters always had occupations; work was a key part of their identity,
to be noted along with age and appearance. “I don’t get a good picture
of who this character is,” Maria commented to Lena after listening to her
short story. “I mean, where does she work? What does she do?” Work
had become part of who they were—and of who they imagined becoming.
From interactions like these, I began to see the possibilities inherent
in KFB’s emphasis on wage labor. Prisons are notoriously alienating and
atomizing spaces, which made these inmates’ insistence on collectivity and

86 ❙ Haney
camaraderie quite compelling. The same was true of KFB’s rehabilitative

goals and emphasis on societal integration. Of course, this is not to over-
state the benefits of these labor practices. The women were tired and
worn out; they were doing hard time under harsh conditions. Without
question, mandatory work had become a form of penal regulation, a
way for the prison to discipline and normalize its charges. Moreover, at
the end of each day, when I ventured outside the prison into the world
of postsocialism, where work had become very hard to secure as un-
employment rates soared, I often wondered just how empowering it was
for the inmates to form identities as workers that were so inconsistent
with the larger culture awaiting them. But then I would return to class
and watch the inmates work together to imagine alternative social rela-
tionships and lives for themselves, and once again I would recognize the
promise and possibilities. This promise becomes even clearer when jux-
taposed with another penal institution with an entirely different concep-
tion of women’s labor.
When work disappears: Wage labor as psychological distraction

It is hard to imagine a women’s prison organized more differently from
KFB than Visions. From a distance, if KFB looks like the epitome of a
communist labor camp, Visions seems full of feminist promise. In fact, it
was born out of pressure from feminist lawyers working on behalf of
incarcerated mothers. In the mid-1990s, caving to the pressure, the Cal-
ifornia Department of Corrections (CDC) opened three special penal
institutions for female inmates to serve their sentences with their children.
Known as the Community Prisoner Mothers Program (CPMP), the fa-
cility’s promises are many: the hope that they will end the cycling of
prisoners’ children through the foster care system by allowing women to
raise their children while incarcerated and the promise that these facilities
will empower female inmates.8 The prisons are also located in community
settings as a way of signifying their realistic approach to the problems
facing female inmates. “We keep it real,” explained house director Maria
Cortes on my first visit to Visions. “And the women get better.” It all
seemed full of potential.
Yet, as with KFB, when I probed a bit further, a very different picture
emerged. After years working with its staff and inmates, I ended up seeing
Visions’s discourses and practices as more symptomatic of the broader
politics of disentitlement shaping the lives of poor women. Many things
8
For more on the development of CPMP facilities, see Barry (1989).

led me to this conclusion: from how Visions homogenized women’s prob-

lems to how its staff turned social vulnerability into personal pathology
(Haney 2010). But here I focus on one: faced with enormous diversity
within their ranks and among the inmates, the Visions staff created a tight
institutional narrative that emphasized the inmates’ need to recover from
problems of low self-esteem, compulsion, and vice. They also set forth a
clear program of psychological exposure and communal confession—
mixed with a bit of yoga and meditation—as curatives for these ailments.
When confronted with such serious disorders, there could be no time for
job training or paid labor. So, despite all its promise and promises, the
outcomes of the Visions program were hardly empowering: its practices
left the inmates struggling internally, without a sense of the importance
of their labor or the social contributions they could make through it.
The work of recovery

The staff often remind the inmates that Visions is unlike other correctional
institutions. Instead of being in a far-off locale, it is located on a busy
inner-city street; instead of having prison guards as staff, it is run by a
group of women committed to “keeping it real,” with only one correc-
tional official among them. But perhaps what sets Visions apart from other
facilities most is its dizzying diversity. The staff includes women with
backgrounds in everything from penal corrections to alternative healing
to psychoanalysis to addiction studies. The inmates are equally varied and
include inmates convicted of a range of felonies, court-mandated clients
in alternative-to-incarceration (ATI) programs, and a few homeless
women.9 The funding structure is close to incomprehensible: Visions’s
county funding alone encompasses six different sources, including assis-
tance from public health programs, mental health agencies, drug and
alcohol initiatives, and ATI policies. The tensions emanating from all this
diversity were apparent as Visions tried to combine divergent logics, ori-
entations, and loyalties.
However, despite all this diversity, those in charge of Visions had de-
veloped a common institutional narrative. As in KFB, they had crafted a
script to relay their definition of the situation and explain why they did
what they did. But the Visions script was entirely different in form and
focus. Theirs was a discourse of recovery that constituted Visions as a
space for women to heal from personal loss, trauma, and pain. In all its
9
I use the term “clients” here since this group of women did not come to Visions from
the CDC. Thus, although they were legally mandated to be at the facility, they were not wards
of the state of California in the same way as CDC inmates.

