A “Labor History” of Mass Incarceration

Alex Lichtenstein

A quarter century ago, when I began researching a dissertation on convict labor in

the American South, I professed astonishment that the number of prison inmates in
the United States had reached a half million; by the time I finished my thesis, in 1990,
that figure had climbed another 50 percent to 750,000. When my book appeared some
years later, the number of incarcerated Americans had long surpassed a million. I
hardly need to rehearse the figures, but in this new century, the number of people in
prison stands at more than 1.6 million; those in jail total another 800,000; and those
under “correctional supervision” (prison, jail, probation, parole, etc.) are an astound-
ing 7.3 million — in 1980, the comparable figure had been a mere 1.8 million, regarded
then by many critics as troublingly large (see fig. 1). A whole series of studies have
shown that this “mass incarceration” might better be termed hyperincarceration, as
Loïc Wacquant calls it, because it falls on certain populations very unequally. Accord-
ing to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, although the total incarceration rate in the
United States is 754 per 100,000 — a world-­historical rate, by the way — at the midyear
point of 2008, there were 4,777 black male inmates held in state and federal prisons
and local jails per 100,000 black males, compared to 1,760 Hispanic male inmates per
100,000 Hispanic males and 727 white male inmates per 100,000 white males. Let me
repeat that another way — nearly 5 percent of all black men in the United States are
incarcerated as you read this, and the rate is much greater for young black men in the
prime of their working life. When one spins out numbers to encompass all those who
have ever been confined to a jail or prison cell . . . well, we know that for young Afri-
can American men in some urban areas, the correctional state is by far the state they
know best. It is the very essence of the contemporary American state as far as their
lives are concerned. The Sentencing Project calculates that one-­third of black men
will serve time at some point in their lives.1

1.  The most recent imprisonment and incarceration data can be found in U.S. Department of Justice,
Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Prisoners in 2008,” bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1763 (accessed
December 21, 2009). For the midyear figure, see Heather C. West and William J. Sabol, Prison Inmates
at Midyear 2008 — Statistical Tables (Washington, DC: BJS, 2009), 18, bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/

Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 8, Issue 3

DOI 10.1215/15476715-1275217  © 2011 by Alex Lichtenstein

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What does this mean? The implications according to criminologists, sociolo-
gists of punishment, political scientists and theorists, politicians (on both the left and
right), philosophers, economists, social workers, and corrections officials are signifi-
cant, profound, and troubling. All agree that we are in the midst (or, more optimisti-
cally, perhaps at the tail end) of an unprecedented social experiment whose compat-
ibility with a democratic society may be found wanting and/or whose fiscal limits
have already been reached in some states (California is a perfect example).2 If you
want a crash course in these matters, Glenn C. Loury’s essay “Race, Incarceration,
and American Values” in his book of the same name and a recent collection entitled
After the War on Crime, edited by three Berkeley law professors, are the places to start.
Loury, a black conservative economist who was once the darling of the New Right,
has changed sides — and this is his current crusade. “Never before,” he mordantly
observes, “has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citi-
zens.” I am glad we have him to speak up. As Loury notes, “even if the racial argu-
ment about causes [of mass incarceration] is inconclusive, the racial consequences are
clear. . . . Mass incarceration has now become a principal vehicle for the reproduc-
tion of racial hierarchy in our society.” In the states outside of the U.S. South, at least,
this is a fairly recent historical development, really a post – civil rights phenomenon.
In 1960, the U.S. prison population was 60 percent white. By 2005, it had become 70
percent nonwhite.3

