Erin Hatton - Labor and Punishment: Work in and out of Prison

Labor and Punishment

WORK IN AND OUT OF PRISON

Edited by Erin Hatton

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

2021 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hatton, Erin Elizabeth, 1974 editor.

Title: Labor and punishment : work in and out of prison / edited by Erin Hatton.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020051368 (print) | LCCN 2020051369 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520305335 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520305342 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520973374 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH : PrisonersEmploymentUnited States. | Ex-convictsEmploymentUnited States. | Precarious employmentUnited States.

Classification: LCC HV 8925 . L 335 2021 (print) | LCC HV 8925 (ebook) | DDC 331.1086/927dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051368

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051369

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Introduction

Erin Hatton

Mass incarceration and economic inequality and insecurity are among Americas most pressing social problems. Each has been the subject of extensive research, and together they provide the scholarly scaffolding for this book.

Contemporary America has been dubbed The Age of Mass Incarceration. These numbers are shocking, and thus, despite being widely reported, they must be dwelled uponagain and againrather than glossed over as a mere backdrop.

Yet, as astonishing as such incarceration rates are, they do not tell the full story of mass incarceration in the United States. For incarceration rates have not been evenly distributed across the American population. Black men have been the primary target of Americas incarceration This is worth repeating: more thantwo-thirds of young Black men who have not finished high school are likely to be incarcerated over the course of their lives. Thus, if incarceration rates (and criminal justice entanglement more broadly) have soared in the United States since the 1970s, Black male incarceration has rocketed to space.

Despite their dramatic and disturbing overrepresentation in the criminal justice system, however, Black men represent less than a third of Americas sprawling prison population.

At the same time, Americans have faced escalating economic inequality and insecurity. Since the 1970s, various human-driven socioeconomic forcesincluding global competition, changing corporate ownership, and neoliberalization as enacted through de- and reregulation, changing tax policy, stagnating wages, de-unionization, and retrenchment of labor and welfare protectionshave produced a sharply divided economy. In short, the very rich have become much richer, while the poor and working classes have become much poorer, losing their modest savings and going into debt.

Much like mass incarceration, moreover, economic insecurity is not evenly distributed. While the median white familys wealth has increased by one-third since 1983, that of Black families has decreased by half. Thus, although not all women and ethno-racial minorities have suffered in this era of economic inequality and insecurityand, to be sure, not all men and whites have benefittedgrowing class divides have exacerbated already stark race, ethnic, and gender divides, as both a product of past inequalities and a producer of future ones.

Employment precarity has helped propel this era of economic insecurity for many Americans. Since the 1970s, all jobsbut particularly those of the poor, working, and middle classes, including disproportionate numbers of ethno-racial minoritieshave become worse on nearly every measure of job quality. In short, work has become more precariousmore uncertain, more unstable, and more insecurefor a growing number of people.

The socioeconomic consequences of such precarity exacerbate the race and gender inequalities already in place, though it is also true that this era is characterized by an unusual democratization of precarity: white mensimilar to and sometimes even more than other groupshave faced significant levels job instability and insecurity.

Though economic insecurity and mass incarceration have not typically been studied side by side, a growing number of scholars have examined their concurrent rise. In fact, scholars such as Katherine Beckett, Bruce Western, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, and Loc Wacquant have argued that these social forces have become deeply intertwined: that expanding the carceral state and contracting the welfare state constituted Americas two-pronged approach to governing social marginality in the late twentieth century.

As scholars have shown, it is an approach that stemmed from the 1960s. At that time, the problem of povertyparticularly Black urban povertygained new visibility in the United States.

Meanwhile, the race riots of the late 1960s, in combination with the Black Power movement, increased the visibilityand fearof (male) Blackness in the white American imagination.

Thus, previous scholarship has highlighted a driving force behind the concomitant expansion of the criminal justice system and contraction of the welfare system in late twentieth-century America: the subjugation of already marginalized groups. The consequence of this double-edged dynamic, scholars have shown, is a self-reinforcing system in which such groups are kept disproportionately incarcerated and poor. Criminal convictions often leave a long-lasting mark that impairs former prisoners employment prospects, particularly among African Americans. All of these dynamics impede the economic security and stability of former prisoners and their families: perpetuating poverty and increasing the risks of re-incarceration, while transferring such risks across generations.

Labor and Punishment: Work in and out of Prison builds on this already rich literature by exploring the intersections between work and prison. In doing so, it identifies two new crucially important mechanisms that drive the looping effects between mass incarceration and economic insecurity. The first is that incarceration not only acts as an external stigmatizing mark that former prisoners bear, much like Hester Prynnes scarlet A, but it also produces internal change in prisoners expectations and experiences of work. Through compulsory and coercive labor in prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers, as well as in the pervasive job preparation and counseling programs to which prisoners, parolees, and probationers are subjected, carceral subjects come to expectand sometimes embracelow-wage precarious work outside of prison.

Carcerally mandated precarity is the second key mechanism identified in this book, a mechanism that sustains the iterative relationship between incarceration and economic insecurity. For, regardless of whether carceral subjects internally embrace precarious work, their docility and compliance are actively enforced by the criminal justice system. This is because, in fact, many Americans entangled in the criminal justice system are compelled to work under the threat of incarceration. People on probation and parole, as well as those with court-ordered debt and in court-mandated addiction treatment programs, are often required to maintain employment as a condition of their freedom from incarceration. This requirement effectively compels them to accept and keep any jobno matter how degradedthereby intensifying their exploitability and socioeconomic marginality. In short, the criminal justice system mandates labor compliance among the carcerally entwined precariat, fueling the insidious feedback loop between mass incarceration and economic insecurity.