Free Labor and Forced Labor: Labor Unions and the Historical Struggle over Prison Industries

Abstract

This dissertation examines the history of prison labor in the United States as a series of classification struggles over the meaning and boundaries of the working-class. Existing theories of penal change focus on political-economic conditions or ideological shifts. By contrast, I demonstrate the important role of labor organizations in shaping the development of the penal state, especially the abolition of contract prison labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a historical case study of New York and discourse analyses of labor rhetoric, I show how prison labor policy was a key arena for contesting who could legitimately be considered a worker and what obligation the state owed to both free and forced laborers. At first, labor organizations responded to prison labor by drawing sharp distinctions between the respectable working class and the degraded “criminal class.” Over time, labor advocates softened this boundary through a process of conditional inclusion where they reframed people who are incarcerated as disgraced, but redeemable, members of the working-class. This discursive shift created symbolic space for labor unions to reach a policy compromise with the state that abolished contract prison labor while legitimizing state-run forms of prison labor as “rehabilitative” systems. By studying prison labor policy making as a classification struggle, this dissertation demonstrates how conflicts over the meaning of labor can reshape penal policy and the cultural boundaries of the working class. These dynamics are equally important in contemporary debates over the status of prison workers, and a historical understanding provides us with critical tools for evaluating, understanding, and transforming the polices that govern prison work today.