Captive Labor – LPE Project

From Work in Prison to Carcerality at Work

Brett Davidson — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 11:00:00 +0000

How might organized labor be engaged in ending mass incarceration? One approach is to emphasize how carceral labor is exploited as a substitute for rights-bearing “free labor." But the mere threat of substitution does not ensure solidarity. A more promising avenue is to consider how carcerality itself extends into so-called "free" labor markets. Under this "carceral labor continuum," anti-carceral unionism emerges not from broad concerns over economic substitution but instead from the practical demands of workplace organizing.

Strategic Lessons from Abolitionist Labor Struggle In Immigration Detention

Brett Davidson — Tue, 30 May 2023 11:00:00 +0000

This post continues our symposium on carceral labor with Inquest. ** ** ** Since last summer, immigrants detained in California’s Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center and Golden State Annex detention centers have been on strike. Forced to labor by their jailers, they are protesting the meager pay they receive—a dollar a day—and the terrible conditions under which they work and live.

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Alabama Rising: The Past, Present, and Future of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement

Brett Davidson — Thu, 25 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

This post continues our symposium on carceral labor with Inquest. ** ** ** As members of New York University’s Prison Education Program Research Lab, we collaborate on faculty–student research, using peer-based ethnographic methods to assess the human and economic costs of incarceration. To date, our work has focused on the effects of austerity on prison conditions and on the interactions between...

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Building Anti-Carceral Unionism: A Q&A on Local 79’s “Real Re-Entry” Campaign

Brett Davidson — Tue, 23 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

This post continues our symposium on carceral labor with Inquest. ** ** ** Starting in the spring of 2021, the National Employment Law Project teamed up with New York’s Construction & General Building Laborers’ Local 79 in their campaign to challenge self-identified “body shops.” In the following interview, I discuss the campaign with Bernard Callegari, a formerly incarcerated Local 79 rank-and...

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‘Better’ Work Won’t Fix Prisons

Brett Davidson — Thu, 18 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

This post continues our symposium on carceral labor with Inquest. ** ** ** In recent years, activists and politicians across the country have fought to eliminate the “exception clause” in the Thirteenth Amendment, which permits slavery or involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Proponents of this effort lobby state legislatures to...

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Untangling the Nineteenth-Century Roots of Mass Incarceration

Brett Davidson — Tue, 16 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

This post continues our symposium on carceral labor with Inquest. ** ** ** Conscious of the grossly disproportionate rate at which Black people are incarcerated today, many scholars, documentarians, and civil rights activists draw a direct line of descent between the convict lease, chain gang, and criminal surety systems of the post-Civil War South and our own mass carceral state.

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Not Worker, But Chattel

Brett Davidson — Thu, 11 May 2023 08:00:00 +0000

This post continues our symposium with Inquest on Captive Labor. ** ** ** Often, when I tell fellow prisoners of my reluctance to work in one of the many prison factories or so-called “job assignments,” they look upon me as if I have said something foolish. “Why?” they ask — as if having our labor exploited for pennies on the dollar, or for no wage at all, should be self-evidently acceptable.

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Labor and the Carceral State

Brett Davidson — Tue, 09 May 2023 08:00:00 +0000

How does the carceral state function as a system of labor governance? And what is the role of organized labor in ending mass incarceration? To explore these and other questions, we teamed up with our friends at Inquest and invited a leading group of scholars, incarcerated authors, and organizers to participate in Captive Labor, a joint symposium on the theme of labor and the carceral state. Today’...

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