1. Working Behind Bars: Prison Labor in America

2021 ◽  
pp. 17-50
Author(s):  
Erin Hatton
Keyword(s):  
Prison Labor

Invalids

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Golfo Alexopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Labor Force ◽  
Prison Labor ◽  
Basic Work

This chapter presents the ways in which the Gulag administration dealt with its “inferior workforce.” Severely ill and disabled prisoners were considered as physically inferior (fizicheski nepolnotsennye), the defective labor force (nepolnotsennye rabsily), and the not-work-capable elements (netrudosposobnye elementy). They were unable to do the camp's basic work, which involved heavy physical labor in such sectors as construction, mining, and forestry. The so-called inferior workforce included both prisoners classified as invalids and those assigned to light labor. This segment of the Gulag labor force represented an enormous population of prisoners, and it grew significantly over the Stalin years. Given that a significant portion of the prison labor force was severely ill and disabled, the Gulag leadership sought ways to manage, conceal, and discard this enormous emaciated population.

Private Prisons

2019 ◽  
pp. 279-302
Author(s):  
Volker Janssen
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Global South ◽  
Service Industries ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Public Infrastructure ◽  
Private Prisons ◽  
Prison Labor ◽  
Corporate Globalization ◽  
Government Planning ◽  
Services Outsourcing

The chapter considers privatization, private prisons, and prison services outsourcing within a Sun Belt to Global South framework. Eschewing the inclination to frame the Sunbelt as a region that merely modernized the South, the chapter reveals instead a series of contradictions—chief among them neoliberal rhetoric and anti-statist politics alongside the seemingly contrasting policies that were dependent on New Deal–era public infrastructure and government planning. By analyzing such service industries as health care, telecommunications, food catering, and construction within a public–private partnership, this chapter reveals how privatization masks neoliberal anti-statism even when growing the state through mass incarceration. The model for this fusion of public services and private industries was the Cold War’s defense industries, where contractors played a pivotal role in decision making within a symbiotic partnership. The chapter concludes that the modern-day prison industrial complex is more a product of the New Deal state than of a neoliberal conservative ascendency. When the Sunbelt’s private–public partnership partnered with corporate globalization, contemporary prison labor occurs within a “Global South” marketplace more than a framework of “neo-slavery.”

Testimonios of Resistance

2020 ◽  
pp. 273-308
Author(s):  
Robert T. Chase
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Prison Labor ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
Public Campaign ◽  
Self Mutilation ◽  
Labor Strike ◽  
Black Panther

Chapter 8 analyzes how legal testimonies and documentation became “testimonios of resistance” that crafted an effective narrative that southern prisons and prison labor constituted slavery. The chapter begins with the story of David Ruíz and follows with several other Chicano testimonios. By telling Ruiz’s story, this chapter considers the terror of racial violence, the necessity of self-defense, and the agony of self-mutilation. The chapter then broadens the movement to include the Black Panther Jonathan Eduardo Swift and a cadre of political organizers who spread the word of prisoner empowerment. Once the testimonies had developed into a mass movement, the prisoners planned the first ever system-wide prison labor strike just as the Ruiz case was going to trial. As black and Chicano radical organizers, they waged a public campaign to make the conditions of the southern prison plantation visible by insisting that the Texas control penology and agribusiness model was built on a lie—that incarceration amounted to twentieth-century slavery.

Prison Labor and Prison Industries

1983 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 85-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Prison Labor ◽  
Prison Industries

A Fine Southern Plantation

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-101
Author(s):  
Robert T. Chase
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
Prison Labor ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
Unpaid Labor ◽  
Labor Division ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Sexual Power ◽  
New System

The second chapter offers an analysis of how the reforms refashioned prison labor as the new tool of disciplinary control and racial hierarchy within a Jim Crow framework. When this new system was fully operational in the 1960s, Texas garnered plaudits as a pioneering, modern, efficient, and business-oriented enterprise as a modernization narrative. What fuelled the modernization narrative, however, was coerced field labor and a regime of labor division that prioritized prisoners through gender, racial, and sexual power. By moving beyond control penology’s external modernization narrative and dissecting how prison labor disciplined, ordered, and controlled every aspect of southern incarceration, this chapter shows how incarceration on the Texas prison plantation rendered Black, Brown, and even white bodies as slave labor where the state relegated prisoners to coerced and entirely unpaid labor, daily acts of bodily degradation, and the perpetual denial of civil and human rights. As an analysis of prison labor as carceral power, chapter two also analyzes how prisoners carved out hidden transcripts of resistance and survival that constructed a dissident culture and infrapolitics to trouble the southern modernization narrative.

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