'Reform or Disaster': The 1970s Prison Labor Movement’s Ill-Fated Struggle Against Economic Domination

• In Event: Voluntary Associations and Civil Society: Legacies of Systemic Inequality

Abstract

After securing a series of incremental advances throughout the 1970s, American prisoners’ unions faced intense backlash in institutional, political, and cultural arenas as the decade neared its end. This chapter traces how three such organizations—the Prisoners Union and the United Prisoners Union in California and the North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union in North Carolina—navigated and responded to mounting pressure from the prison labor movement’s many opponents. These adversaries, including corrections administrators, “law-and-order” political actors, and unionized correctional staffers, mounted vicious attacks on prisoner-led labor associations at this time. These powerful figures sought to weaken collective action behind bars by collapsing the movement’s “multiscale struggle,” or its campaign to improve the social, economic, political, and legal situation of disenfranchised subaltern actors through activist efforts at micro, meso, and macro levels (countering, in other words, the realities that Georg Rusche observed in the principle of “less eligibility”). In tracing the ostensible end of these three prisoners’ unions, this chapter reveals how concerted counter-organizing effectively dismantled the prison labor movement at the dawn of mass incarceration, undermining collective labor resistance to extractive punitive platforms from the inside.

Author

• Michael Gibson-Light, University of Denver