pim08st.pdf (accessed December 2009). The Sentencing Project remains one of the best nongovernmental
sources for prison statistics, particularly those correlated by race. See, for example, www.sentencingproject
.org/doc/publications/rd_stateratesofincbyraceandethnicity.pdf (accessed April 12, 2011). The imprisonment
rate refers to inmates sentenced to state and federal correctional institutions; the incarceration rate includes
those in jails, many of them not yet sentenced; correctional control includes these plus the categories of pro-
bation, parole, or awaiting trial. On the racialization of corrections, see also Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcer-
ate, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2006); Jerome Miller, Search and Destroy: African-­American Males in the
Criminal Justice System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Bruce Western, Punishment and
Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007). On the distinction between mass incar-
ceration and hyperincarceration, see especially Wacquant’s trenchant comment in Glenn C. Loury, Race,
Incarceration, and American Values (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 89, and his essay “The Place of the
Prison in the New Government of Poverty,” in After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy, and a New Recon-
struction, ed. Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney López, and Jonathan Simon (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2008), 13.
2.  Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing Califor-
nia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
3.  Loury, Race, Incarceration, and American Values, 5, 21, 37. Research into the history of the racializa-
tion of criminality and punishment in the North is just beginning; see the suggestive remarks in Robert
Perkinson’s review essay, “Guarded Hope: Lessons from the History of the Prison Boom,” Boston Review,
July – August 2008, 17 – 20; Khalil Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Ideas about Race and Crime
in the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Heather
Thompson, “Blinded by the Barbaric South: The Ironic History of Penal Reform in Modern America,” in
The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Joseph Crespino and Matthew Lassiter (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2009).

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Figure 1.  U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics correctional surveys (Annual
Probation Survey, National Prisoner Statistics Program, Annual Survey of Jails, and Annual Parole
Survey) as presented in the publications “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2009,”
“Prisoners in 2009,” “Probation and Parole in the United States, 2009,” and “Jail Inmates at
Midyear 2009 — Statistical Tables,” http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/corr2.cfm (accessed
September 20, 2010).

How might recent penal history, characterized by the massive expansion of the
carceral state, the increased racialization of punishment, and the powerful impact of
hyperincarceration on broad swaths of particular communities and neighborhoods4 be
of relevance and concern to labor historians? I briefly lay out several points at which
recent labor and penal history might intersect. There is plenty of historical research in
some of these areas, but until very recently nearly all of it focused on the period before
World War II, with an emphasis on the forced convict labor regimes of the southern
states.5 If we turn our attention to the more recent past, especially since the passage of

4.  See, for example, Laura Kurgan, “Prison Blocks,” Atlantic Monthly, March 2009, 70 – 71. Kurgan
observes that “in 2003, upwards of 12,000 New Orleans – area residents left the city for prison; more than
half were expected to return home within three years.” She shows that in one small section of the inner city
in 2007, fifty-­five people from a single neighborhood less than half a square mile in area entered prison, pro-
foundly destabilizing the community.
5.  To name but a few works that concentrate on labor, Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their
World: Alabama, 1865 – 1900 (Charlottesville: University of Virgina Press, 2000); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice
the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso, 1996);
Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866 – 1928 (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1996); Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Poli-

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comprehensive crime “control” legislation in the late 1960s and the drug laws of the
1970s (both areas deserving of much more research), for the most part historians have
ceded the field to criminologists and sociologists. Now, however, states such as Cali-
fornia and New York have supplanted Mississippi and Georgia as exemplars of racial-
ized punishment, and the impact of criminal justice on the urban ghetto rather than
the Jim Crow rural south has moved to the forefront of their interest. Yet, with only a
handful of exceptions, social scientists have neglected to take a long historical view.
Historians should be cheered, however, by the work of Jonathan Simon and
Loïc Wacquant, both of whom defy intellectual categorization. In his important
book, Governing through Crime, Simon has urged us to see the emergence of the car-
ceral state as a historical formation of governance akin to the New Deal order it has
helped displace. In contrast to the New Deal, “in place of spreading risk across broad
social and economic groups, the Crime Deal has promoted disaggregation of risk that
reaches its most potent form in the assignment of a historically unprecedented portion
of our population to incarceration.” 6 In a series of essays and interventions that com-
plement Simon’s work, Wacquant has advanced a powerful argument that the prison
and criminal justice system, as an expansive social space that sweeps up huge portions
of the African American population in its net, constitutes the latest incarnation of the
ghetto in its post – civil rights phase. As he notes, “one cannot understand the trajec-
tory of the black American subproletariat after the riots that rocked the metropolis
in the 1960s without bringing into one’s analytical sights the stupendous expansion of
the penal state in the last three decades of the century.” 7
Only now are social, political, and labor historians beginning to bring the
interplay of “governmentality,” criminal justice, and the related post – civil rights
forms of racial control into their analytical sights through careful investigations of
the evolving nature of punishment in the post-­1945 period. Robert Chase and Heather
Thompson, who presented their thoughts on these issues at the LAWCHA confer-
ence on “Race, Labor, and the City” in Chicago in May 2009, are working on major
projects that effectively synthesize histories of labor and the state with the stunning