88 ❙ Haney
glossy promotional material, Visions represents itself as a therapeutic com-

munity, replete with clinically trained counselors and specialists. In this
way, Visions’s alternative orientation has come to imply therapeutic in-
tervention; its promise of female empowerment has come to mean ther-
apeutic recovery.
This discourse of recovery is also premised on a shared interpretation
of the source of the inmates’ problems. Since the inmates were a diverse
group of women with complicated backgrounds, there were a slew of
potential problems the staff could have targeted. Yet the staff came to-
gether to reduce all these problems to one: addiction. Many inmates were
said to have gone astray because of addictions to substances like drugs
and alcohol. While some inmates did have serious drug and alcohol prob-
lems, many of them did not. But they were addicts too. They were just
addicted to other things: money, destructive relationships, abusive men,
sex, or male attention. There were even those addicted to a way of life—
to the energy, sounds, and sensations of street, or “gangsta,” life. What
united all these women was an inability to resist destructive impulses and
to develop the self-awareness to understand what caused them harm.
From this common diagnosis of the inmates’ problems emerged a clear
recipe for change. Women’s low self-esteem was said to have caused their
addictions, which were themselves thought to have chipped away at
women’s self-esteem. This implied a clear sequencing of treatment: re-
flection and introspection would lead to heightened self-esteem and then
ultimately to an end to addiction. In this sequence, there was to be no
room for external relationships like the social relations of work, family, or
community. All these relations would distract from the real work of re-
covery, a struggle that was to occur internally as women confronted their
experiences of pain and trauma. Whenever inmates raised social issues,
which they did on a regular basis, the staff accused them of “detouring”
and trying to escape their demons.
In practice, this meant that the women at Visions spent large parts of
their days in counseling sessions and encounter groups. In addition to
meetings with therapists, Visions also offered classes in art therapy, drama
therapy, and anger management as well as various twelve-step programs and
staff-supervised yoga and meditation. All days ended with a house meeting
where women connected with each other and shared their feelings.
So while the Visions staff claimed there was a lot of work being done
in the facility, none of it involved wage labor. At Visions, “working the
program” meant making one’s internal struggle externally visible. First
and foremost, it implied showing the staff that one was ready and willing
to “go deep”—to dig up the worst, most horrible things that had ever

happened in one’s life. Connected to this, working the program also meant
engaging in public confessions of these horrific experiences. Women who
worked the program were those who could give these public airings and
confessionals in a new language. They had worked to master the vernacular
of the facility: so the prison became the “house,” while other inmates
became “sisters.” There were also the “I” statements all inmates were to
use whenever possible—sentences that began with “I,” thus placing the
speaker as the central actor. According to Jane, the Visions director, this
way of speaking teaches women to claim their own feelings and to stop
blaming others for their emotional state and actions.
What working the program clearly did not mean was laboring with and
for others. The women at Visions were not permitted to work in jobs of
any kind. With the exception of the monthly meal each inmate helped to
plan and prepare, they did not hold regular positions in the facility. They
did not secure jobs in the surrounding community. They did not receive
any job counseling or education. While the inmates were permitted to attend
many Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings outside
the facility, no inmate was allowed to take classes at a nearby community
college, attend local job fairs, or work part-time. Whenever the inmates
asked for any of this, which they did all the time, the staff explained that
these activities would just distract from the “real work” confronting them.
Director Jane always told the women that if they wanted these kinds of
programs, they should have stayed in conventional prison. “You can get
education and job training at Valley State [Prison],” she’d explain. “Would
you like to go back? What we give you is deeper. We help you to get better,
to recover, and to deal with your concerns and stresses.”
Emotionalizing injustice
My work at KFB often left me with a sinking feeling that the prison’s
conception of wage labor so collided with current cultural understandings
of work that its transformative potential became limited. At Visions, I wor-
ried about the opposite: about how well the staff’s notion of labor jibed
with the cultural devaluation of women’s work. If anything, Visions’s con-
ception was too culturally resonant. It was not only that the staff’s ideas
about labor reflected the concerns and language of Dr. Phil and Oprah. By
bracketing all external relationships, including the economic and social re-
alities of inmates’ lives, Visions’s discourse of recovery turned societal prob-
lems into personal failings. By trying to make women more self-actualized,
the program drew on what Nikolas Rose (2001, 18) calls a “somatic in-
dividuality” in an attempt to inculcate new ideas about who they really were,
what they could hope for, and what kind of life they should desire.

