Learning from Losses: Black Freedom Movements for Guaranteed Jobs and the Rise of Mass Incarceration

• In Event: Critical Prison Studies Caucus: Making Freedom: Materializing Abolition Through Non-Reformist Reforms

Abstract

Many critical thinkers, including Friedrich Engels, George Rusche, Tony Platt, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, have highlighted how criminalization and state violence have been deployed in key moments to control a relative surplus labor force. Likewise, many scholars argue that the rise of mass incarceration and the uptick in governmental capacity for policing and surveillance developed in response to Black freedom movements after the 1960s. Taking this framework as a starting point, this paper considers the lessons from Black freedom movements for governmental guarantees to jobs. I describe the evolution of two key efforts to win legislation for guaranteed jobs: the campaign designed by Bayard Rustin and Leon Keyserling for a “Freedom Budget for All Americans,” in the mid-1960s, and the subsequent efforts led by Coretta Scott King of the Full Employment Action Council in the 1970s. In so doing, I argue that the history of the carceral state shaped by both the “failure” of these campaigns, as well as by legislation that expanded the governments’ carceral capacity. This paper concludes by examining two important and seemingly disparate 1986 laws: the Anti-Drug Abuse Act and the Tax Reform Act; I argue that these laws charted a course for the political development of the subsequent decades that saw budget cuts to social welfare spending alongside increased spending for policing and imprisonment. Many scholars have foregrounded the Anti-Drug Abuse Act and its imposition of the crack versus cocaine sentencing disparity as a catalytic moment for the ascendance of mass incarceration. Likewise, the Tax Reform Act solidified a tax-cutting agenda that had stymied movements for guaranteed jobs since the Tax Reduction Act of 1964. The 1986 tax cut therefore undermined struggles on behalf of unemployed people for guaranteed jobs and also helped produce a crisis of surplus finance capital. By viewing these laws together, one can see that the crises of surplus labor and surplus finance capital that imprisonment has “resolved” were established by history and public policy, not market forces. By exploring this history of contestation, I argue that struggling over how the governmental responds to its relative surplus labor force is necessary for any efforts at abolition of imprisonment. In this way, the revitalization of contemporary movements for guaranteed jobs remains an urgent issue for those seeking to achieve abolitionist reforms.

Author

• David P. Stein, City University of New York, Graduate Center (NY)