tics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776 – 1941 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
David Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free
Press, 1996); Karin Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coal-
fields, 1871 – 1896 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
6.  Jonathan Simon, Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democ-
racy and Created a Culture of Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Jonathan Simon, “From the
New Deal to the Crime Deal,” in Frampton, López, and Simon, After the War on Crime, 54.
7.  Loïc Wacquant, “The Body, the Ghetto, and the Penal State,” Qualitative Sociology 32 (2009):
101 – 29; “The New ‘Peculiar Institution’: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto,” Theoretical Criminology 4,
no. 3: 377 – 89; “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment and Society 3
(2001): 95 – 134; “The Place of the Prison in the New Government of Poverty,” in Frampton, López, and
Simon, After the War on Crime, 23 – 36; Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), chaps. 2, 6. Of course, both Wacquant and Simon build on
the work of historians such as Alan Brinkley, Thomas Sugrue, Gary Gerstle, Nelson Lichtenstein, and
Lizabeth Cohen.

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growth of incarceration over the past several decades, the former by focusing on the
prisoners’ rights movement that erupted in Texas in the 1970s and the latter through a
reexamination of the meaning of the 1971 Attica prison riot within the racial politics
of the period.8 Both Chase and Thompson are attentive to the way questions of work,
race, and power shaped these penal regimes and resistance to them. In what follows,
I map out a broader agenda for labor historians as they contemplate developing their
consideration of the hidden history of the American prison and the expansion of the
carceral state over the past half century.
First, the most obvious area of study is the labor of prisoners themselves. This
is the concern of much of the older historiography (including my own efforts), which
focused on convict leasing, chain gangs, the emergence of the prison workshop and
factory in the nineteenth century, prison farms such as Parchman and Angola, and
the relationship of these various forced labor regimes to the development of capital-
ism in particular times and places. Should labor historians continue to pay attention to
this dimension of prison labor, even as it diminishes in overall economic importance
(at least in the realm of production), and if so, in what way should it interest us? If
prison labor has been pushed to the margins of the productive economy (though this
remains a point in dispute), what role does actual labor in prison play today, and in
which economic sectors? How do the state and/or private contractors organize prison
labor, and how is it compensated? Does work inside America’s prisons train work-
ers, or even claim to, and if so, what for? Is there room for struggle, for example, pris-
oner unionization? What is the relationship between work and the prisoners’ rights
movements of the 1960s and 1970s? (This last one is an essential question that both
Thompson and Chase take up.) Does incarcerated labor compete with free labor as a
kind of internal “offshore” labor enclave? When and in which sectors?
The issue of competition with free labor raises a related set of questions that
should be of particular interest to labor historians — the shape of the movements
against prison labor competition. At crucial moments in the evolution of impris-
onment, workers have organized in favor of prison “reform,” largely as a way to
challenge employers’ use of prison labor to undercut wages, standards, and orga-
nization. In many ways, the key challenges to nineteenth-­century prison labor