90 ❙ Haney
Less obvious were the concrete implications of these understandings

for everyday life at Visions. Recall that KFB’s conception of labor had
launched the staff into battles over prison overcrowding and the exclusion
of prison labor from the social security system. At Visions, the diagnosis
of addiction led the staff to find ways to shut down any talk of poverty,
social inequality, or economic marginalization. Whenever the inmates
raised them, they were accused of avoiding their deeper problems and
sidestepping the real work of recovery. Perhaps the best example of this
was counselor Lesley’s mantra that “the system is in your head,” which
was her way of indicating how prison had left its mark on the inmates’
thinking. Yet at other times, Lesley used “the system” and “injustice” or
“inequality” interchangeably. So when Keisha complained about how un-
fair it was to have worked for minimum wages all her life, the injustice
was in her head. Or when Maria insisted that she would never be able to
earn a livable wage unless she received job training, the system was in her
head.
Visions’s discourse of recovery thus became an effective way to silence
dissent and to wish away inequality. While the inmates complained con-
stantly about Visions’s failure to provide them with practical help, or what
Chanel called “shit that we’ll need in the real world,” their complaints
never got them very far. Take, for instance, Ronette’s struggle to get a
job during the final six months of her sentence. When she initially asked
to work outside the facility, the staff rejected her request, claiming that
working for wages would distract from her recovery. Then Ronette coun-
tered with an appeal based on a CDC regulation stipulating that efforts
had to be made to give inmates work assignments as their release ap-
proached. Again, she was rejected; her recovery had to come first. She
then wrote a letter to the Visions director explaining the economic realities
she would confront upon release as the sole parent of a five-year-old girl.
No luck. So she appealed directly to the CDC, attaching all her earlier
requests. The CDC sent the appeal back to Visions, which rejected it for
fear that Ronette would relapse if faced with the stress of holding down
a job. Finally, just months before her release, Ronette got herself trans-
ferred to a more traditional penal facility in order to get some work
experience, even though this meant serving the remainder of her sentence
without her daughter.
As Ronette’s odyssey to get a job demonstrates, the inmates were left
without any viable way to get Visions to recognize the social and economic
realities of their lives, much less to demand social rights. This leads to a
particularly painful part of this ethnographic story: when confronted with

a model of recovery that personalized their problems, many inmates re-

acted similarly. They turned on each other and themselves in quite harmful
ways. They fought constantly, turning the most mundane daily conflicts
into all-out wars. They competed over who had lived the hardest, most
“off-the-hook” lives and who had the deepest wounds to show for it. And
when they got really desperate, they drew their kids into these battles,
making fun of children who were having trouble adjusting to life behind
bars or refusing to let their kids play with those of their rivals.
Perhaps most distressing of all, the Visions inmates began to take plea-
sure in each others’ pain. The level of psychological brutality the inmates
could inflict on each other was shocking. At times, it seemed like the
inmates took stock of others’ problems and vulnerabilities so that they
were ready to pounce when necessary. When faced with such brutality,
most inmates resorted to individual survival strategies. They slept a lot,
crawling into bed in between scheduled meetings and groups. Those who
could took an ever-expanding cocktail of prescription drugs, from Prozac
to Valium to Methadone to Ambien. They ate a lot. They watched a lot
of television. They cut themselves. They retreated to bathrooms for hours
at a time since it was the one place where they could be alone or spend
one-on-one time with their children.
This individualization was particularly apparent in my creative writing
classes. These classes could not have been more different from the ones
I held in Hungary. While the KFB inmates used class to escape from their
grueling work lives and to bond with other inmates, the Visions women
insisted on using class to revisit and perfect their personal stories: theirs
were realist accounts that ranged from horrific tales of past traumas and
abuse to optimistic tales of the emergence of new selves freed from old
pathologies. But what they all shared was an exclusive reliance on the “I”
in their writing; they represented their experiences in purely personal
terms. Whenever I tried to get them to write about others, or even in the
third person, they resisted. These were their stories, about their lives.
Despite my attempts to convince them that writing could also be a
way to escape such pain and to take the role of another, the Visions women
insisted on using it as a confession. At its worst, this insistence led them
to turn writing into a competition. Among other things, the competitive
confessional ended up desensitizing the inmates to their personal histories.
It led them to appear numb to some quite horrific experiences, from gang
rapes to suicide attempts to drug overdoses to incest. With time, it was
no longer enough for a woman to discuss being gang raped—she had to
detail how, when, and where it happened. And then she had to get in-

