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Home , Debt bondage in India, Deregulation, Exploitation of labour, Kevin Bales

AND THE GOVERNANCE OF UNFREE LABOR: A FEMINIST ACCOUNT

GENEVIEVE LEBARON

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

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1+1 Canada Abstract

This thesis is a study of the resurgence of institutionalized unfree labor in the contemporary

United States (US). Its central argument is that the neoliberal resurgence of unfree labor has not been an anomalous or individuated phenomenon, but rather, its systemic growth across the neoliberal period has been rooted in fundamental shifts in power, production and social that have heightened insecurity, inequality, and immobility across the entire spectrum of labor exploitation. On the one hand, this has meant that unfree labor is an increasingly prominent feature of global . On the other, it has meant an intensification of forms of market discipline and state coercion that have increased free workers' insecurity in relation to the labor market, as well as unfreedom within labor contracts and processes. Far from having remained neutral as is generally assumed in the liberal paradigm, states have facilitated this tilt as they have, since the late 1970s, restructured labor market, immigration, and social provisioning policies in ways that have privileged the security of over the security of the majority of the population.

Departing from the formal abstractionism generally employed in the study of unfree labor, this thesis employs a feminist historical materialist approach that conceives of the material foundation of social life as the productive and reproductive activities of everyday life, and emphasizes the ways that the conditions and organization of these activities are transformed by social struggles at the levels of the state and daily life.

Investigating the various relations of unfreedom that have shaped labor processes

iv throughout US history, this thesis contends that in the neoliberal period, the resurgence of unfree labor can be understood as a central moment of power wherein increased social discipline exercised through market-based structures has resulted in a shifting of the labor spectrum towards greater unfreedom for the laboring classes. Rather than having occurred separately from the social transformations of neoliberalism, through which capital and the state have sought to recompose the laboring class into a cheaper, more flexible, and more vulnerable labor force, drastically transforming the productive and reproductive activities of daily life, the resurgence of institutionalized unfree labor has been one component of this wider process.

Drawing on a historical analysis of prison labor—the most consistent and widespread example of institutionalized unfree labor in US history—this thesis documents that far from being exclusive to the nineteenth century, this is a strategy that has corresponded to moments of significant ferment and decline in the conditions and organization of labor. The study begins with the initial use of prison labor in the post-civil war period as a strategy to re-appropriate the labor power of freed slaves in the South, and impose factory discipline on immigrants in the North. It then documents the near elimination of productive prison labor in the Post-World War II period, and its resurgence and for--use by in the neoliberal period. Incorporating the wider dimensions of social life, the study demonstrates that in each historical era, the institutionalization of prison labor has not been exclusively an accumulation strategy, but has also been related to strategies to promote social discipline and order in ways that have

v cultivated racialized and gendered division within the laboring classes. Just as the convict lease system violently entrenched a social order based on white supremacy into the post- emancipation economy, while the industrial prison contract system disciplined human bodies into the forms of factory labor that were fundamental for the new industrial capitalist system, prison labor programs in neoliberalism have been part of a larger state strategy to coercively impose the forms of labor discipline that are fundamental to the flexible, lean, labor regimes of neoliberal order. In this way the thesis links macro shifts in the global economy to the micro level of the human body, documenting that increasingly corporeal forms of discipline and unfreedom have resulted from the expanded power of capital on a global scale.

vi Acknowledgements

Writing a PhD dissertation is a long and often solitary task. Mine was made much easier by the strong support I received from colleagues and friends at York University. My sincere thanks are extended to my supervisor, David McNally, who has been a dedicated mentor and friend since I began my M.A. at York University in 2005. David has influenced me and contributed to my personal development in ways that go far above what any student could expect from a supervisor, and his encouragement, lucidity, and earnest, unfailling support lie at the heart of this project's timely completion. I also owe a large debt of gratitude to my second committee member Isabella Bakker, who has been an invaluable mentor and trusted friend throughout my doctoral studies and who has had an enormous impact on my intellectual development. In addition to guiding my professional development, and going above and beyond to support me at every turn of my graduate career, Isa's kindness, generosity, and unfailing encouragement leave me grateful beyond words.

In addition to David and Isa, I am very grateful to my third committee member,

Laam Hae, whose incisive comments on my dissertation proposal shaped and guided my project in important ways. I'd also like to thank my professors in the Department of

Political Science: Greg Albo, Anna Agathangelou, Leo Panitch, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Leah

Vosko, John Saul, and Stephen Gill. The theoretical tools that these talented teachers fostered in me, and the intellectual curiosity that each instilled, have been central to the project and to my intellectual development. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the political science departmental program staff, and to Marlene Quesenberry in particular, who has

vii been instrumental in helping me navigate this complex process. In addition to providing me with excellent mentors, York University also provided me with four years of generous support—three in the form of a Graduate Fellowship for Academic Distinction and one in the form of a President Susan Mann Dissertation Award. These awards, as well as the additional research funding provided to me by the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council of Canada, were indispensable to the timely completion of this project and I remain truly grateful for SSHRC and the University's generous support of my work.

In addition to my colleagues at York, I must also thank my family for their steadfast support and their tolerance of my very busy schedule. It is difficult to adequately express the debt that I owe to my mother, Michelle LeBaron, who has always been the most enthusiastic and generous supporter of my academic endeavors. For more reasons than I can list here, without her, the completion of this project would have been impossible. In gratitude for all that she has given me, this work is dedicated to her. Special thanks must also be given to my dear sister, Emily, and my amazing brothers, Justin and Daniel, whose energy and kindness have made my graduate school experience infinitely more fun and much less lonesome than it would have been without them. I must also thank Karen

Bhangoo who paved my way by completing her own PhD in record timing under difficult circumstances, proving that such a feat is truly possible.

Several important friendships have sustained me personally and intellectually throughout my studies. I would especially like to thank Adrienne Roberts for her friendship, support, and benevolence in letting me follow in her footsteps-1 look forward to

viii our future collaborations. I would also like to thank Alan Nasser who has been my mentor and dear friend since the time I was an undergraduate at the Evergreen State College, and who instilled in me the belief that one cannot be a political economist without a strong grounding in philosophy and history. His thoughtfulness, humor, and magic have propelled me through this process and remain central to my personal and academic pursuits. I also owe intellectual and personal debts to several of my close friends who, from near and far, have been pillars of compassion, devotion, and inspiration: Erin Rutherford,

Shawn Arquinego, Julia Doherty, Travis Culp, Mona Ayyad, Leila Monib, Tehmina

Siganporia, Marianne and Christoph Spreng, Lori Crowe, Christopher Hendershot, Maita

Sayo, and Natalie Knight.

My greatest debt of gratitude is owed to Sebastien Rioux. He has not only been foundational to every dimension of this project, but has supported me with love and heroic patience throughout my graduate career. In addition to tirelessly editing each element of this piece of writing, Sebastien has impacted my intellectual and personal development in ways that cannot be adequately captured in words. Paying off the debt that I owe to him will be one of my lifelong tasks.

IX Table of Contents

Abstract iv Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Scholarly Intervention 7 A Rationale for Studying Prison Labor 12 Elaboration of Research Problematique 21 Chapter Outline 31 Part I: Theorizing Capitalism, Labor, and Unfreedom 37 Chapter 1: The New ? Theorizing Unfree Labor and the 38 The "New" Slavery 39 Rethinking Unfree Labor 48 Slavery in an Otherwise Free Market? 49 Slavery? 60 Can the Free Market Eradicate Unfree Labor? 71 Conclusion 79 Chapter 2: Labor, Unfreedom, and the Feminist Historical Materialist Method 83 The Heuristic Advantages of Feminist Historical 86 Modalities of Labor and the Capitalist 98 Marx, Labor and 110 Conclusion 121 Part II: Prison Labor in Historical Perspective 125 Chapter 3: Unfree Labor After Emancipation: Race, , and Prison Labor in the Reconstruction of the US South 130 An "Ever Turning Wheel of Servitude" 134 From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison 143 "One Dies, Get Another": Convict Leasing, Brutality, and the Racial Bifurcation of Punishment 146 Corporations, Convict Leasing and the State 156 Racialized Criminality, the Labor Contract, and the Fluidity of Actually Existing Unfreedom 176 Conclusion 186

x Chapter 4: The Prison and the Factory: Industrial Contracting and Class Discipline in the North 190 "From the Whip to the Workshop": The Rise of Forced Labor as a Mode of Legal Punishment 194 Punishing the Poor: Instantiating The Market in Early Capitalist Europe 195 The Introduction of Labor as a Legal Mode of Punishment in the , 1786-1830 205 The Expansive Industrial Prison Contract System of the 19th Century, 1840-1890 208 "The Whip Made Men Living Machines": Labor and Discipline in the Prison Factories 211 "To Turn Unruly Laboring Men Into Silent and Insulated Working Machines": Corporations, Convict Labor, and the State 223 The Fluidity ofUnfreedom in the Age of Capital: The Rise of a Permanent Wage Earning Class 236 Conclusion 248 Part III: The Neoliberal Growth and Governance of Prison Labor 253 Chapter 5: Carceral Capitalism: Prison Labor and Unfreedom in the Neoliberal United States 258 Punishing the Poor: Carceral Expansion Under Neoliberalism 261 Factories Behind Bars: Reinvigorating the Prison Industries 276 "Producing Productive People ": The Rise ofPost-Fordist Prison Production 281 "Slaves of the State": Prison Labor in the Realm of Circulation 296 Carceral Power, Labor Discipline, and The Continuities of Actually Existing Unfreedom 308 Conclusion 315 Conclusion 320 Bibliography 331

XI Introduction

Unfree labor is an increasingly widespread feature of global capitalism. The United States

(US) State Department estimates there are over twenty-seven million people subjected to

unfree labor worldwide, with at least one million of those working within its own borders as

unfree agricultural, domestic, sex, and factory workers (US Gov. 2009). A recent article in

Foreign Policy notes that "slavery currently exists on an unprecedented scale" (Skinner

2008b: 62) while former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright referred to the sale of

people as "the world's fastest growing criminal enterprise" (as quoted in Skinner 2008b:

62). This reality brings into sharp focus the contradictions of the free market, which has

long been imagined to operate without violence, bondage, or coercion, and which political

economists across the political spectrum expect only to give rise to free forms of labor.

The premise of this dissertation is that the resurgence of unfree labor in

neoliberalism has not been an anomalous phenomenon but rather has been rooted in

fundamental shifts in power, production and social reproduction that have tilted the entire

labor spectrum towards greater unfreedom. On the one hand, this has meant that unfree

labor is an increasingly prominent feature of global capitalism. On the other, it has meant

an intensification of market discipline that has increased both free workers' insecurity in

relation to the labor market, as well as unfreedom within labor contracts and processes.

Both dynamics are traceable to a deepening of capital's disciplinary matrix in society as a whole as states have implemented punitive social and penal policies geared towards

1 promoting labor and social discipline among working populations, yet, they have rarely been analyzed as such. Rather, analytical shortcomings in the dominant scholarly approaches have meant that the growth of unfree labor in neoliberalism and the simultaneous intensification of coercion, immobility, and constraint in the labor market have been studied in relative isolation of the other. This has foreclosed a holistic and systematic understanding of the neoliberal intensification of unfreedom across modalities of labor exploitation, severely limiting the insights of strategies to eliminate unfree and precarious labor in all of its forms.

Indeed, the only real effort to document the neoliberal proliferation of unfree labor has come from the liberal "neo-slavery" literature developed by journalistic and human rights circles, dedicated to mapping the extensive human rights associated with unfree labor today (referred to as "modern-day slavery"). While these accounts have powerfully documented the unprecedented expansion of unfree labor, analysis in this tradition has focused very little attention towards deciphering the shifts in power, production, and social reproduction that have underpinned its growth. Marxist accounts, on the other hand, have successfully documented the ways in which neoliberal restructuring has intensified free working populations' insecurity, immobility, and exploitation in labor markets and processes (through the rise of precarious and lean production, falling real wages, etc), but have generally overlooked the extreme result of these restructuring processes—the neoliberal rise of unfree labor. This disjuncture reveals the need to overcome binary approaches to the study of labor in political economy wherein unfree labor

2 is approached as an anomalous and individualized form of exploitation epiphenomenal to market restructuring, while neoliberal restructuring is studied in isolation of its most extreme outcome, and the articulations between these remain underdeveloped.

