Work as Political Control: Labor & Political Activity by Incarcerated People

• In Event: Political Movements, Politics on the Move: Justice, Resistance, and Activism

Abstract

It is well established that the US prison system is itself a repressive arm of the state, responsible for the disappearing, warehousing, and violent exploitation of race-gender-class subordinated individuals and those who resist such subordination (e.g., Davis 2003; Burch 2014; Soss & Weaver 2017; Gilmore 2007). This study, however, looks within the state prison context, making legible how the state facilitates political control over incarcerated people through institutional features, primarily those related to the various forms of forced labor to which incarcerated people are subjected. In particular, this project explores the mechanisms through and the conditions under which work in prison facilitates political control—preventing, punishing, and channeling political activities perceived as threatening to the state into those that can be tolerated or suppressed. The range of political activity explored by this study, informed by incarcerated people’s written accounts in archived prison newspapers, encompasses the many ways in which incarcerated people negotiate the distribution of power in prison. Thus, political activity includes informal networks of care between incarcerated people, such as assisting others with legal work and organizing transportation for each other’s children for visits (Law 2009); it also includes more consolidated political activities, such as the distribution and study of reading materials or the creation of organizations within the prison. Finally, political activity includes large scale and highly visible forms of resistance in the form of (hunger) strikes, uprisings, and demonstrations. The study’s theoretical contribution is its attempt to make legible how the state administers its preferences over incarcerated people’s political activities through institutional features embedded within the prison labor regime. Theoretically, I argue that the features used by the state fall broadly into three categories of mechanisms—carrots (rewarding compliant behavior; e.g., good time credit associated with productive work hours), sticks (punishing dissident behavior; loss of job and accompanied privileges in retribution for participating in “disturbance”), and boxes (constraining possible behavior; e.g., organizing incarcerated people into easily surveilled jobs). Individual and prison-level characteristics condition the use of certain mechanisms, such as the capacity of the prison, the racial/ethnic and gender composition of those incarcerated, and the amount of outside-community oversight over the prison. The empirical exploration of this theorized relationship between work and political control in the prison, particularly the mechanisms through and conditions under which such occurs, is multi-method and across a variety of sources. I examine three state-produced data sources: 1) Survey data of incarcerated people collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (waves 1974, 1979, 1986, 1991, 1997, 2004, 2016), which I use to establish patterns in how the state distributes incarcerated people throughout the prison labor regime; 2) Archival administrative documents from three state prison systems (CA, TX, MN), which I use to track the institutional development of prison labor, particularly in response to political activity by incarcerated people; and 3) Interviews with current administrators of prison industry work programs, which I use to directly probe the existence of hypothesized mechanisms in contemporary prisons. Crucially, I also conduct semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated people, prompting discussion about their experiences with work in prison and how such related to their potential to engage in political activity. Finally, I conduct qualitative analysis of incarcerated people’s discussion of work in prison across a variety of archived prison newspapers (e.g., newspapers from women’s prisons, “prison farms”; independently printed newspapers and newspapers printed through the administration). The combination of these sources attempts to make legible the state’s regiment of work-related political control mechanisms, grounded in incarcerated people’s experiences with such state violence. This study is part of a larger dissertation project that generally explores the relationship between work and political control: It asserts that, to understand the mechanisms of political control administered through the precarious jobs people experiencing race-gender-class subjugation work, we must first understand such dynamics in the prison, as work in both conditions are expressions of gendered-racial capitalism. It is through this lens of gendered-racial capitalism that the dissertation explores the interconnectedness between the carceral state and the US labor regime.

Author

• Alison Boehmer, University of California, San Diego