92 ❙ Haney
creasingly revealing with each retelling of the story. The competitive con-
fessional thus created yet another gulf among the inmates; it became yet
another barrier to forming alliances or supportive relationships.
The possibilities and limitations of prison work

While it may seem as though I have lost the focus on labor, this is precisely
the point: by draining women’s work of its social content, Visions defined
it as a psychological journey to the promised land of self-esteem. Yet this
is hardly where the journey wound up. Like its Hungarian counterpart,
Visions used what it called work to bring its women into line. Like KFB,
Visions had women “work” the program as a form of regulation and
control—as a way of insisting on what kind of women they should become
and what kind of lives they should lead. In both contexts, work became
a central mode of carceral power and of penal discipline. It was a strategy
of governance, a way to align women’s behavior with the aims and interests
of government (Rose 1999).
Of course, as a strategy of governance, prison work operated in vastly
different ways in the two contexts and reflects very different ideas of
women’s labor. In KFB, the disciplining placed mandatory wage labor at
the center of prison life, using it to prepare women for social integration
and productive lives. In Visions, the disciplining took the form of emo-
tional exposure and confession that relegated wage labor to a distraction,
something to be bracketed in order to get to the real work of the self.
In one case, penal power operated through the omnipresence of wage
labor, while in the other through its absence. Work became an external
imperative in one case and an internal struggle in the other. And in one
case, hard work became a social, collective good, while in the other a
personal, therapeutic way to “go deep.”
In juxtaposing these conceptions of prison work, I remain cautious not
to overdraw the comparison or overextend the arguments made from it.
This is not an ethnographic account of national differences in approaches
to punishment, nor is it an attempt to explain systemic differences in
patterns of female incarceration. For instance, one could imagine a U.S.
prison in which wage labor is as mandatory and even as valorized in KFB;
one could also imagine a Hungarian therapeutic community that empha-
sizes addiction narratives and confessional practices. In this way, KFB and
Visions are no more representative of their respective national prison sys-

tems than they are of the surrounding culture’s approach to crime and
punishment.10
But because these case studies do exemplify two forms of penal dis-
cipline and two expressions of carceral power, they are illuminating in
other ways. First, when taken together, these cases complicate the common
story of the political economy of prison and its punch line about how the
expropriation of labor is at the center of the prison-industrial complex.
They complicate this story line not only by drawing attention to the
variation in how prisons actually use labor but also by pointing to the
need to shift our unit of analysis away from the micro- and macro-level
analytical extremes. Had this ethnographic analysis been limited to either
of these levels, as so much political economy is, the empirical variation I
discovered might have remained invisible. On the one end, had I focused
only on inmates’ individual lives, similarities would have been highlighted.
After all, both KFB and Visions inmates struggled with their roles as
mothers and with legal obstacles to parenting. They received abysmal
medical care and lost the most basic reproductive rights. They all grappled
with the pain and loss of incarceration. Neither group experienced the
lofty empowerment promised by prison officials.
At the other extreme, an analysis of how KFB and Visions fit into the
larger prison-industrial complex would have given rise to another form of
similarity. After all, there are economic advantages to both penal models:
KFB got a lot of labor out of its inmates for little money, and the private
company operating out of KFB remained profitable. Even Visions’s prac-
tices amassed economic gain: its merging of private and public funding,
combined with its billing of inmates for room and board, made the busi-
ness of Visions lucrative for some. At a more abstract level, it is easy to
see how the Visions program serves the needs of U.S. consumer culture,
training inmates to relate their desires more closely to capitalist patterns
of consumption. Yet these kinds of arguments would obscure as much as
they illuminate. By shifting the unit of analysis to the concrete practices
of prison labor, a different picture emerges. The homogeneity that would
10
In other places, I have tried to tease out why these approaches to punishment and penal
labor emerged where they did when they did, suggesting that KFB’s practices hearken back to
a state socialist imaginary that continues to have a hold on prison officials, while Visions’s
practices emerged from ascendant forms of state hybridity that have allowed for a more diverse
set of cultural influences on public institutions. In this way, I argue against seeing them as being
at two stages of some sort of linear penal development. Hungarian penal officials were very
aware of the version of neoliberal penality characteristic of the U.S. penal system; they simply
rejected it. For more on these arguments, see Haney (2008, 2010).