Addressing this shortcoming, the methodological ambition of this thesis is to develop an integrated political economy approach that can begin to map the intensification of unfreedom across diverse modalities of labor. It proposes that since, when examining the contradictions and complexities of actually existing labor relations, the simplistic binaries and categorical ideal types utilized by both the neo-slavery and Marxist approaches become completely untenable, developing a deeper understanding of labor and unfreedom requires moving away from unhelpful dichotomies and acknowledging the fluidity of the actually existing levels of unfreedom characterizing labor in neoliberal capitalism. There is thus a need to develop forms of thought that can break down dualisms and destabilize static and classificatory approaches so that, rather than positing an a priori dichotomy between capitalism and pre- or non-capitalism on the basis of the presence of unfree labor, we can begin to link the most unfree forms of labor that have characterized its historical development directly to the social relations of capitalism itself.

Crucial to this end, I argue, is a conception of juridically free and unfree labor as discrete, yet neither analytically or historically distinct, phenomena. Because historical analysis reveals a complex and contradictory interplay wherein the development of what is called "free labor" has been anchored and coercively imposed—at least in part—through the use of various modalities of "unfree labor", and because considerable continuities exist

3 between these categories when they are substantiated in relation to the actual embodied labor in the real world, free and unfree labor are best approached dialectically. Recognizing that capitalism, as a mode of production in the historical sense, has involved various modalities of labor—each characterized by distinct forms of unfreedom—it is therefore useful to approach free and unfree labor as part of a single spectrum of capitalist forms of labor exploitation.

A conception of free and unfree labor as discrete yet deeply interrelated phenomena builds on 's method and writings about the integrated development of "capitalist slavery" and "free" labor during his time of writing, as well as feminist political economy approaches to understanding diverse modalities of labor in the capitalist mode of production. Importantly, this conceptualization also builds on the work of practitioners and policy-makers who, faced with the complex interplay and overlaps of labor exploitation in the real world, have come to understand "free labor" and "slavery" as opposite ends of a single spectrum rather than ontologically separate phenomena. As the International Labor

Organization (ILO) put it:

There is a continuum including both what can clearly be identified as forced labor and other forms of labor exploitation and . It may be useful to consider a range of possible situations with, at one end, slavery and slavery-like practices and, at the other end, situations of freely chosen . In between the two extremes, there are a variety of employment relationships in which the element of free choice by the worker begins at least to be mitigated or constrained, and can eventually be cast into doubt. (2009: 8-9)

Grasping diverse modalities of labor exploitation as part of a single spectrum makes it possible to explain the neoliberal interplay between unfree labor, on the one hand, and the shifting contours of immobility, coercion, and unfreedom in the labor market, on the other.

4 This, in turn, facilitates a much more nuanced and holistic understanding of the currents of coercion and unfreedom that have characterized capitalist development.

With the aim of contributing to political economy accounts of neoliberal restructuring, the two primary arguments developed in this thesis are as follows: (1) Far from occurring in isolation from larger political and economic restructuring, the proliferation of unfree labor relations in neoliberal capitalism has both been part of, and worked to anchor, a larger shift whereby the entire spectrum of labor exploitation has been tilted towards greater unfreedom. Rather than having remained neutral as is generally assumed in the liberal paradigm, states have facilitated this tilt as they have, since the late

1970s, restructured labor market, immigration, and social provisioning policies in ways that have privileged the security of capital over the security of the majority of the population.

An important aspect of this shift has involved the contradictory process of, on the one hand, removing constraints placed on the mobility and accumulation of capital while, on the other hand, increasingly constraining the physical and social mobility of the working population through punitive economic and social policies as well as through carceral institutions, locking growing numbers of individuals into the capitalist market on highly unfree and precarious terms. (2) Further, as the case study of US prison labor comprising the latter three chapters of this dissertation makes clear, at historically specific conjunctures—all moments of considerable ferment in the configurations of and unfreedom in regards to life and labor—states have institutionalized punitive unfree labor programs as part of a broader range of strategies to promote social and labor discipline

5 among laboring populations and to ideologically instantiate the legal closing off and

criminalization of alternatives to wage labor. Drawing on an historical analysis of prison

labor, I hypothesize that just as in the nineteenth century when the convict lease system

- violently entrenched a social order based on white supremacy into the post-emancipation

money economy, and the industrial prison contract system was used to discipline human

bodies into the forms of factory labor that were fundamental for the new industrial

capitalist system, in neoliberalism, the state has again opened its prisons to industry as part

of a broader strategy to coercively impose the forms of labor discipline necessary to the

neoliberal order. Far from having proliferated on class-, gender- or race-blind terms (as is

often suggested in both liberal and Marxist analysis), this thesis argues that the expansion of

unfree labor has unfolded in ways that have preyed on and intensified existing inequalities

in the labor market and in society at large.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief outline of scholarly examinations of

unfree labor—further developed in Chapter One—locating this study in the context of two

dominant approaches. It then introduces the rationale for selecting US prison labor as a

case study in probing the neoliberal expansion of unfree labor, further elaborates the

research problematique, and provides a chapter-by-chapter overview of the study's

arguments and content.

6 Scholarly Intervention

As has been extensively documented by historians and human rights scholars,1

unfree labor is an increasingly widespread feature of global capitalism. Among the many

examples of unfree labor that figure centrally in corporate supply chains today are the

following: peonage, and convict labor in the US; in and

Latin America; the offshore program in Canada (importing migrants from "the Caribbean

and elsewhere"); contract migrant labor in white South African mining and industry and

the sunbelt states in the US; the gangmaster system in UK agrobusiness; and the unfree

industrial labor both in the brick kilns of and in the export processing zones of

China. However, in spite of the growing number of highly profitable capitalist enterprises

around the world introducing unfree labor, many political economists across the political

spectrum have clung to the a priori insistence that "fully functioning" capitalist enterprises

cannot operate efficiently or profitably without workers who are juridically free. This

notion originates in liberal streams of political economy, such as the work of and , and was later developed by the forerunners of neoclassical economic historians.2 Far from remaining exclusive to liberal streams of political economy, the

assumption that capitalism and unfree labor are fundamentally incompatible is also common to various streams of Marxist political economy.

The most prevalent variant of the Marxist argument—the semi-feudal thesis— contends that unfree labor is a pre-capitalist relation destined to be replaced by a workforce

1 See, for example, Lichtenstein (1996); Myers (1998); Aronowitz (2001); Brass (2011); Bales (2004); Bowe (2007); (2004). 2 See Brass (2009) for an elaboration of this position as it has been developed in various streams of thought.

7 that is free as capitalism spreads through the since unfree labor is fundamentally incompatible with advanced , , and market expansion. Faced with the growing reality that unfree labor is, in fact, being used by some of the most efficient and profitable corporations, scholars in this vein have recently attempted to reconcile this clear contradiction by arguing that the use of unfree labor by capitalist employers amounts to primitive accumulation, and therefore, still constitutes an external pre-history to capitalist social property relations.3

Among the small number of Marxist political economists who have broken with this line of thinking and acknowledged the centrality of unfree labor to capitalist development, there has been a tendency to argue that unfree labor is acceptable to, but never specifically sought out or actually reproduced by, capitalism proper.4 Wallerstein

(1979) contends, for example, that unfree labor is acceptable to capital, but this relational form is only encountered in the periphery of the global economy. In the core metropolitan countries, he claims, the workforce is free, while unfree labor-power remains external to capitalism proper. Miles (1987) shares a similar dualism in relation to modes-of- production, concluding that due to a combination of uneven capitalist expansion and the persistence of peasant smallholding in peripheral contexts, labor shortages occasionally

3 See Brass 2011, pp. 24-30 for a succinct overview and critique of the Marxist literature, or Chapter One of this thesis. 4 There are, of course, exceptions here, notably including . Having noted that in an advanced capitalist nation the object of unfreedom was to "bring about a recovery in the at the expense of the which is deprived of its political and means of defense" Mandel (1968: 537) observed, "in the extreme form which [the capitalist labor regime] assumed, above all in Germany, during the Second World war, fascism goes beyond the militarization of labor, to the abolition of free labor in the strict sense of the word, to a return to slave labor on an ever larger scale" (1968: 537).

8 prevent the emergence of the free wage labor on which capitalism depends. In both cases, capitalism is said to require labor-power that is free, and to draw on unfree equivalents solely when its preferred variant is unavailable, leading to an understanding of unfree labor as a relative anomaly somehow located within—but never actually part of, let alone reproduced by employers in—the wider capitalist system.5 Formal abstractionism6 (Banaji

1977) of this kind has limited the explanatory power of Marxist accounts as many authors have placed analytical categories prior to the actual historical reality and experiences of social classes in an attempt to develop fixed, cut to measure, once and for all applicable definitions of free and unfree labor and their relation to capitalism.7

These severe limitations in Marxist accounts, and the paucity of empirical research regarding the neoliberal expansion of unfree labor regimes in this tradition, has facilitated the dominance of the liberal approach to unfree labor. Although even further limited in their insights, the liberal paradigm is highly influential at the international policy level and in the popular media. Committed to methodological , the liberal approach understands unfree labor to be comprised of a series of relatively isolated incidents, perpetuated by "bad people", conceiving of unfree labor—or "modern-day slavery" as it is

5 It bears noting that such accounts are startlingly reminiscent of the dual systems theory that plagued feminist thought during the mid-1980s, and result in the similar problem of limiting theory's capacity to explain the forms of power and exploitation that shape and limit people's movement, choices, and capabilities in daily life. 6 The term "formal abstractionism" was coined by Jairus Banaji (1977, 2010) in his critique of the "bad theory" common to many Marxist historians. He uses the term to criticize these theorists' "substitution of purely theoretical explanation for theoretical research and/or recourse to a theory that is itself simply a string of abstractions" (2010: 8). 7 As we will see, this view also frequently conflates the fact that there is a payment made to a worker (wage labor) with labor-power that is free. The problem here is obvious- throughout history, many different kinds of workers who were relationally unfree (i.e. could not withhold their labor power) have received payment, however, that they were paid did not in itself signal the presence of labor power that was free.

9 called in this literature—as a timeless relationship of human domination which originated in pre-capitalist circumstances and has simply persisted unchanged into the present. Each instance of unfree labor is thus understood as an anomalous and individuated moment of coercion and exploitation in what is, otherwise, a genuinely democratic and free market system. Employing moral and quantitative (population growth) notions of causality rather than historical or political economy forms of explanation, these accounts advance the paradigmatically liberal conception that the state is a benign and neutral mechanism that responds to the agendas of various interest groups in the context of formal equality. Given that the liberal approach does not challenge labor exploitation as such, but only challenges unfree labor on moral grounds, it is not surprising that the "modern-day abolitionists" politics advanced by Bales and a broad coalition of evangelical Christian and secular feminist activists, nongovernmental organizations, and state agents since the late 1990s8 is premised upon the "liberation" of "slaves" into capitalist markets, purportedly free of exploitation and coercion.

As will be documented in the first chapter of this dissertation, even a cursory overview of the most prominent features of unfree labor today reveals the severe limitations of both the liberal and Marxist approaches. While on the one hand, the neo-slavery literature severs unfree labor from the actually existing political of which

8 This coalition has been geared towards have combating what they see as a diverse yet intertwined array of human rights abuses, including practices ranging from trafficking across borders to indentured labor in rock quarries to participation in some (or all) forms of commercial sexual activity. See Bernstein (2007) for a feminist critique of this coalition's politics.

10 it is a part, Marxist accounts have tended towards a formal abstractionism that obscures

more than it reveals about the specific history of labor and unfreedom throughout

capitalism. Given the rapidity with which unfree labor is becoming a prominent feature of

corporate supply chains, and the central role it now plays in the process on a global scale, the development of an alternative explanatory framework is urgently required.