8.  Simon, Governing through Crime. See also Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s
Prison Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010); Heather Ann Thompson, “Blinded by the Barbaric
South: The Ironic History of Penal Reform in Modern America,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptional-
ism, ed. Joseph Crespino and Matthew Lassiter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Heather Ann
Thompson, “The Attica Uprising of 1971 and the Creation of the Carceral State: Toward a Rethinking of
the Fall of the Labor Movement and the Rise of the Right” (paper presented at the Center for the Study of
Work, Labor, and Democracy, University of California, Santa Barbara, February 6, 2009); Heather Ann
Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Post-
war American History,” Journal of American History 97 (2010): 703 – 58; Robert T. Chase, “Slaves of the State
Revolt: Southern Prison Labor and the Prisoners’ Rights Movement in Texas,” in Life and Labor in the New
New South: Essays in Southern Labor History since 1950, ed. Robert Zieger (Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2010); Robert T. Chase, “Civil Rights on the Cellblock: Race, Reform, and Violence in Texas Pris-
ons and the Nation, 1945 – 1990” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2009).

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regimes — whether convict coal mines in the south or the Auburn system of con-
tracted factory production in the north — came from the organized working class,
and historians have been suitably attentive to this. I would call attention, however,
to an important ideological dimension of these campaigns — just as antebellum free
workers may have defined their sense of manhood, freedom, and vocation in contra-
distinction to slavery, so too did they against convict labor in the postbellum period.9
We might take Frederick Douglass’s famous admonition to the antislavery move-
ment — that hating slavery and the slave was a peculiar form of abolitionism — and
apply it to prison labor as well: hating convict labor and the convict seems all too prev-
alent in anti – convict labor campaigns. However, this insight has yet to be extended
much beyond the Progressive Era. The efforts to combat convict road gangs gained
traction during the Depression, when the state sought to dole out public work as relief
instead. I confess to not being entirely sure how this dynamic may play out in more
recent politics, but I think it could be explored.
Another area of study that has received less attention than one would expect
is the history of the labor of the keepers rather than the kept. Again, there are scat-
tered exceptions — Chase’s dissertation on Texas is attentive to this, as is journalist Ted
Conover’s marvelous book about working at Sing Sing, Newjack — but for the most
part when we think about prison labor we ignore the work done by correctional offi-
cers. The total number of justice employees grew 86 percent between 1982 and 2003;
given that this country’s enormous correctional apparatus now employs more people
than Ford, General Motors, and Walmart combined, this seems like an important
oversight. The unions that represent these workers — in California especially — are
important political players.10
Of course, labor historians and activists concerned with prisons need not focus
exclusively on the world behind bars. That would reproduce the ideological fallacy
that there are two worlds, prison and the free world, when in reality these realms are
closely intertwined in all sorts of ways, not least because most of those people who
spend time in prison eventually come out. Indeed, mass incarceration or hyperincar-
ceration over the past three decades has been intimately bound with the restructuring
of urban labor markets, both as a response to deindustrialization and as an impor-
tant force in its own right in disciplining the casual, informal, or illicit labor that has
replaced steady work in many urban neighborhoods.11 Again, we need to return to

9.  Shapiro, A New South Rebellion, remains an important exception.

10.  Chase, “Civil Rights on the Cell Block”; Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (New York:
Random House, 2000). Employment figures from Alan Elsner, “America’s Prison Habit,” Washington Post,
January 24, 2004, A19. For trends in correctional employment, see Kristen A. Hughes, “Justice Expenditure
and Employment in the United States, 2003,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin, April 2006 (Washington,
DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2006), bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/jeeus03.pdf (accessed Janu-
ary 1, 2010). On the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, see Peter Schrag, California: Amer-
ica’s High-­Stakes Experiment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 201 – 2.
11.  The most sustained arguments along these lines can be found in Wacquant, Punishing the Poor,
and Gilmore, Golden Gulag.