94 ❙ Haney
have come out of individual and structural stories gives way to variation
when we focus on an institutional level.
This then leads to a second, larger argument: these different expressions
of penal power had observable effects. The therapeutics of neoliberalism
had consequences for how the prison staff interpreted the inmates’ prob-
lems and potential. They shaped the extent to which the staff accentuated
the possibilities of women’s social contributions and the significance of
their labor. They affected how the inmates related to each other and
whether they could step outside themselves to connect with others. And
they influenced the inmates’ ability to respond to dominant notions of
women’s labor. In neither national context is women’s labor socially or
culturally valued. This is especially true for the kind of women imprisoned
at KFB and Visions—women who, in the main hierarchies of power and
privilege, are near the bottom. These women are rarely portrayed as con-
tributing to the social good; the work they perform is rarely held out as
an avenue for their own empowerment, much less for societal betterment.
To the extent that prison labor leads to an awareness of women’s social
contributions, it might actually serve as an alternative to, as opposed to
a reflection of, dominant forms of social exclusion.
In this way, these differences in the penal politics of labor have broader
political significance. In contrast to the many analyses of the causes and
consequences of mass imprisonment, we still have few viable ideas about
how to reform or transform it. Our scholarly imaginations become quite
narrow and limited when we turn to contemplate alternatives to the car-
ceral state. In part, this may also relate back to the unit of analysis our
scholarship so often operates on. From the perspective of a life story, it
is difficult to see beyond the personal; individual accounts often lead to
individualizing solutions. From the perspective of political economy, the
obstacles to change seem even greater—disrupting the business of prison
is at best a long-term strategy and at worst a politically infeasible one. Yet
when institutional relations, interactions, and practices are centered, we
can begin to imagine more concrete and inventive ways to transform the
content of penal programs. We can begin to think through how those
programs might work against the politics of exclusion rather than become
symptoms of it. One place to start might just be the arena of prison labor.
Department of Sociology
New York University

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Working through Mass Incarceration: Gender and the Politics of Prison Labor from East to

This content downloaded from 132.203.227.62 on Sat, 5 Jul 2014 15:08:42 PM

Working through Mass Incarceration: Gender and the

F ew developments in the contemporary state arena have been as dra-

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This content downloaded from 132.203.227.62 on Sat, 5 Jul 2014 15:08:42 PM

Labor, punishment, and empowerment

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their facilities empower those they incarcerate. Irrespective of whom they

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tional degradation (Buck 2004). In fact, it is this tendency to focus on

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neutralize those rejected by the deregulated service economy (Beckett and

When work is omnipresent: Wage labor as societal integration

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The world of work

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This content downloaded from 132.203.227.62 on Sat, 5 Jul 2014 15:08:42 PM

This content downloaded from 132.203.227.62 on Sat, 5 Jul 2014 15:08:42 PM

This content downloaded from 132.203.227.62 on Sat, 5 Jul 2014 15:08:42 PM

This content downloaded from 132.203.227.62 on Sat, 5 Jul 2014 15:08:42 PM

we walked by two inmates washing the same window. “There is only so

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camaraderie quite compelling. The same was true of KFB’s rehabilitative

When work disappears: Wage labor as psychological distraction

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led me to this conclusion: from how Visions homogenized women’s prob-

The work of recovery

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glossy promotional material, Visions represents itself as a therapeutic com-

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This content downloaded from 132.203.227.62 on Sat, 5 Jul 2014 15:08:42 PM

Less obvious were the concrete implications of these understandings

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a model of recovery that personalized their problems, many inmates re-

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The possibilities and limitations of prison work

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This content downloaded from 132.203.227.62 on Sat, 5 Jul 2014 15:08:42 PM

This content downloaded from 132.203.227.62 on Sat, 5 Jul 2014 15:08:42 PM

Haney, Lynne A. 2008. “Competing Empowerments: Gender and Neoliberal Pun-

This content downloaded from 132.203.227.62 on Sat, 5 Jul 2014 15:08:42 PM

Sudbury, Julia. 2005. “Introduction: Feminist Critiques, Transnational Land-

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