Contributing towards this alternative framework, this thesis develops a feminist historical materialist (FHM) methodology to explain the proliferation of unfree labor alongside the of capitalist social property relations. Building on FHM approaches which understand the economy not as a thing or structure but as a historically changeable set of social relations—the product of people's conscious practical activity— this method builds upon Karl Marx's critique of political economy which was itself an effort at defetishization; an attempt to highlight the everyday social relations that underpin markets (Ferguson 1999: 7). In Chapter Two in particular, building on FHM's conception of the material foundations of social life as the productive and reproductive activities of everyday life,9 and emphasizing the ways that the conditions and organization of these activities have been transformed by social struggle, I outline key tenets of a holistic and

These activities have often been described through the term social reproduction which generally refers to (a) biological reproduction of the species, and the conditions and social constructions of motherhood; (b) the reproduction of the labor force which involves subsistence, education and training; and (c) the reproduction and provisioning of caring needs (Bakker 2007: 541). As Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill note, social reproduction is best conceived not so much as a set of intersecting structures but as a "transformative process that not only entails the constitution and reconstitution of gender, race and class and ideas about gender, race and class ... but also how a sense of identity and resistance can be actualized in this new context of intensified globalization" (2003: 13). See Chapter Two for a full discussion of this concept.

11 systematic approach to understanding labor and unfreedom in the capitalist mode of production. It is instructed not only by the methodological strengths of FHM, but also by

Marx's own writing and method regarding free and unfree labor, and attempts, in particular, to build on two of Marx's observations: (1) that "free" labor in fact entails a great deal of constraint and unfreedom; (2) that unfree labor has worked to anchor the lesser degrees of coercion, violence, and bondage involved in juridically free labor, or, in his words,

"the veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New

World as its pedestal" (1990: 925, emphasis added). Given that the social relations of unfree labor are complex and span multiple layers of the economy, a study tracing its shifting contours is particularly well suited to the historically-grounded interdisciplinary approach and multi-faceted methodology developed in this thesis.

A Rationale for Studying Prison Labor

The research for this dissertation was motivated by a wish to address two interlocking questions: (1) How and why has unfree labor proliferated so rapidly in the neoliberal period and how far and in what ways has this expansion been related to the simultaneous scaling back of services, promotion of workfare, and general decline in working conditions and real wages?; (2) How has it come to be that the capitalist labor market which has developed in the US has come to be fundamentally organized by race, gender, and class in spite of the fact that legally, and according to many theories, these distinctions should have been rendered obsolete through capitalist industrialization? For numerous reasons, ranging from the key role that it played in both the industrializing

12 North and the post-Emancipation South, to the glimpses it gives us into the state's consolidation and deployment of carceral power, prison labor provides a highly instructive case study in addressing these questions and in assessing the historically specific role that unfree labor has played in capitalism's expansion and profitability in the US since the mid- nineteenth century.

As we map the US's three distinct but overlapping prison labor systems (the contract system of the industrializing North [1840-1910]; the convict lease system of the post-civil war South [1865-1920]; the flexible production system of the neoliberal period

[1979-2011]), it will become clear that when prison labor is examined in a way that is attentive to the historically specific social relations that have underpinned markets (such as carceral relations and institutions, racial hierarchies and gender orders, etc) there can be no doubt that each system of prison labor has constituted a distinct modality of unfree labor.

Rather, as we will see in chapters three, four, and five, prison labor has been one of the most violent, corrupt, and exploitative modalities of labor supply, control, and exploitation to characterize US historical development. Evaluating the prisoners' freedom across three planes: (1) the compulsions and coercion underpinning prison laborers' entrance into labor contracts or situations and their inability to leave the contract; (2) the social relations surrounding their experience in the sphere of circulation; (3) the conditions involved in, and their experience of, the labor process itself, it will become clear that while prison labor in the US has been unfree, during each historical period, the form and organization of prison labor has mirrored the prominent features of the dominant form of labor in the free

13 market. Far from existing in isolation of free labor, prison labor has been used as a strategy to coercively impose the forms of labor discipline necessary to eras of considerable ferment and decline in the conditions of free labor—both directly, as it was historically used to discipline the bodies of the marginalized poor into the cadence of specific forms of waged labor, and indirectly as it has been used to instantiate the legal closing off of and criminalization of alternatives to wage labor. A case study of prison labor thus gives us a unique lens into the ways in which unfree labor has coercively underpinned peoples' entrance into, and limited social and physical mobility within, the free labor market, and, more broadly, generates insights into the ways that one form of unfree labor has been used to anchor shifting and social reproduction in the capitalist system.

It is important to stress, however, that while I have grounded my research in a case study of prison labor across three historical eras, this is not, nor does it aim to be, a comprehensive historical work. Rather, it is a problem-centered interdisciplinary study that is organized historically to capture the crucial continuities in the role that unfree labor has played in the development of capitalist social property relations in the US. What is of central concern in this case study is not the history of prison labor per se, but the evolution of a distinct modality of unfree labor across three distinct periods in the US's economic and social history.

Significantly, as we will see, the introduction of profitable labor as a punishment for crime has not been exclusive to the US, but rather, is part of a centuries long tradition wherein capital and the state have used carceral institutions to discipline and exploit the

14 laboring poor.10 Transporting this use of carceral power from Europe into the colonies,

throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, early US carceral institutions

mandated forced labor for the poor though the violent forms of corporal punishment,

though this initially existed on a relatively minor scale. This case study takes the industrial prison contracting system that emerged in the early nineteenth century and spread rapidly

throughout the Northern states throughout the to be the first major wave of unfree prison labor (Chapter Four). Through the contract system, states sold their property right in convict labor to private corporations in exchange for substantive revenues,

often up to 150% the costs of carceral administration, and inmates were made to work for

the private who built factories inside of state or federal prisons or faced

torturous forms of labor discipline. Institutionalized at a time of considerable ferment and struggle over wages and terms of waged employment, the contracting system fulfilled

Northern capitalists' need for a cheap, disciplined labor force in the context of the labor scarcities and rebellions that characterized the early stages of industrialization, as well as provided states with the necessary revenue to fund the massive carceral expansion that anchored the increasingly racialized, gendered, and economically unequal social order. The impetus for states to transform their prisons into large-scale industrial factories where

10 Alongside the emergence of capitalist social property relations in sixteenth century England, various forms of carceral labor have been used, both as a means of accruing profit, and as a method of instilling capitalist labor discipline into those unwilling to sell their labor power in the burgeoning labor market. In the sixteenth century, countries such as England, Holland, Germany and France—the leading regions of emergent capitalism—began to develop a variety of carceral institutions which had in common a concern to put their inmates to work and to train them in the disciplines of industry. In Joanna Innes' words, "The new prisons ... were designed for a very specific clientele: for men and women drawn from the ranks of the laboring poor, guilty of no more than petty delinquencies considered to be especially characteristic of the poor: 'idle and disorderly' behaviour of various kinds, unlicensed begging, vagrancy and the like" (1987: 42). See Chapter Four for a longer discussion of the historic of prison labor.

15 inmates produced the equivalent of over $30 billion a year in goods (McLennan 2008: 90), however, came from the racialized, class-based, and gendered disciplinary effects that administrations correctly predicted that productive convict labor would have on laborers in society at large.

The second, and overlapping, system of convict labor—the convict lease system— followed in the wake of the formal abolition of slavery in 1865 (Chapter Three). Through this system of labor recruitment, control, and exploitation, US states leased large blocs of

(almost entirely black male) prisoners as laborers to private companies who were then entitled to exploit them for the length of their sentences or until they had literally been worked to death, which, given that death rates among leased convicts averaged over 40% in some states, often came first (Novak 1978: 33). The regions' capitalists paid lease fees to the state that were a fraction of the labor costs that would have been incurred by paying individuals directly, and through the system were able to amass a "cheap, docile, negro labor" force (Kelly 2004: 11) that was estimated to do between 30-50% more work than juridically free labor (Lichtenstein 1999; Mancini 1996, 58). At the same time, states played a key role in coercing unfree labor for and in doing so both avoided the costs and responsibility that would have been associated with the massive increase in criminalization following the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (receiving, instead, a profit of over 372% of the costs of carceral administration (Myers 1998)), while simultaneously terrorizing the larger black population into compliance with a social order

16 characterized by white supremacy, political disenfranchisement, and economic and social immobility (Blackmon 2008: 68-69).

Both the convict lease and industrial contract systems were abolished by the early

1930s in the face of protest by increasingly powerful labor unions over the competitive threat of prison labor, and from manufacturers who claimed that their competitors' use of prison labor constituted unfair . In the late 1970s, however, alongside crucial shifts in the organization, experience, and remuneration of free labor—particularly the rise of flexible, lean forms of production—the state again opened its prisons to industry as a part of a broader strategy to coercively impose the forms of labor discipline necessary to the neoliberal order (Chapter Five). As the state attempted to mitigate the crisis and declining corporate profits which had induced a great seizing up of the capitalist economy, the Prison Industry Enhancement (PIE) Act was passed in 1979, allowing private corporations to enter "joint ventures" with state prisons for the first time since 1935. As we will see, it has been through the PIE program that states have subsidized production

(through free or highly reduced rent, utilities, etc) and bolstered profits for some of

America's largest corporations (often through subsidiaries) including: IBM, Boeing,

Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, TWA,

Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, Starbucks (Paeleaz 2008). Far from being exclusively about profits (as many analysts have suggested), like its historical predecessors, the neoliberal system of prison labor has fundamentally been about disciplining the marginalized poor—both directly as it has been used to instantiate the

17 closing off and criminalization of alternatives to wage labor, and indirectly as it has

disciplined deviant bodies into the most flexible and precarious forms of waged labor. One

component of the neoliberal spectrum of market disciplines that deprive people of access to

the means of life except through money and markets, and emerging in tandem with the decline of unions, Walmartization, and the rise of flexible production, the re- institutionalization of forced prison labor has sent a strong message that attempting to secure one's livelihood outside of the increasingly precarious labor market will result in an even more punitive and coercive forms of waged labor. As such, this third wave of prison labor has worked to anchor accelerated labor exploitation and discipline and acted as a coercive ancillary to increasingly volatile labor markets in neoliberalism.

The shifting contours of prison labor throughout US history, and particularly its emergence alongside the deepening and extension of market mechanisms that have sought to aggressively reorder peoples' daily lives, make an historical investigation of it extremely interesting from a scholarly vantage point. A study of US prison labor locates unfree labor as a modality of exploitation that has figured centrally across multiple eras of capitalist development in a highly industrialized country,11 throwing the limitations of accounts positioning unfree labor as somehow "outside of capitalism into sharp relief. Indeed, the

11 Importantly, while there has been widespread scrutiny of unfree labor in the global South (Skinner 2008; Bales 2004; UN 2009a), the emergence of unfree labor in the more prosperous free market states of the global North continues to be marginal in studies of forced and coerced labor. Until 2010, for example, the US State Department's annual Trafficking in Persons report did not include the US or Canada in spite of ample evidence that unfree labor was becoming increasingly widespread in those countries since the early 1990s (Free the Slaves 2004). Furthermore, studies that have analyzed unfree labor in the US and Canada, predominantly through the "Neo-Slavery" paradigm, have tended to lack a systematic understanding of the economic, political, and social transformations that have given rise to its resurgence, and as such, these studies' evaluations of the causes of unfree labor and the strategies advocated to eliminate it are severely limited in their insights (see, for example, Bales and Soodalter 2009; Bowe 2007).

18 history of prison labor illustrates the essential role that unfree labor has played in facilitating the profitability of major in competitive industries at pivotal moments in US history, as well as the role it has played in facilitating the expansion and reproduction of capitalist social relations as a whole. It thus generates crucial insights into how, in the US case, the direct domination of slavery has come to be replaced by less direct, but equally constraining and coercive forms of carceral power for certain sectors of the population as human beings have created and contested market social relations in layered and contradictory ways.

