The insightful chapters in this volume reveal the multiple and multifaceted intersections between mass incarceration and neoliberal precarity. Both mass incarceration and the criminal justice system are profoundly implicated in the production and reproduction of the low-wage “exploitable” precariat, both within and beyond prison walls. The carceral state is a regime of labor discipline—and a growing one—that extends far beyond its own inmate labor. This regime not only molds inmates into compliant workers willing and expected to accept any “bad” job upon release but also compels many Americans to work in such jobs under threat of incarceration, all the while bolstering their “exploitability” and socioeconomic marginality.
Contributors include Anne Bonds, Philip Goodman, Amanda Bell Hughett, Caroline M. Parker, Gretchen Purser, Jacqueline Stevens, and Noah D. Zatz.
Labor and Punishment Work in and out of Prison
About the Book
Reviews
"Labor and Punishment is an imminently useful resource for students and researchers."—Criminal Law & Criminal Justice Books
"Hatton…edits and contributes to this valuable collection exploring the particular condition of labor during and after imprisonment. . . .These timely, often polemical studies lead to a dour pronouncement: no institution or system cited is anywhere close to doing it right."—CHOICE
"Labor and Punishment offers to the reader a platform to question whether work must always be synonymous with punishment, and what we, as a society, can do to ensure that it is instead an experience defined by meaning and dignity."—Exertions"Well written and full of informative nuggets."—Jeff Manza, Department of Sociology, New York University
“This is a novel approach to understanding the carceral state and fills an important gap in this literature. The work that Erin Hatton is doing in this area stands to make an enormous contribution. We already know the carceral state is growing, and we know about the ways in which it is subsidized by private industry. The real value of Labor and Punishment is that it will highlight not just these connections but how they have implications for the way work is done in the modern era.”—Adia Harvey Wingfield, Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis
Table of Contents
Introduction
Erin Hatton
1. Working Behind Bars: Prison Labor in America
Erin Hatton
2. From Extraction to Repression: Prison Labor, Prison Finance, and the Prisoners' Rights Movement in North Carolina
Amanda Bell Hughett
3. The Political Economy of Work in ICE Custody: Theorizing Mass Incarceration and For-Profit Prisons
Jacqueline Stevens
4. The Carceral Labor Continuum: Beyond the Prison Labor/Free Labor Divide
Noah D. Zatz
5. Held in Abeyance: Labor Therapy and Surrogate Livelihoods in Puerto Rican Therapeutic Communities
Caroline M. Parker
6. "You Put Up with Anything": On the Vulnerability and Exploitability of Formerly Incarcerated Workers
Gretchen Purser
7. Working Reentry: Gender, Carceral Precarity, and Post-incarceration Geographies in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Anne Bonds
Conclusion
Philip Goodman
List of Contributors
Index
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