The Symbolic Currency of Labor at the Parole Board

• In Event: Reimagining Mass Incarceration

Abstract

Scholars have demonstrated how criminal justice contact shapes relationships to the labor market, and the role of work in legitimizing systems of punishment as a whole. However, we know less about how penal actors symbolically invoke work in decisions about who to punish. To fill this gap, we investigate decisions around who to release from prison in California. In 105 hearings for life-sentenced men, committing oneself to work is widely discussed among prisoners and parole commissioners as a moral virtue. However, we find that demonstrated commitment to work only weakly relates to whom commissioners grant parole. Upon closer inspection of decision reasoning, we find that commissioners emphasize adaption to conditions of neoliberal precarity – inconsistent work, lack of work, and poorly compensated work – over the cultivation of concrete, employable job skills and prior employment record. We consider the implications for the literature on labor and punishment.

Authors

• Joss Greene, University of California, Davis

• Isaac Dalke, University of California, Berkeley