All of that said, it is also important to acknowledge the limitations associated with drawing on the US prison labor system as a case study of unfree labor. While a study of unfree labor in the US goes a long way towards controverting the popular notion that unfree labor is exclusive to the global periphery, the prominence and centrality of unfree labor in the US cannot be generalized across the industrialized countries. Rather, because the political economic development of the US characterized by distinct social property relations12, and because the degree of labor unfreedom in the US during various eras has been exceptional, a great deal of empirical and historical research is required to assess how far and in what ways the role and forms of unfree labor in Canada, France, the United

Kingdom (UK) and European Union (EU) are or are not analogous to those that have characterized the US. Furthermore, while prison labor is certainly one form of unfree labor, as a state—institutionalized form of unfree labor designed to criminalize and discipline

12 Importantly, as a vast body of historical research has demonstrated, the US diverges from many other advanced capitalist nations in that it has "no feudal past." See Post (1995: 392-393) for an overview of this literature. See also Dubofsky (1996) for the history of US industrialization.

19 those who deemed to have engaged in criminalized activities, it is a very unique form of unfree labor. As such, while a study of it generates crucial historical insights about the historic arc of unfreedom that has characterized the longue duree of capitalist development, it is important to acknowledge the very important senses in which it diverges from various modalities of unfree labor in the developing world. While in general terms, I argue that unfree labor has arisen through, and contributes to, the general climate of precariousness and discipline, as we will see, it is also true that various forms of unfree labor in the developing world have more to do with human desperation and and less to do with social discipline, while US prison labor has perhaps more to do with social discipline and less to do with instantiating poverty.

In brief, and posing serious challenged to the liberal and Marxist paradigms, the case of US prison labor developed in this thesis makes three things clear: (1) unfree labor has directly contributed to both the profitability and expansion of capitalism; (2) capitalists have sought out, and at times even demonstrated a preference for unfree labor, and have put pressure on the state to expand a coerced and unfree labor force; (3) this has been not been exclusively attributable to unfree labor's profitability (which has certainly been important, particularly in moments of heightened competition), but more importantly, because of the disciplinary effect that unfree labor has had on working populations in the free market. As we will see, the key leverage that working populations have had in their struggles for improved pay and conditions has been their ability to withdraw labor-power, either absolutely (i.e. in a strike) or relatively by selling their to the highest bidder. As

20 this leverage has posed challenges to capitalist profitability and given laborers autonomy to

resist labor discipline, capitalists have limited or curbed this leverage in many different ways,

though here I focus on the ways in which it has been limited through a resurgence of unfree

labor. Helping to foster an overall climate of precariousness, unfree labor has been used to

break strikes, exerted downward pressure on wages, and to instantiate the legal closing off of

and criminalization of alternatives to wage labor (e.g. poaching, theft, begging, squatting,

panhandling) in ways that have curbed the mobility and overall leverage of free working

populations. The case study of prison labor reveals that unfree labor in the US has thus

been disciplinary insofar as it has permitted capitalists to overcome the barriers to capital

valorization by providing a more disciplined work force that has yielded higher levels of

while accepting lower wages.

In sum, a study of prison labor across distinct historical eras is fundamental in the

development of an account of the constituent role that unfree labor has played in capitalist

development, and to efforts mapping the intensification of unfreedom across many layers of

economic life during crucial moments in US history.

Elaboration of Research Problematique

An important reoccurring theme in this dissertation is ways in which the state's

restructuring of labor markets and policies that govern rights and movement (of capital and people) have coincided with, and at times underpinned, the intensification of forms of

market discipline that deprive people of access to the means of life except through money

and markets. A key argument that this thesis makes in regards to the global rise of unfree

21 labor is that its rapid growth has been facilitated by the forms of neoliberal restructuring that have intensified market discipline, as states have promoted the valorization and profitability of capital in ways that have reduced the security and mobility laboring populations.13 Using unfree labor as a lens into the interplay between market discipline and state coercion, I argue that the reorganization of state policies in ways designed to promote social and labor discipline have intensified the carceral dimensions of market power, whereby people are aggressively integrated into capitalist markets in ways that lock their present and current life choices and possibilities into unequal and unfree capitalist social relations. Because an understanding of what neoliberalism is and how it has come to be is central to understanding the disciplinary forms of power that lie at the heart of this study's problematique, this section will lay out key trends related to the global shift from the post-

World War II Golden Age era to the neoliberal era before turning to describe the dissertation's primary arguments in greater detail.

As has been documented by a wide range of historians and political economists, in the industrialized countries, the post-World War II economic order was largely based around the Fordist model of production (Albo, Langille, and Panitch 1993) whereby organized labor was integrated into a system of mass production and consumption. This period was marked by a form of social compromise, often called the "post-War

" An important assumption here is that states' efforts to administer the working class involve the imposition of disciplinary norms geared at promoting certain forms of behavior and expectations and that various eras of state policy-making are used to this end, including welfare, education, policing, prisons (Sears 1999). Strategies for administering the working class are not static, however, they shift over time with the rhythm of class relations and the dynamics of the capitalist economy, and neoliberalism has constituted a moment of substantive shift across a range of institutions.

22 compromise" (Panitch 2004: 19), that included both a domestic consensus that combined labor and welfare interests and an international compromise that included a mediation between national interests and the global order. The social compact between capital and labor meant that labor was given material concessions in exchange for its support of capitalism at home and imperial policies abroad. This era of what John Ruggie (1982) has called "embedded " was underpinned by the idea that an active state was necessary to counter the effects of market failures, or in some cases, the absence of markets entirely.

States were committed to fiscal and monetary policies that restricted capital mobility and secured low levels of .

In the postwar era, social reproduction was organized around the idealized male- breadwinner gender order whereby men where privileged in the economic and political sphere while women were assigned the responsibilities of care and domestic labor.

Employers and the Keynesian also took on some of the costs associated with social reproduction as they supported the family wage and various social services. While the benefits associated with the dominant models of production and social reproduction were not equally distributed and forms of provisioning were highly gendered and racialized

(Orloff 1993: 315; O'Connor, Orloff, and Shaver 1999), this era has nonetheless been described as a period of US hegemony since domestic and international relations were largely based on consensual rather than coercive politics.14

14 This is certainly not to suggest, however, that violence and direct forms of coercion were absent during the postwar period in the United States and globally. For example, during this time Latin America experienced its most violent dictatorships and violence was crucial to the development of nations in the postwar decolonizing contexts.

23 By the end of the 1970s, however, a series of domestic and international circumstances led to the gradual decline of the postwar order, including a deterioration of hegemonic politics and a strategic shift towards coercion as a form of rule in the US and around the world, which Stephen Gill has described as the "politics of supremacy" (2003:

118). In the US, as commercial profits began to decline—and in the face of double-digit inflation, a declining dollar, and large capital outflows at home— forces emerged to challenge the Keynesian-era trends of inward economic development, expansionary welfare policies, and the strong bargaining power of unions. In 1979, the same year that the Prison

Industry Enhancement Act was passed allowing private businesses to profitably contract for prison labor and sell their products on the free market for the first time since the Great

Depression, Paul Volcker, chairman of the US , proclaimed the end of the

Great Boom and advised the American public to brace themselves for sharp declines in standards of living (Rattner 1979). Vowing to bring a halt to the economic crisis that had generated steep declines in profitability, Volcker reassured financial interests that the state would not allow inflation to undermine the dollar and "delivered a monetary shock to break the inflationary spiral" (McNalfy 2011: 33).15 As a number of political economists have demonstrated (Harvey 2005; Dumenil and Levy 2009; Panitch 2004), the "Volcker shock" was about restoring profitability and putting an end to the overaccumulation of capital that had caused a great seizing up of the capitalist economy. However, it was also about undermining working-class power and instilling labor and social discipline into the

15For summaries of the Volcker shock, see (2005: 23-30); David McNally (2011: 33-37); and Leo Panitch (2004).

24 US population as part of a broader project to achieve the restoration of class power, as full

employment and social rebellion came to be seen as both barriers to capital valorization and

profitability and political threats to economic elites (Harvey 2005: 15-16).

Officially implemented as policies of "discipline" and "stability", the Volcker shock

was directed towards breaking the back of US working populations whose "laxity" and "lack

of discipline" was considered by many in the ruling elite to have precipitated the crisis

(McNally 2011). accounts have claimed that, as the racial upheaval and political rebellion of the 1960s and early 1970s had intensified as the civil rights and anti­ war movements "radicalized and transmogrified into more militant, nationalist, and

explicitly anti-capitalist form," it was social rebellion— especially among those who had

remained marginalized in spite of the consistent rise of workers' living standards (primarily

racialized, gendered, and poor individuals)— that had jolted US capitalism (Parent! 2008:

3). Order appeared to be unraveling, too, on the shop floor as "sabotage, drug abuse, and wildcat strikes began biting into Fordist production regimes" causing declines in productivity amidst steep inclines in property crimes (Parenti 2008: 4). While the

economic crisis was, in reality, caused by over-accumulation of capital and not laxity on the part of workers (Harvey 2005), it is the premise of this thesis that the perceived social crisis

of the 1970s had a great deal to do with both the content and form of the draconian

monetary and social policies that sparked the beginning of neoliberalism, and with subsequent punitive programs of social reform—including the domestic re-

institutionalization of unfree labor.

25 Just as Volcker promised, the monetary shock of 1979-1982 precipitated huge

declines in American standards of living and signaled a turning point in the form,

organization and financing of working populations' social reproduction. As the national

unemployment rate soared, and average real incomes plummeted,16 social policies and

discourses were redesigned in ways that sought to compel marginalized populations to rely

on an increasingly precarious labor market for their survival rather than social assistance or

non-market forms of social provisioning. At least partially in response to the racial upheaval

and political rebellion that of the early 1970s, in the 1980s, as capitalist social forces came to

see stable and full employment as a barrier to profitability, and social movements as

fostering criminal rebelliousness, unions underwent a discursive and material attack and

labor became cheaper and increasingly flexible and precarious in form as employment was

restructured in ways intended to re-impose "work ethics" and social discipline on laboring populations (McNally 2011: 42-29). As a number of qualitative and quantitative studies

have documented, the rise of supremacist politics and the neoliberal economic order have

dramatically increased insecurity among, and inequality between, the US working population not only reversing the domestic gains that had previously been achieved by

subordinate classes but also weakening their institutional foundation.17 Alan Budd, chief

economic advisor to , was surprisingly forthright about the

16Between 1979 and 1983, the national unemployment rate increased by 66 percent and between 1968 and 1994, the income gap between rich and poor increased by 22 percent, with even more drastic increases in the following decade (Chang and Thompkins 2002: 48). Between 1979 and 2007, the real wages of men aged 25 and older with less than a college education declined, for some groups precipitously: by 28 percent for men with less than a high school education. While college-educated women saw earnings increase by 33 percent, the poorest women's earnings decreased substantively (Brenner 2011: 66). 17 See McNally (2011: 46-50) for a review of key points made by this literature.

26 intentionality of the inequality and precariousness that resulted from the Volcker Shock

and similar policies: "Rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the

strength of the working classes ... what was engineered—in Marxist terms—was a crisis in

capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labor, and has allowed the capitalists to make

high profits ever since" (as quoted in Parenti 2008: 29).

The American state's facilitation of the growth of unfree labor within its borders, and its institutionalization of it through prison labor and other regimes, is best understood in this context—as part of a continuum of neoliberal strategies to reduce the security and power of working populations by fostering a climate of precariousness, instantiated through the state's increased use of coercion. As research by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty

International, Free the Slaves, and a number of other academic and advocacy organizations have documented, the US has facilitated the rise of unfree labor in three key ways: (1)

Redesigning labor market and immigration policies in ways that have increased insecurity and immobility among the most marginalized members of the working class, fostering systemic vulnerability to unfree labor; (2) Failing to enact or ratify international treaties designed to abolish, or at least curb the growth of, unfree labor; (3) Directly institutionalizing unfree labor regimes—such as for profit prison labor and certain temporary foreign migrant programs (i.e. in agriculture and domestic labor).18 Because it is clear that the growth of unfree labor has been facilitated by a general intensification of workers' unfreedom in regards to labor processes and markets, the entire continuum of

18 The relevant reports and policy documents are named and explored in greater detail in Chapter One.

27 policies and tactics through which the state has engineered a new political and social climate designed to buttress market discipline (e.g. the deregulation of labor markets, promotion of unemployment and inequality, the shift away from hegemony and towards supremacy) have played a strategically important role in facilitating the expansion of unfree labor.

