Punishment and Social Structure

4. The Carceral Labor Continuum: Beyond the Prison Labor/Free Labor Divide

“…A long scholarly tradition dating back to Rusche & Kirchheimer (1939) has recognized the potential for carceral labor to be used to discipline free labor. Within this framework, the carceral state acts on labor markets at most indirectly, by creating alternate systems of production and by influencing the size of the market labor force through incarceration rates (Melossi 2003). Historically, the dominant political response from organized labor has been to insulate the market from prisoner-produced goods.…”

“…That separation lies at the foundation of "neoliberal penality" (Harcourt 2011), a specific iteration of the laissezfaire notion of a self-regulating economy operating on its inner market logic apart from state action (Polanyi 2001). Although scholars have long conceptualized incarceration as a regulator of total labor supply and as a means to manage or exploit unemployment (Rusche and Kirchheimer 1939;Wacquant 2009;Gilmore 2007;Western and Beckett 1999;cf. Parker in this volume), its capacity for forced labor has been assumed to operate outside the labor market and inside the prison (Melossi 2003). Carceral labor outside the prison suggests a need to revise accounts of how the criminal legal system operates as a labor market institution (Zatz 2020).…”

“…Incarcerated workers are at once sharply distinguished from "free labor" by their incarceration and yet intertwined with it through their work. For incarcerated workers to receive the pay, protections, and status accorded to free citizen-workers would violate the political demand of "less eligibility" (Melossi 2003); that principle requires that the state impose on those suffering criminal punishment conditions that visibly and viscerally convey degradation relative to those marked as "law abiding." Yet imposing that degradation also threatens free labor (McLennan 2008).…”