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those shocking statistics — if, in fact, a majority of young black men in particular

communities spend time locked up and acquire the disability of a criminal record,
how does this compare to those in some neighborhoods who hold a steady, formalized
job recognized and secured by the state? We can say with confidence, for instance,
that the people who have been jailed, incarcerated, or placed on probation and parole
in these communities far exceed those who belong to unions.
Labor historians should examine in both contemporary and historical terms
how a criminal record reduces the bargaining power of individual workers and if ex-­
convicts are able to reintegrate into the labor market at all and on what terms. In the
introduction to their collection After the War on Crime, the editors remark that mass
incarceration has “laid the foundation for an intractable unemployment problem of
persons quite literally barred from employment by formal laws and informal eco-
nomic norms” that indeed make a criminal record a severe liability for a job seeker.
Wacquant adds in his essay for that collection that today the “penal system contributes
directly to regulating the lower sectors of the labor market.” He notes that the half-
­million prisoners now released into the labor market annually constitute “a large vol-
ume of marginal laborers who can be superexploited at will,” ideally suited to tempo-
rary and contingent employment. In essence, this is akin to a guest-­worker program
in which vulnerable laborers travel across the border from incarceration to freedom,
always in danger of repatriation to the world behind bars. This disciplinary function
of the carceral state on the labor market works at the other end too, especially as the
functions of the federal prison system and Immigration and Customs Enforcement
become ever more integrated. As Jennifer Klein recently has pointed out in the LAW-
CHA newsletter, “hundreds of thousands of workers lack legal status and live under
constant threat of imprisonment or deportations.” 12
Finally, all of these questions — the labor (or lack of it) of prisoners themselves,
the work lives of the men and women who make the modern prison-­industrial com-
plex function on a daily basis, and the deep connection between the unprecedented
expansion of the carceral state and the growth sectors of the postindustrial and neo-
liberal economy — might be drawn together through an examination of the connec-
tion between prisons and the overall political economy. Here we should think in
broader terms of what Mike Davis has called “carceral Keynesianism” — that is, the
kind of impact massive state expenditure (nearly a sevenfold increase on corrections in
the past twenty-­five years, now $60 billion plus annually) has, especially on the work-
ing class13 (see fig. 2).

12.  Frampton, López, and Simon, After the War on Crime, 4; Wacquant, in Frampton, López, and
Simon, After the War on Crime, 25 – 26; Cindy Hahamovitch, “Creating Perfect Immigrants: Guestwork-
ers of the World in Historical Perspective,” Labor History 44 (2003): 69 – 94; Jennifer Klein, “Labor and the
Obama Era,” LAWCHA Newsletter, Spring 2009, 6.
13.  Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Vintage,
1999), 416; U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Justice Expenditure and Employment
Extracts, 2006,” bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1022 (accessed January 1, 2010).

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Figure 2. Tracey Kyckelhahn, “Justice Expenditure and Employment Extracts, 2007,” U.S. Department
of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2315
(accessed September 20, 2010).

Let me suggest several angles of approach to this question that labor historians
should find of interest. Economists and sociologists observe that the large numbers
of Americans in prison may artificially depress the official unemployment rate in the
United States,14 but the historical process by which incarceration has soaked up sur-
plus labor over the past three decades has not been fully examined. What exactly have
been the evolving connections among the deindustrialization of particular neighbor-
hoods, the spread of informal and illegal economic activity in those communities,
growing public investment in criminal justice, and the subsequent unequal impact of
imprisonment on populations marginalized in the neoliberal labor market?
The connection between the fiscal dominance of corrections in state budgets
is no zero-­sum game: in fact, while helping, vampire-­like, to suck the productive life
out of some areas, prison expansion has poured a steady stream of state contracts into
design, construction, correctional, food and health services, technology, surveillance,
and control, and not just through the growing privatization of prisons. Indeed, it is
fair to say that corrections have become one of the most successful public-­works pro-
grams operating today. Moreover, in the states with the largest penal populations,
investment in criminal justice has shifted economic resources geographically and polit-
ically to depressed rural areas — Texas, New York, and California are good exam-