During neoliberalism, facing high levels of debt and rising interest rates, the governments of many countries in the global North and the global South either chose to or were compelled, through the lending conditionalities imposed by international financial institutions, to restructure their economies along the lines of the .19

Restructuring has involved the institutionalization of commitments to fiscal discipline, low levels of inflation, and the of state enterprises. It has also involved the removal of controls placed on the movement of capital and goods and facilitated the ability of corporations to move production overseas in order to exploit the cheap labor and loose regulatory regimes resulting from the widespread deregulation of labor markets. Labor has become cheaper and increasingly flexible and precarious in the face of new systems of work organization and labor intensification (lean production), and new technologies (robotics, computerization) as, across the globe, companies have attempted to cut costs through geographic relocation, wage-cutting, down-sizing and new technology. Describing the transition to lean production systems during the neoliberal era, McNally notes:

It is not simply that jobs went to the global South, though in some industries this clearly happened. It is more that a severe process of restructuring occurred that

19 The Washington Consensus refers to a set of economic policy prescriptions recommending economic and the curtailment of social welfare provisions that came to be considered the standard reform package for crisis-ridden developing countries by Washington, DC-based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the , and the US Treasury Department.

28 involved an enormous downsizing of workforces and 'leaning' of production system everywhere... Production was made more 'flexible' largely by making labor so—by tiering wages, altering shifts, increasing insecurity and precarious employment (casual, part-time, and contract work) and enhancing employers' power to hire, fire, and reorganize work. (2011: 47)

Far from having remained neutral, states have facilitated this shift by deregulating labor markets and removing restrictions on the mobility of capital.

Neoliberalism, in David Harvey's words, "is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong rights, free markets, and " (2005: 2).

With the transition to neoliberalism, the state has not retreated but rather has been restructured in ways that privilege capital and the wealthy at the expense of the majority of the population. Indeed, while capital has been given greater freedom and mobility, the same has not been true for most individuals. Rather, physical mobility has been constrained through tightly controlled immigration policies and other means. Social mobility has also been constrained, and levels of inequality have increased within as well as among states. As markets have globalized and deepened, and states have dramatically reduced social and welfare spending, leading to the increasing individualization and privatization of risk, millions around the world have been thrust into capitalist markets on highly precarious terms. Dispossessed of land, water, food, and other necessities of life except through the market, market coercion and insecurity has driven huge segments of the dispossessed to sell their labor power as a commodity. However, the contradictory mobility of capital and

29 immobility of poor human beings has meant that, for millions of others, the coerced entry into capitalist market has involved being purchased as a commodity themselves.

As will be detailed further in Chapter One, by intensifying the forms of market discipline that deprive people of access to the means of life except through money and markets, and in so doing, creating enormous global reserves of labor, neoliberalism has fostered a systemic vulnerability among marginalized, poor populations (particularly indigenous people, women, and children) to relations of unfree labor. As over two billion people struggle to survive on $2 a day and neoliberalism has threatened the ability of much of the world's population to sustain itself—what can be understood as an emerging crisis in social reproduction—people have accepted forms of bondage and peonage as the only available pathway for survival. This has been facilitated and exacerbated by the rise and rapid expansion of a market where people are bought and sold as commodities for labor purposes, with the average global price of peoples' lives and labor at an all-time low of $90

(Inocencio 2011). Still others, facing both insecurity and immobility, have risked leaving their communities in search of work—often through predatory employment agencies—and have encountered even deeper immobility, isolation, and unfree labor on the other side.

Many others have migrated to the global North in search of a buyer for their labor power, but have been integrated into Northern labor markets on highly restrictive, precarious, and unfree terms, where many countries' immigration now involve structural mechanisms that limit the ability of migrants to exert rights. The key point here is to note that historical analysis and a wide range of evidence make clear that the recent growth in unfree labor has

30 been deeply rooted in processes of neoiiberal restructuring which have, through currents of dispossession, coercively imposed capitalist markets onto billions of people and integrated them into those markets on unfree and unequal terms.

Given that the US has played a crucial role in imposing the very same economic policies at the root of the neoiiberal growth of unfree labor, it is not difficult to understand why the country has been consistently remiss in enacting regulations that would abolish, or at least curb the growth of, unfree labor. While most countries in the world have ratified the ILO's Abolition of Forced Labor Convention, for example—adopted in the aftermath of WWII to restrict the use of compulsory labor—for reasons closely related to its widespread use of prison labor, the US has consistently refused to ratify this convention.

While at first glance, it may appear contradictory that the same policy-makers who have championed freedom and personal as they have facilitated the extension and deepening of capitalist markets around the globe should refuse to ratify a convention abolishing forced labor, it will become clear as this study proceeds that contemporary decisions of this kind are entirely consistent with the underlying logic and history of the state's record regarding unfreedom.

Chapter Outline

The research for this study began with the following hypothesis: Far from occurring in isolation from larger political and economic restructuring the proliferation of unfree labor relations in neoiiberal capitalism has both been part of and worked to anchor, a larger shift

31 whereby the entire spectrum of labor exploitation has been tilted towards greater unjreedom.

The American state has facilitated this tilt domestically as it has, since the late 1970s, restructured labor market, immigration, and social provisioning policies in ways designed to buttress market discipline and promote the profitability of capital by limiting the mobility, collective power, and freedom of working populations. While the central tenets of this preliminary hypothesis remained intact at the end of the data-gathering stage, the findings eventually led to what I believe are more nuanced understandings and conclusions. I present these findings along with a range of sub- arguments in five chapters.

Chapter 1 presents the theoretical framework adopted in this study, elaborating its central argument by measuring the strength of the liberal and Marxist analysis alongside an exploration of some of the more prominent features of unfree labor today. It argues that when looking at the level of concrete historical analysis, neither the liberal nor the Marxist theories of unfree labor provide much by way of analytical clarity or insights, and thus, despite each literature's individual merits, there exists a considerable gap between the reality of unfree labor and its portrayal in these literatures. As a result, I argue, most evaluations of the causes of unfree labor and the strategies advocated to eliminate it are severely limited in their insights, and thus, a substantively different approach to the study of unfree labor is required.

With this in mind, Chapter 2 develops a feminist historical materialist approach to understanding labor and unfreedom that is uniquely suited to relate unfree labor to the overall development of the capitalist economy, building a methodological foundation from

32 which to explore the case study of prison labor comprising the remainder of the thesis. I

argue that while FHM's general strengths and innovations—particularly its success in

documenting unwaged domestic labor as a constituent part of the

rather than something that exists as somehow separate from or outside of it—provides key

insights and a strong analytical foundation for a study of labor and unfreedom in capitalism,

the strength of these insights need to be built upon, and the scope and method of FHM

need to be expanded in order to build a coherent analytical approach that can conceptualize

and explain the full range of actually occurring levels of unfreedom associated with labor in capitalist society. I argue that Marx's own method and writings about free and unfree labor are helpful here, and that, in particular, his ability to grasp the movement between waged and slave labor during his time of writing, leads us away from binary thinking and towards a more systematic way to evaluate labor and unfreedom in capitalism.

Chapter 3 marks the starting point of the historical dimension of the case study of prison labor. Relying primarily on historical records and analysis detailing the emergence and widespread utilization of the convict lease system in the US South, I document the state's leasing of large blocs of prisoners to private corporations who were then responsible for their supervision, , and exploitation during labor processes. In examining this period, it becomes apparent that after the formal abolition of slavery, various modalities of unfree labor were retained and re-enforced through racialized violence and legal mechanisms to limit the physical and social mobility of various segments of the population.

Furthermore, new modalities of unfree labor proliferated in the wake of those that had

33 become illegal since rather than banning all forms of slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment actually institutionalized and expanded certain modalities of unfree labor since it contained a specific provision that permitted slavery and "as punishment for a crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" (US Constitution 2004). While the convict lease system was one of the most brutal, violent, and deadly systems of labor supply, control and exploitation in US history, far from representing a lag in Southern modernity, it was actually a central component in the region's modernization, with the most significant and rapidly growing sectors of the economy (such as mining, logging, and farming), relying on and indeed, fighting for the continuation and expansion of, the convict lease system). I argue that rather than taking place in isolation from capitalist development, the convict lease system emerged as part of its associated social transformation, and like and the Black Codes, was key in the formation of a racially bifurcated working class, denying wage-earning status to former slaves and anchoring the racialized and gendered forms of unfree labor that were fundamental to the region's industrialization.

Chapter 4 presents the second historical component of the case study of prison labor, documenting the industrial prison contracting system through which private companies built factories directly inside of Northern state prisons and contracted with state and local governments to exploit convict labor for private gain (McLennan 2008: 90). I document that throughout the latter half of the 19th century, companies often held exclusive ten to twenty year contracts for the labor of an entire states' prison population, and tactically used their sizable captive workforces to drive down wages and working

34 conditions for the lowest stratum of the working class. States, in turn, were able to run prisons as profitable enterprises, collecting income from contractors that often exceeded carceral costs, enabling a mass expansion of coercive power at a time of social unrest associated with growing inequality. Underpinned by the assumption that a study of the rise of industrial prison labor within the Northern states during the nineteenth century must not just be a study of labor inside of prisons but rather a study of labor and freedom within industrial capitalism, this chapter delineates how and why industrial prison contracting came to play a key role in anchoring and reproducing the unequal and unfree class, race, and gender based social relations that characterized industrialization.

Chapter 5 brings us back to the neoliberal period. Demonstrating that prison labor today is neither a "new" form of "modern-day slavery" nor a static vestige of the past, I argue in this chapter that a much deeper understanding of contemporary prison labor can be achieved when it is understood as part of the centuries' long tradition wherein capital and the state have used carceral institutions to discipline, contain, and exploit the laboring poor, at times, through racialized forms of violence. Drawing on the historical findings of

Chapters 3 and 4, I argue that just as prison labor has historically been used to discipline bodies into the cadence of capitalist life and labor, the revitalization of prison labor during neoliberalism has been part of a coordinated attempt to impose social and class discipline among working people and the marginalized poor. Alongside crucial shifts in the form and organization of free labor during neoliberalism—particularly the rise of flexible, lean forms of production—the state has again opened its prisons to industry as a strategy to coercively

35 impose the forms of labor discipline necessary to the neoliberal order, and also as a means of

financing a larger expansion in carceral power geared towards containing the

contradictions, insecurities, and resistances generated by shifting relations of production

and social reproduction. It follows that neoliberal prison labor—and all of the coercion, exploitation, and racial oppression it involves—is a phenomenon whose explanation lies as

much in the political economy of the present day as it does in the historical traditions of the past.

Finally, in the Conclusion, I reflect on some of the implications of the study for future research. Building on the insight that "notwithstanding the force of economic coercion imposed by market dependence, capitalism has always required an intricate web of social, political, and legal coercion organized in and through the state" (McNally, 2011:

116), I argue that carceral relations and institutions—including those of prison labor— comprise a constituent dimension of capitalist social relations. This demonstrates, in contrast to liberal approaches which imagine that capitalism has replaced violent and coercive forms of power with less direct and more efficient power relations, that violent and coercive relations continue to underpin capitalist forms of accumulation. It also reveals (as has been true throughout the longue duree of capitalism) that attempts to transform and control the laboring body remain at the center of capitalist forms of governance.

36 Part I: Theorizing Capitalism, Labor, and Unfreedom Chapter 1: The New Slavery? Theorizing Unfree Labor and the Free Market

The neoliberal era in the United States (US) has been characterized by a resurgence of unfree labor, notable, for example, in the re-institutionalization of for-profit prison labor programs and widespread incidents of forced labor in the agricultural and domestic sectors.

This resurgence has been deeply rooted in neoliberal political, social and economic transformations, though it is not generally analyzed as such. Indeed, in many popular accounts, incidents of unfree labor in the US are depicted as horrifying yet isolated incidents of "modern day slavery," anomalous instances of coercion and labor exploitation in what is, otherwise, a bastion of freedom and personal liberty. In these accounts, the debt- bonded agricultural workers found shackled to their Florida living quarters (Sainz 2009), the Washington State prisoner packaging materials for Microsoft without pay (Hornig

2001), and the Indonesian domestic worker confined to servitude inside her employers' household (Canadian Press 2007) have simply fallen through the cracks of the free market, instead of comprising an integral part of it.

