Labor and Punishment

The insightful chapters in this volume reveal the multiple and multifaceted intersections between mass incarceration and neoliberal precarity. Both mass incarceration and the criminal justice system are profoundly implicated in the production and reproduction of the low-wage “exploitable” precariat, both within and beyond prison walls. The carceral state is a regime of labor discipline—and a growing one—that extends far beyond its own inmate labor. This regime not only molds inmates into compliant workers willing and expected to accept any “bad” job upon release but also compels many Americans to work in such jobs under threat of incarceration, all the while bolstering their “exploitability” and socioeconomic marginality.
 
Contributors include Anne Bonds, Philip Goodman, Amanda Bell Hughett, Caroline M. Parker, Gretchen Purser, Jacqueline Stevens, and Noah D. Zatz.

Erin Hatton is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University at Buffalo in New York. She is the author of Coerced. 

Introduction
Erin Hatton

1. Working Behind Bars: Prison Labor in America 
Erin Hatton

2. From Extraction to Repression: Prison Labor, Prison Finance, and the Prisoners' Rights Movement in North Carolina 
Amanda Bell Hughett

3. The Political Economy of Work in ICE Custody: Theorizing Mass Incarceration and For-Profit Prisons
Jacqueline Stevens

4. The Carceral Labor Continuum: Beyond the Prison Labor/Free Labor Divide
Noah D. Zatz

5. Held in Abeyance: Labor Therapy and Surrogate Livelihoods in Puerto Rican Therapeutic Communities
Caroline M. Parker

6. "You Put Up with Anything": On the Vulnerability and Exploitability of Formerly Incarcerated Workers 
Gretchen Purser

7. Working Reentry: Gender, Carceral Precarity, and Post-incarceration Geographies in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Anne Bonds

Conclusion 
Philip Goodman

List of Contributors 
Index