The Prison Labor Problem: Labor Organizations and the Abolishment of Contract Prison Labor in New York

• In Event: Open Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 7: Crime, Criminalization, and the Carceral State

Abstract

Private contracting for prison labor has expanded across the United States over the past several decades and has raised questions about the development of the carceral state. However, it is a reemergent practice and not a modern conception. Private contractors were foundational to the penitentiary before being dismantled by the turn of the twentieth century. So why was contractual prison labor abolished? Some scholars suggest that the transition to modern industrial society reduced the economic usefulness of prison labor, prompting an effort to salvage the disciplinary and financial underpinnings of the prison by transition to state-run systems. Other scholarship emphasizes working-class influence, showing how labor organizations petitioned legislatures to end competition between prison and free labor. However, no study has directly examined the legislative debates that led to changes to prison labor policy and how the demands of working-class organizations influenced these policy debates. I remedy this gap by examining decades of documents, reports, and testimonies from the New York State Legislature (1820-1900) that dealt with prison labor reform. Building on Campbell and Schoenfeld (2013) and Haydu (2010), I examine these documents as a sequence of problem-solving efforts to address prison labor competition with free workers. I find that abolition only occurred when labor advocates and the state reached an ideological alignment around the idea of rehabilitative labor. Early debates centered financial concerns of the state, while labor demanded the full abolition of prison work. By the late nineteenth century, state and labor actors both adopted a rehabilitative discourse that justified state-run prison industries as a comprise position- preserving prison labor while also removing prison labor competition. Overall, this study shows how the working-class played a key role in the development of the penal state and the interaction between labor and penal institutions in U.S. history.

Author

• Tyler John Smith, University of Washington