Scholarly accounts have been seriously hampered by similar assumptions.

Depicting unfree labor as something that originated in pre-capitalist circumstances and has simply persisted unchanged into the present, many analyses disconnect unfree labor from the reality of the free market system in which it is situated. This assumption shapes both the liberal "new slavery" or neo-slavery literature, which is situated prominently within the critical literature on unfree labor in the 21st century, and has also shaped critical political

38 economy (particularly Marxist) attempts to theorize unfree labor and its relationship to capitalism. Despite the impressive empirical scope of the liberal literature, and the theoretical ambitions of the Marxist literatures, there nonetheless exists a considerable gap between the reality of unfree labor and its relationship to the free market system and its portrayal in these literatures. As a result, most evaluations of the causes of unfree labor and the strategies advocated to eliminate it are severely limited in their insights.

In an effort to advance our critical understanding of unfree labor in the contemporary US and to develop a more solid foundation for the analysis of the neoliberal re-institutionalization of prison labor presented later in the thesis, this chapter will engage the central themes on unfree labor raised in the neo-slavery literature. It will measure the strength of this literature by situating that analysis alongside an exploration of some of the more prominent features of unfree labor today. In doing so, the chapter will highlight the extent of the neo-slavery literature's limitations, expressed in some very serious blind spots in its analysis of contemporary unfree labor. It will, at the same time, evaluate to what extent existing Marxist theorizations of unfree labor can act as a corrective to these blind spots and will conclude that as both the neo-slavery and Marxist literatures are marred by methodological limitations and heuristic confusion, a substantively different approach to the study of unfree labor is required.

The "New"Slavery Three central assumptions shape most of the neo-slavery literature: (1) Slavery is ontologically autonomous from the mode of production in which it is located; (2) Today,

39 anyone has an equal chance of being enslaved, and race, gender, and class have become irrelevant; and (3) Slavery can be eradicated through individual action, such as buying the freedom of slaves and raising community awareness. Kevin Bales' book Disposable People:

New Slavery in the Global Economy (2004) and Bales and Ron Soodalter's The Slave Next

Door: and Slavery in America Today (2009) are influential books in this body of literature and neatly capture all three assumptions so a review of them here will help to outline the main tenants of this approach. The subsequent sections of the chapter will then investigate each assumption in turn, demonstrating how each leads to serious blind spots in this literature's analysis of unfree labor today and assessing the extent to which the Marxist literature can act as a corrective.

Bales' primary argument is that slavery is becoming increasingly widespread in contemporary society, with over 27 million20 people currently enslaved world-wide, over twice the number that were taken from Africa during the entire 350 years of the (Bales and Soodalter 2009: 3). This includes over one million slaves working in the US as agricultural, construction and textile workers, commercial sex slaves, and domestic workers, and this number is growing at the rate of over 50,000 a year. Slavery, in these accounts, is described as a "dark under world" of the global economy generating yearly profits of over $30 billion, half of this in industrialized countries. The "slave trade," as the trafficking of people for labor purposes is referred to in the literature, is estimated to be the

20 Estimates regarding the number of "modern-day slaves" range from the ILO's (2005) minimum estimate of 12 million to the Anti-Slavery Society's 200 million (Anti-Slavery Society 2007). Most sources do agree, however, that the numbers are rising and that unfree labor is becoming more widespread.

40 second-largest international crime worldwide, exceeded only by the trafficking of drugs

(Sage and Kasten 2006: 4).

While Bales defines the term slavery only in passing,21 it is clear that for him, all labor arrangements wherein people are violently "held against their wills for the purposes of exploitation" (2004: 20) can be understood as instances of the apparently self-evident institution of slavery that has existed for centuries. The literature refers to all contemporary unfree labor (including chattel slaves, bonded labor, and serfs, for example) as slavery, which, in this conception, appears as a fixed and historically unchanged relationship of domination between individuals, ontologically autonomous from the wider political, economic and social relations in which it takes place during any historical era. "The simple truth," Bales and Soodalter argue, "is [that] humans keep slaves; we always have" (2009: 5).

Or, in another passage: "One ancient occupation never seems to go away—that of slave"

(135).

The notion that while contemporary unfree labor exhibits some "new" characteristics, it is essentially the same old slavery that has plagued human history for centuries, is constant through the literature. What changes is simply the emphasis on the particular characteristic that marks the fundamental shift between the old and new slavery.

According to John Bowe, author of Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark

Side of the New Global Economy, the new slavery is demarcated both by the widespread presence of corporations and the frequency of migration into the United States (2007: xvi).

21 While Bales uses the term slavery in most texts without any attempt at delineating the attributes of this term, he does attempt a definition in Bales 2006.

41 For Benjamin Skinner, "modern-day" slavery is differentiated only by the drastic rise in the numbers of people subjected to it: "There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history" (2008: 62). Alexis Aronowitz (2001) claims that neo-slavery can be distinguished by the advanced electronic forms of communication and advertisements that facilitate illegal transport through international networks and inexpensive fronts for fraudulent arrangements. Whitaker and Hinterlong (2008) note that modern-day slavery involves a new context of control. Ultimately, however, these authors claim little has changed and neo-slavery is simply a residual form of the slavery that has plagued humanity for centuries. Bowe, for example, notes: "it is helpful to think of slavery in the modern world as something like a resistant disease, refusing to die off, constantly metamorphasizing into new guises" (2007: xx). Now, as has always been the case, Skinner argues, "a slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence" (2008a: 62). In every account, unfree labor appears as a lingering remnant of previous historical eras, separate from the dynamics of the global economy in which it currently happens to thrive.

Bales (2004) offers perhaps the most sustained attempt to clarify the attributes of the "new" versus the "old" slavery, and so a review of the specificities he proposes is worthwhile. Noting that "slavery has too often been applied as an easy metaphor," Bales attempts to nuance this usage by distinguishing between "new" and "old" slavery. In his account, the "old" slavery seemingly refers to all incidents throughout world history wherein "one person legally owned another" (Bales 2004: 5), spanning from ancient China

42 and Egypt to ancient Greece to the Brazilian slave economy, right up to the 1865 amendment to the US constitution which abolished slavery except when punishment for a crime. Then, Bales argues, in the past few decades the world has witnessed the "shift from the old slavery to the explosive spread of the new" (2004: 12). He argues that the "new slavery" is "new" because it exhibits some key features that distinguish it from slavery in previous eras, most significantly, the new slavery is characterized by a new disposability and in that race is no longer a significant dimension of slavery.

In the first case, Bales argues, the new slavery can be distinguished from the old in that whereas slavery was previously a long-term relationship wherein slaveholders had a strong incentive to invest in the rest and reproduction of slaves so that they stayed alive for many years and bore children, it is now a short-term relationship characterized by a new disposability. In this account, whereas purchasing slaves has historically been a major investment, it is now so inexpensive to purchase a slave that they are subject to maximized exploitation and then are disposed of when they become sick, injured, or unable to work.

He argues that historically, "slaves were like valuable livestock: the plantation owner needed to make back his investment. There was also pressure to breed them and produce more slaves, since it was usually cheaper to raise slaves oneself than to buy adults ... Today most slaves are temporary; it is simply not profitable to keep them when they are not immediately useful" (2004: 15). Bales claims that this new disposability arises from the laws of that have caused the of slaves to decline compared to previous historical eras where the world population was lower. As he notes, "It is a dramatic illustration of the

43 laws of supply and demand: with so many possible slaves, their value has plummeted" (Bales

2004: 14). Related to this new disposability, whereas slaveholders previously asserted legal

ownership over slaves, legal ownership is now avoided. This is, most essentially, because

slavery is now illegal and slave-owners want to avoid prosecution and also wish to avoid the

reproduction costs for slaves and their offspring inherent in legal ownership. Bales refers to

this distinction as "control without ownership," and it is yet another way that the new

slaveholders raise their profits in comparison to the "old" slaveholders.

The second key distinction of the new slavery is that race is no longer important.

Bales argues that, "In the new slavery, race means little" (2004: 10). Indeed, much of this literature is premised on the newfound "democracy" of slavery wherein any vulnerable person can be enslaved and race, gender, and class are no longer key relations. As Bales and

Soodlater argue in their section, "Equal opportunity slavery": "Where the slaves in America were once primarily African and African American, today we have "equal opportunity"

slavery; modern-day slaves come in all races, all types, and all ethnicities. We are, if anything,

totally democratic when it comes to owning and abusing our fellow human beings" (2009:

6). The new slavery is not enacted through legal ownership, but through the final authority of violence, so any individual exerting violence over another can potentially gain and

maintain the necessary control to enslave another (2004: 5).

While Bales and Soodalter are the most explicit in arguing for the irrelevance of race as a defining feature of the new slavery, most accounts do emphasize the great

"diversity" of contemporary unfree labor. Skinner's (2008) text compiles case studies from

44 Asia, Eastern Europe, and the United States, noting that modern-day slaves come in all

colors and nationalities. Bowe (2007) documents the "modern-day enslavement" of Indian

migrants in a welding factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma, migrant Latino orange and apple pickers

in Immokalee, Florida, and migrant garment workers in the US commonwealth island of

Saipan. Emphasizing that neo-slavery involves deception and violence on the part of "slave-

masters", who, Bowe argues, are often immigrants to the US themselves, and noting the

diverse backgrounds of those enslaved, Bowe's account is one in which racialized people

trick each other into slavery, eliminating, in his eyes, the white supremacy linked to the "old

slavery". Other accounts, apparently so convinced that slavery is now "democratic", contain no analysis of the racialized dimensions of unfree labor at all.

Perhaps underpinning the literature's lack of sustained analysis regarding the defining characteristics of slavery and any historical comparison of these characteristics over time is the assumption that since slavery is a trans-historical feature of human society, the wider political and economic context in which slavery takes place does not need to figure prominently in explanations of its existence or expansion. Causality and historical explanation, contrarily, can be located in human nature or individuals' moral shortcomings.

Bowe, for example, argues that slavery is not related to political economy at all, but rather originates in individuals' desire for power over one another. "Slavery and labor abuse in general have far less to do with economics than with emotions" (2007: 151). He elaborates,

"Any survey of different forms of slavery makes stunningly clear that prior to the modern age, slavery had absolutely nothing to do with profit. To focus on the modern, technical

45 notion of profit and ignore the darker, cruder nature and allure of power is, in fact, almost quaintly naive" (153). Bales and Soodalter summarize, albeit in a simplistic way, what is perhaps the literature's primary causal claim: "We know that slavery is a bad thing, perpetrated by bad people" (2009: 3).

Moral causality of this kind does not, however, lead neo-slavery scholars to argue that the massive expansion of unfree labor they document in the post-WWII era has been underpinned by a proliferation of bad people or the moral deficiency of those decades.

Rather, most authors seem surprised that such unfreedom could persist in the midst of the same modern era that they argue has brought freedom and prosperity to millions of people.22 Bales' explanation, rather, is that the massive surge in contemporary slavery since

1945 has come about as a result of government corruption plus population expansion in the global south. As he notes, "Government corruption, plus the vast increase in the number of people and their ongoing impoverishment, has led to the new slavery" (2004: 14). This assertion takes place in a Malthusian framework wherein the sheer number of people on the earth has now run up against the natural limits of scarcity, relegating billions of people into poverty: "the sheer weight of numbers overwhelms the resources at hand" (Bales 2004: 12).

In one paper (2006), where Bales lays out his most detailed explanation of the increase in the number of "slaves" since 1945, he argues that this has been fueled by: (a) population growth, (b) global economic disparities and impoverishment, and (c) the absence of the rule

22 While their modernist sentiment generally appears more subtly, Bowe captures it boldly when describing his surprise that slavery has persisted in the modern world given his understanding of "modern people as free and productive, sensitive and thoughtful, and so on, while ancient people were enslaved, miserable, ignorant, and shortlived" (2007: xxii).

46 of in many countries. While there is no systematic analysis of why these things have occurred or how this multi-variable statistical analysis can support casual claims, he argues that this new context has created real challenges for law enforcement and policies attempting to address slavery.

