For years, NYC developers have profited off mass incarceration by utilizing “body shops,” unregulated labor brokers that undercut unions by exploiting formerly incarcerated workers. To fight back, Laborers’ Local 79 is forging a new model of anti-carceral unionism.
A new participatory research project aims to build a nuanced, localized analysis of carceral labor by surveying incarcerated people in all fifty states about their experiences, insights, and demands.
Popular historical narratives often trace the origins of penal labor to the post-Civil War South. Yet as insightful and politically useful as this familiar story may be, it overlooks the vast system of forced penal servitude that took shape in the antebellum North. Untangling the nineteenth-century roots of mass incarceration and forced labor can help clarify the shifting dynamics of expropriation, exploitation, and racialization across the long history of the U.S. carceral state.
In this essay, the author draws on his experiences as an incarcerated organizer to argue for the importance of a Black abolitionist politic that resists both “work” and the adoption of the “worker” identity. Instead, the category of the slave-in-revolt is better suited to the project of abolitionist organizing.
How can we understand mass incarceration as a system of labor governance? This post introduces our new symposium on “carceral labor” by offering an empirical and conceptual overview of the different ways in which the carceral state structures and compels work, both in and beyond the prison.
The American penal system is astonishingly vulnerable to the threat of defendant collective action. The reason is simple: the system is massively overleveraged. Major city court systems, which only have the capacity to bring to trial about 3 percent of the cases they handle, are dependent on plea bargaining to remain minimally functional. If even a tiny percentage of defendants banded together and refused to plead guilty, they would bring the administration of criminal justice to a grinding halt. What might such a plea strike look like? And should such a tactic be attempted?
Starting in the early 2000s, a bipartisan consensus emerged around the untenable price tag of mass imprisonment. Twenty years later, this left-right consensus has hardly made a dent in the US prison population. Instead, an austerity-driven approach to criminal justice reform has led to reductions in basic services inside prisons and jails, ultimately shifting the cost of such services onto the incarcerated and their families. Interviews with sixty formerly incarcerated New Yorkers, as well as some of their family members, brings to light the true cost of the commercialization of the criminal legal system.
With the spring submission season nearly in the books, and our Twitter feeds abuzz with placement announcements, the LPE Blog highlights some of the most exciting forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles. Covering tech, care, labor, criminal justice, religious freedom, money and banking, property, the administrative state, and so much more, this scouting report is not to be missed.
Forget Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. Over the next three days, you’ll want to turn that dial to Law and Political Economy: Labor, Social Control, and Counterpower. From the comfort of your own home, stream panels on the legal regulation of data and technology, socialist constitutionalism, decarcerating the welfare state, and so much more. Zoom links for the various panels can be found within this post, along with some paired blog posts from our (vast) archive.
As a result of jail and prison expansion in Eastern Kentucky, the region has become a center of gravity in the fight over the future of the carceral state. To understand this carceral boom, we need to appreciate how multiple crises have converged in Eastern Kentucky to produce a historical moment – a conjuncture – in which prisons and jails serve as putative solutions to a variety of social and economic problems.
The criminal legal system functions by separating acts of harm and violence into two opposed sides—“perpetrator” and “victim”—and lining up legal workers to vindicate one side’s rights to the exclusion of the other. This approach puts forth a scarcity model of justice, in which attending to harm is a zero-sum game. But if we wish to train our students to think holistically about justice, we must encourage them to appreciate the vast range of harms caused by the the criminal legal system.
Over the past forty years, the Supreme Court has increasingly recognized the rights of defendants in criminal proceedings to exert autonomy over their own representation, including dispensing with counsel. Analyzing these developments in Sixth Amendment jurisprudence, this post argues that encoding defendant choice into constitutional rules will likely deepen, rather than mitigate, the structural inequalities at the heart of the criminal legal system.
Many cases that have a profound effect on poor families, such as whether they will lose their home to eviction or whether a parent will go to jail, are argued in courtrooms where no one, not even the judge, knows the law.
A just transition for probation officers will never appeal to everyone. Nevertheless, it provides a potentially powerful framework for people who have experienced the dehumanizing mental and physical toll of working in the carceral state.
How can we fight for accountability when privatization is designed to allow the government and private contractors to evade just that? A recent lawsuit—and the campaign behind it—points to one underexplored answer.