14.  Western, Punishment and Inequality.

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ples. These areas now profit by housing prisons that serve as what Simon calls “social
waste management facilities” in a peculiar inverted form of apartheid. South Afri-
can apartheid long rested on using depressed rural areas as labor reservoirs to spur
urban industrial economic growth, drawing on superexploited African labor socially
reproduced in the reserves. Today, U.S. carceral apartheid depends on deproletarian-
ized labor, trapped in urban reserves — much of it black and Hispanic — as a resource
to enhance job growth and economic resurrection for poor rural whites, whether in
California’s inland empire or New York’s great north. Politically, it is perhaps not
quite a new “3/5 clause” in terms of its impact on representation in conservative rural
districts where prisons are located, but as Heather Thompson suggests, these pock-
ets of white rural development depend on the “production” of inner-­city inmates of
color for their economic survival. Residents of these rural communities lobby to have
prisons located within their region, and entire local political economies can grow up
around these gulag islands, including motels, restaurants, transportation, and other
services for families visiting inmates far from home. The prison-­industrial complex
casts a wide developmental net and has the capacity to mobilize many interested polit-
ical constituencies on its behalf. This complex of economic transformation, shifting
resources, public investment, and new political constituencies has a history to it, which
labor historians should begin to explore.
In short, labor historians are positioned to ask how what Simon calls “govern-
ing through crime” has been linked to the emergence of a particular kind of politi-
cal economy — one associated with the Sunbelt (California and Texas in particular),
lack of regulation, the privatization of social space, antitax politics, erosion of state
expenditures on public goods (education, services, etc.), yet (at least until very recently)
apparently limitless public expenditure on corrections driven by fear, anxiety, and
post – civil rights racial backlash. What does the new carceral state look like as a func-
tioning political-­economic system, and how did it evolve to its currently unsustainable
point? Again, California, with more than 150,000 state prisoners (i.e., about 50 percent
of the 1980 U.S. total ) stands as the shining and terrifying example.15
Let me conclude with an important caveat — my own concern has often
been with the role of privatization in driving the political economy of prison expan-
sion — certainly this was the case back in the day of convict leasing in the New South,
and as states shed social responsibility to the private sector, it is a growing issue today,
especially in the business of detention of undocumented immigrants.16 Nevertheless,
Loïc Wacquant is right when he cautions us not to get overly focused on an instru-
mentalist account of the “prison-­industrial complex,” which he actually sees as some-

15.  Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Schrag, California.

16.  See Elizabeth Alexander, ed., Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization and Human Rights
(Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2008); Michael A. Hallett and Randall Shelden, Private Prisons in America: A
Critical Race Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Mark Dow, American Gulag: Inside U.S.
Immigration Prisons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). See also the Web site by Renee Feltz
and Stokely Baksh, “The Business of Detention: Cracking Down on Immigration and Locking Up Profits,”
www.businessofdetention.com (accessed on January 1, 2010).

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thing of a red herring. It is not the purely economic aspect of prison labor, privati-
zation, or even prison employment that is really at stake here, at least not in terms
of raw productive capacity, exploitation of privatized prison labor, and the rest of it.
Rather, it is the social function of the expansion of the carceral mode. Thus, Wac-
quant argues, we need to be more attentive to “the novel functions that prison shoul-
ders” in “managing deregulated labor, ethnoracial hierarchy, and urban marginal-
ity.” In doing so, I encourage labor historians to break out of the “two worlds” way
of thinking about prisons and their history. Too much scholarship — like too much
thinking about prison in general — considers the isolated life worlds inside the prison,
namely intense studies of prison social organization, labor, discipline, sexuality, resis-
tance, punishment, terror, and economy. Alternatively, a whole series of studies con-
sider the carceral state from the outside: the impact of incarceration on communities,
the economy, race relations, the labor market, gender relations, the discharged, and
governmentality. Prison is nothing if not an integral component of the communities
from which it draws both the keepers and the kept, and imprisonment has become
a deeply rooted part of a vast terrain of American daily life, including areas of enor-
mous interest to labor historians. Only when we integrate the inner and outer histo-
ries of the prison will we fully be able to reckon with the costs of the post-­1960s “war
on crime.”

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by Harvard University user
on 10 May 2020