In order to eradicate slavery, Bales notes the need for the US state to exert pressure on other states notorious for slave labor, as well as the need for the US to better prosecute slaveholders in its own borders. However, typical of the literature as a whole, Bales argues that the most effective and timely end to slavery will result from individual citizens' actions to facilitate awareness of slavery and free slaves from exploitative conditions. Noting that the eradication of slavery will require individual commitments to finding and freeing slaves in their own communities, Bales and Soodalter argue: "the best defense against modern-day slavery is a vigilant public. Be a nosy neighbor" (2009: 255). Bales' Ending Slavery (2007) similarly emphasizes individual action as it outlines a range of remedial strategies and more general principles, including programs for replicating and up-scaling successful models of

"slave raids" pursued by individuals, protecting "slave liberators" and ex-slaves from backlash from slaveholders, and for refining rehabilitation efforts. Other volumes have focused on the promise of slave redemption and slave emancipation. Kwame Appiah and

Martin Bunzl's Buying Freedom (2007), for example, assesses both the ethical and practical dimensions of slave redemption and emancipation, with many contributors arguing that buying the freedom of slaves remains a viable strategy for abolition, in spite of the historical challenges and controversies surrounding slave redemption. In general, the neo-slavery

47 literature appears to assume that it is possible to eradicate existing instances of "slavery" through individual and state action, and, once eradicated, there will be no compulsion that could cause unfree labor to return.

Rethinking Unfree Labor

As this summary of Bales' work reveals, it is presently common for scholars of unfree labor to suggest that contemporary dynamics are simply a continuation of the transhistorical institution of slavery, separate from the otherwise free market in which the new slavery happens to takes place. The notions that slavery has been democratized so that virtually anyone can be enslaved, and can be eradicated through US state and individual citizen action, also figure prominently in contemporary literatures. Yet, when we examine contemporary unfree labor in a deeper and more historical way, we in fact find a significant disjuncture between its reality and its portrayal in these assumptions and in the literature as a whole. This means that an alternative analysis, which can more accurately account for the dynamics of contemporary unfree labor, is necessary. In order to get to that point, however, we need to interrogate the central tenets of Bales and his contemporaries, measuring the usefulness of the neo-slavery literature by comparing it to prominent features of unfree labor today.23 This will demonstrate the limits of their analysis and highlight for us the actual character of unfree labor that a new theoretical framework would need to capture.

23 Because the accuracy of statistics from activist and community groups has been called into question, this chapter will rely heavily on official reports from organizations such as the United Nations, International Labor Organization, and US State Department, whose research is widely accepted as credible, to highlight key trends in unfree labor today.

48 Slavery in an Otherwise Free Market?

The US Department of State's 2009 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report documents the strong link between the 2008 onset of a global economic crisis and the proliferation of unfree labor, which they also refer to as "modern-day slavery." Drawing on research from numerous international organizations, the report demonstrates that trafficking in persons for labor purposes, or, the purchase and sale of people for purposes of forced labor, bonded labor, and involuntary domestic servitude, has been exacerbated by the 2008-2009 economic crisis which has also prompted rampant unemployment, a decline in real wages, and a further erosion of social safety nets. Furthermore, the report illustrates that even prior to the crisis, the 21st century's context of growing demand for cheap was "pushing more business underground to avoid taxes and real labor costs," resulting in a worldwide rise in modern-day slavery (US Dept. of State 2009: 39). In the coming years, the United Nations (UN) anticipates instances of slavery to increase as poverty rates continue to rise around the world and direct access to subsistence decreases.

At the same time, they predict an expansion of "forced, cheap, and child labor by multinational companies strapped by financial struggles" (39).

Reports such as this one, which document the strong linkages between transformation in global capitalism, labor conditions in general, and the expansion of unfree labor, throw into sharp relief the limitations of the neo-slavery literature's attempt to analyze contemporary unfree labor in isolation of the broader global economy. All of the evidence suggests that far from occurring sporadically, in isolation from larger political and economic restructuring, the proliferation of unfree labor has been a systemic tendency

49 across the neoliberal period. As states have removed the constraints placed on the mobility

and accumulation of capital, and deregulated labor markets at the same time that social and

penal policies have been redesigned in ways that deprive people of access to the means of life

except through money and markets, currents of coercion and dispossession have integrated

millions of people into capitalist markets on highly unfree terms. As the capitalist market

economy has been brutally imposed and deepened across the world, millions have been

dispossessed of land and turned into propertyless laborers who migrate to urban areas in

search of work. While market coercion and insecurity has driven huge segments of the

dispossessed to sell their labor power as a commodity, for millions of others, coerced entry

into capitalist market has meant being purchased as a commodity themselves.

Far from having remained neutral as is generally assumed in the liberal paradigm, states have facilitated this tilt as they have, since the late 1970s, restructured labor market,

immigration, and social provisioning policies in ways designed to buttress market discipline.

In the early 1980s, facing high levels of debt and rising interest rates, the governments of

many countries in the global North and the global South either chose to or were compelled,

through the lending conditionalities imposed by international financial institutions, to restructure their economies along the lines of the Washington Consensus. Restructuring has involved the institutionalization of commitments to fiscal discipline, low levels of

inflation, and the privatization of state enterprises. It has also involved the removal of controls placed on capital and goods and facilitated the ability of corporations to move production overseas in order to exploit cheap and loose regulatory regimes, changing global

50 conditions of existence in fundamental ways, particularly for the very poorest. As the evidence presented in this chapter suggests, as these forms of restructuring have undermined the ability of much of the world's population to sustain itself outside of the market, and have locked their current and future life possibilities into hierarchical and unfree capitalist social relations, neoliberal restructuring has been at the heart of the systemic rise of unfree labor across the neoliberal period.

Invoking the label "modern day slavery" to compare a specific labor situation in the context of super-exploitative globalization to those conditions that were generally present in slavery (always situated in the past), especially forced migration, exhaustive labor, and/or restricted freedom, neo-slavery scholars note the contradictory resilience and exceptional survival of unfree labor into the present day. But they are continuously perplexed by the apparent "paradox" that the expansion and deepening of "free" markets have systematically entailed a growth in unfree labor. Indeed, in their analysis there appears to be nothing about the global economic system that facilitates or gives rise to unfreedom in labor processes or markets. Rather, it appears that the market has simply not expanded quickly enough to accommodate recent population growth:

In the ballooning populations, rapid economic change is bringing some people into the modern world of good medicine and technology, "Western" lifestyles, and a new sense of self and achievement. Other people are being consumed by the industries driving this change. The sheer volume of people in the developing world compared to the number of new industrial jobs means that many of them are, as the English worker says when he's been fired, "redundant." (Bales 2004: 234)

The only recent book dealing explicitly with unfree labor and globalization is an edited volume by Christien van der Anker (2004) which argues that globalization has increased

51 levels of "slavery" by increasing poverty and therefore, vulnerability. This volume, however, lacks a systematic analysis of the historic causes of peoples' vulnerability and poverty, as well as an empirical basis for the claim that vulnerability has increased slavery and is supported only by scattered examples. Other texts refer in passing to economic dynamics but exhibit a profound misunderstanding of how the global economy works to give rise to unfree labor.

Bowe (2007), for example, notes that slavery has become a crutch for certain globalized businesses, but lacks any investigation of the system of which those businesses are a part.

Bales (2004) claims that the "new disposability of slaves" arises from the laws of supply and demand that have caused the value of slaves to decline compared to previous historical eras where the world population was lower, a claim that both goes against the grain of existing historiography24, as well as attributes to inanimate laws what is, in fact, a consequence of human action in the specific context of globalized capitalism. While the rest of the literature privileges descriptive accounts of unfree labor over an analysis of the economic system in which it has proliferated, where the global economy does appear, authors tend to see it as a solution to unfree labor rather than a force deeply implicated in its spread.

The apparent contradiction between the deepening of "free markets" and the rise of unfree labor is resolved, however, when we pause to consider historically what the

24 The relative cost and "value" of slaves has varied throughout history and it is by no means clear that slaves are less valuable today than they have been during other eras. The historiography of the Atlantic slave trade, for example, documents that it was only when the British Empire rendered the slave trade illegal in 1808 that plantation owners started treating their female slaves as breeders of their future labor force. The proof of this is undoubtedly the massive increase in the slave trade from the end of the 161 century until its (formal) abolition. The centrality and dominance of the British Empire in the slave trade runs counter to Bales' argument in that it offered a strong incentive for plantation owners to work their slaves to death because of the availability of an international captive labor force constantly departing from the costs of West Africa. See Rediker and Linebaugh (2001).

52 deepening of markets has really meant. Far from globalizing democratic decision-making or equality in any meaningful sense, the neoliberal extension and deepening of markets has involved the contradictory process of, on the one hand, removing constraints placed on the mobility and accumulation of capital while, on the other hand, increasingly constraining the physical and social mobility of the working population through punitive economic and social policies as well as through carceral institutions. In Isabella Bakker and Stephen

Gill's words, what has been prioritized in globalization has been the entrenchment of a framework that provides maximum security for the owners of capital "in ways that may have gone with much greater inequality and [the] erosion of material conditions for greater human security, and provisioning for social reproduction" (2003: 12).

When the smoke and mirrors surrounding "free markets" gives way to the realization that what has been globalized and given unprecedented freedom is capital— and not the majority of the world's population—that contemporary unfree labor has been shaped by, expanded, and reproduced as part of the overall historical development of global capitalism simply cannot be ignored. This is evident, for example, in reports that provide even a very general analysis of the prominent connections between the processes of globalization, multi-national corporations, and unfree labor. The 2009 International Labor

Organization (ILO) report The Cost of Coercion report documents, for example, that the deregulation of labor markets throughout the 1970s and 1980s, combined with increasing competitive and cost pressures between corporations, has had an adverse impact on employment conditions in general and have, in many cases, led to forced labor (2009: 2).

53 Another report, Hidden Slaves: Forced Labor in the United States (2004), published by the

Human Rights Center at the University of , Berkeley, documents the ways that the neoliberal economic context has created conditions that have given rise to unfree labor in the US's domestic, agricultural, and textile sectors. In the first case, the report notes that forced labor in domestic work is fueled by the burgeoning demand for cheap, exploitable household help in the context of increasing dual-wage households. This demand has resulted, as documented by a substantial body of qualitative and quantitative research,25 from a surge in labor market activity among women in industrialized countries in the context of falling real wages and the state's promotion of as a privatized solution to the social challenges resulting from some women's entry into the labor market. In the case of the agricultural and textile industries, the connections between unfree labor and key features of the capitalist global economy are even starker. The report notes that the high occurrences of forced labor in agriculture during the past thirty years have been linked to the fact that agricultural wages are stagnant or declining, working conditions are poor, and legal protections for agricultural workers are weak. This is related, the authors note, to the specific form that corporate supply chains have taken in recent decades, which makes it difficult to monitor or hold people accountable for their use of unfree labor. In the textile industry, competitive pressures on manufacturers located within the United States have driven down real wages, and manufacturers increasingly attempt to evade monitoring or enforcement of labor laws by operating, at least in part, in

25 The feminist political economy literature has powerfully demonstrated this. See, for example: Agathangelou 2004; Arat-Koc 2006; Bakan and Stasiulis 1997; Bakker 2007; Chang 2000; Nakano Glenn 1992.

54 the . In all of these industries, the report notes that the US's overall

decline in real wages, degradation of employment conditions, shortening of job tenure, and

shrinking protection over the past quarter century have given rise to forced labor in that

country.

Acknowledging these salient connections, a 2009 ILO report recognizes that

"modern-day slavery" is not ontologically separate from other forms of labor exploitation existing alongside it, and notes that even "free" labor relations often involve severe levels of

unfreedom. Emphasizing the connections between unfree labor and overall economic, political, and social transformation, the ILO writes that: "there is a continuum including both what can clearly be identified as forced labor and other forms of labor exploitation and abuse. It may be useful to consider a range of possible situations with, at one end, slavery and slavery-like practices and, at the other end, situations of freely chosen employment"

(2009: 8-9).

Yet, in spite of these prominent connections between unfree labor and the capitalist market, the concepts that the neo-slavery literature uses to examine unfree labor, formed in abstraction of historical or political-economic analysis, cannot capture the contemporary realities of unfree labor and, as such, have limited explanatory power. The concept of the

"new slavery," in particular, seeks to neatly separate contemporary unfree labor from the global economy in which it takes place, rendering the literature unable to explain why unfree labor is so widespread in the contemporary moment and how this has been related to broader shifts in the character and organization of corporations and labor in neoliberalism,

55 as documented in the reports above. Lacking heuristic clarity, there is no clear criteria by which authors decide whether an instance does or doesn't constitute slavery, and while

many authors openly discuss the challenges of identifying slavery in the midst of "free

market" relations which so closely resemble it, none of them are able to explain why

unfreedom in the labor market is more widespread than the cases that fit into their narrow

concept. This limited conceptual framework also leads neo-slavery scholars to advocate for market expansion as a means of eradicating unfree labor, instead of seeing that dimensions of market expansion have, in fact, been key factors in its proliferation.

Underpinned by the assumption that slavery is ontologically autonomous from the mode of production in which it is located, the neo-slavery literature uses fixed and a priori categories to investigate unfree labor. As described above, the literature refers to all contemporary unfree labor as slavery. In spite of the distinctions between "new" and "old" slavery outlined above, all unfree labor is understood as the timeless relation of domination it has always been in the past: "In spite of this difference between the new and the old slavery, I think everyone would agree that what I am talking about is slavery: the total control of one person by another for the purpose of economic exploitation" (Bales 2004: 6).

Attributing to slavery a fixed and timeless ontology severs it from the diverse social, political, and economic conditions and struggles that have shaped and surrounded it in any given historical era. The concept of slavery, used in this way, renders us unable to grasp the ways in which unfree labor relations have changed as part of overall patterns of social transformation, and blinds us to the historical interconnection and interaction between

56 unfree labor and broader social property relations. While it may be possible to trace continuities in unfree labor across centuries, we can also map crucial shifts and discontinuities in the way unfree labor is organized, underpinned, and carried out, and the period beginning in the mid-1970s—during which the neo-slavery literature claims the

"new" slavery has spread around the globe—marks exactly one of these crucial shifts.

Unable to answer why the "new slavery" has come about, why it has taken on these "new" features which supposedly distinguish it from previous eras, or explore its proliferation as part of overall social transformation in recent decades, however, the neo-slavery literature not only fails to enhance our understanding of concrete historical reality, but actually lends confusion to it.

Much of the Marxist literature, too, has been plagued by the tendency to posit an external relationship between unfree labor and the global economy, and to rely on a priori and dualistic categories that lend confusion to historical reality. While unlike liberal analysts, key Marxist authors such as Tom Brass and J. Mohan Rao have focused explicitly on the relationship between forced labor, capitalism, and globalization, these debates have taken place at a highly abstract level, and have sought to create models for what could or could not happen under capitalism, rather than attempted to explain actually occurring phenomena.

While the concepts employed are generally more rigorously developed than those of the neo-slavery literature, many authors similarly place analytical categories ("unfree labor'V'free labor") prior to the actual historical reality and experiences of social classes in

57 an attempt to develop fixed, cut to measure, once and for all applicable definitions of unfree labor. Their concepts usually take the methodological form of a binary. In Rao's work, for example, unfree labor is simply defined negatively in relation to "free production relations"

(1999a). Brass, similarly, claims that all labor relations involving an advance loan can be understood as unfree (1999: 10-13, 20-1), denying the existence of free labor relations that involve advance payments. Such categories are geared towards the primary purpose of many of these debates, which has been to decide which forms of labor constitute "capitalist relationships" in an economistic sense.26 Also related to this purpose, many writers have centralized the mode of surplus extraction in labor relationships, positing that if surplus is extracted solely by "economic" means, this is a free wage-labor relationship, while if it is extracted by "extra-economic" means, this is an unfree labor relation, understood by many

Marxists as a historical remnant of .

The biggest issue here, aside from a lack of heuristic clarity, is that these ideal type categories and modes of investigation are generally more concerned with fracturing social reality into binaries ("free/unfree" and "capitalist/non-capitalist") than they are with dialectic and robust political economy explanation. Such accounts also create little room to understand ambiguous or liminal forms of labor that do not fall neatly into either free or unfree labor, especially highly gendered forms of work such as unpaid domestic work and forced sex work. They also tend to gloss over the unfreedom existing in many "free" labor relationships, understanding free and unfree labor as ontologically autonomous, rather than

26 There are some notable exceptions in this regard, such as Bakan (1987) and Banaji (1977).

58 dialectically related. Additionally, the concepts tend to be abstracted from analyses of

in agrarian contexts in the global South and though scholars appear to

think their concepts are universal, their applicability to diverse contexts, such as industrial

settings, household labor, and prisons, for example, especially in industrialized contexts, is limited. In sum, the ideal type categories and unhelpful dichotomies that have dominated

Marxists debates about unfree labor leave the literature unable to capture what free and unfree labor have meant historically, in their configurations with history, capital, and in the hands of diverse historical agents who are located in specific relations of power.

The debates have been similarly limited by methodological issues, especially the failure to place theory into historical context.27 Sharing Bales' assumption that unfree labor is a pre-capitalist phenomenon that has merely persisted into the present, Rao (1999a), for example, takes the classic Marxist view that while during early phases of capitalism, unfree labor may be present, in mature capitalism free labor will have replaced unfree labor.

While Brass (1999) takes an opposite viewpoint and argues that the creation of unfree labor is an essential part of modern capitalism, his application of such a claim to several specific case studies does not amount to historical contextualization. Taking place at a highly abstract level, many Marxist debates about unfree labor have been marred by a formal abstractionism that, far from developing analytical lenses that shed light into actually existing unfree labor, actually miss the dynamic complexities of labor and unfreedom in the neoliberal era.

27 A fuller explanation of the key differences in various Marxist authors' perspectives can be found in Lerche (2007).

59 At a general level, we are back where we started. The ILO's Cost of Coercion (2009)

report indicates that forced labor is common in many countries, including those countries

with a large presence of foreign direct investment, though far less so in the most developed

capitalist countries themselves. The report has also re-stated a warning issued in a previous

ILO report (2005) that that "with the growing deregulation of labor markets and the trend

towards outsourcing and ever more complex forms of subcontracting, there are signs that

forced labor abuse is also penetrating the supply chains of mainstream companies in the

formal economy" (ILO 2009: 11). This indicates that there is a need to relate unfree labor

to the overall historical development of the global capitalist economy, and more specifically,

to investigate the linkages between the political, social, and economic transformations of

neoliberalism and increasingly widespread unfree labor. Such an investigation will require a

move away from unhelpful dichotomies and a move towards re-dialecticizing unfree labor

and the market, acknowledging the fluidity of actually occurring levels of unfreedom.

Equal Opportunity Slavery?

The second significant blind-spot in the neo-slavery literature's depiction of unfree

labor is rooted in the assumption that today, "race matters little" since, in their conception,

there has been a shift from the historic situation where slavery was based on race to the

contemporary moment where slavery is characterized by diversity. Bales' argument that

today, anyone has an "equal-opportunity" of being enslaved since the criteria of

enslavement now focuses on "weakness, gullibility and deprivation" (2004: 11) reveals profound misconceptions about racialized, gendered, and class-based social relations and

60 their relation to contemporary labor exploitation. In addition to extending the false notion

that slavery was initially based upon a modern conception of racism towards Africans, these

assumptions also cause the neo-slavery literature to miss the salient racialized, gendered and class-based dynamics of unfree labor today.

In the first case, and of great significance for analyses of unfree labor, the neo- slavery literature's assumption that slavery previously involved only Africans subjected to unfree labor because of their race, while today, race is insignificant because of the "diversity" of those enslaved, reveals some important misconception about the history of unfree labor, especially in the US. As has been widely documented by historians, it is simply not the case that slaves in the US were primarily African, or that those who were African were enslaved for this reason. At its beginnings, as Trinidadian historian Eric Williams famously demonstrated in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) unfree labor in the Americas was "brown, white, black and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan" (Williams 1944: 7). For more than fifty years, over half of the white emigrants to North America came as indentured servants bound to a master for a definite period of time, typically five to seven years. Of the

92,000 European immigrants brought to and between 1607 and 1682, for example, more than three quarters were British and Irish chattel bond-laborers, and many of the remaining were convicts who were held in bonded labor for much longer periods of time (Allen 1997: 119-130). Indeed, American ethnic groups considered white today—including Jewish-, Irish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans—once occupied a liminal status in their new country and only gradually achieved the status of white (Roediger 2005).

61 As David McNally notes, "The modern discourse of race had not yet developed, at least in part because differences in skin colour did not yet map onto the distinction between the

free and the unfree" (2006: 150). The salient point here is that unfree labor in the Americas was not initially based upon race, and indeed, for many years, racial categories were quite unstable. It was only in systematizing distinctions between Europeans and Africans that

race was created in its modern sense.

Research across many bodies of literature demonstrates that a modern conception of race and racism emerged with the rise of capitalism, uprooting the common sense idea— prevalent in the neo-slavery literature—that race exists outside of historical circumstances.

The literature documenting the rise of race in the colonies, for example, links the escalation of "race-thinking" to the actual social practices of white supremacy contained in plantation slavery and the dispossession of the indigenous peoples. As David Roediger explains,

"Expansion, capitalist development and race thinking went hand in hand" (2008: 73).

People were not enslaved because of their race, but rather, racial oppression emerged in

Anglo-America as a strategy for capitalist control of the laboring class and racial ideology became integral to the outlook of large numbers of people in Europe and North America.28

"Only in the era of modern capitalism did persecution get accounted for in terms of inherent and unchangeable features (the 'race') of a specific group" (McNally 2006: 157).

Though one-sided in some respects, Williams captures an important point when he notes that "slavery was not born out of racism; racism was born of slavery" (1944: 7).

28 For a fiall elaboration of this argument, see Roediger (2008, 2007), Allen (1997), and McNally (2006).

62 Analyses of this kind bring into sharp relief the profound misconceptions that mark the neo-slavery literature's analysis of race and its relation to historic labor exploitation. In demonstrating first, that unfree labor has always involved people of diverse ethnicities and national origins, and furthermore, that racialization has been a complex process that did not cause unfree labor in the Americas but, in many ways, emerged from it, evidence of this kind shatters the very foundations of the neo-slavery literature's dual notions that while the

"old slavery" was based on race, race is no longer relevant because of the "diversity" of those who are enslaved today.

An exploration of some of the prominent racialized and gendered dynamics of unfree labor today casts even further doubt on the neo-slavery literature's notion that today, anyone has an equal chance of being enslaved. Rather, there is a powerful body of evidence that demonstrates that most people subjected to unfree labor today are part of what the UN and ILO refer to as "socially excluded groups", particularly indigenous people, minorities, women, and migrants. At the start of the 21st century, the United Nations High

Commissioner for Human Rights highlighted this fact: "Victims of slavery and slavery-like practices frequently belong to minority groups, particular racial groups, or categories of people who are especially vulnerable to a wide range of discriminatory acts, including women, children, indigenous people, people of low' caste status and migrant workers" (UN

2001). Another recent report demonstrates that indigenous and minority populations are often the most vulnerable to bonded labor because in many countries, they now have limited and decreasing access to land for their traditional income-generating activities such

63 as cultivation or hunting. The issue of land ownership, the UN notes, is closely linked with

the phenomenon of bonded labor (UN 2009a: 49). An ILO report, similarly, in describing

the vulnerability of indigenous persons to unfree labor, and debt-bonded labor in particular, notes "poor peasants and indigenous peoples in Asia and Latin America, especially, have been induced into indebtedness, through accepting relatively small but cumulative loans or wage advances from employers or recruiters at a time of scarcity" (ILO 2009).

An August 2009 UN press release urging action against widespread forced indigenous labor in Bolivia and Paraguay brings the factors underpinning indigenous peoples' vulnerability to unfree labor into clearer light. The press release calls on Bolivia and Paraguay to take urgent action to protect indigenous peoples' human rights after a UN report documented hundreds in the Chaco region "trapped into forced labor practices and face discrimination, severe poverty, and systematic violence" (UN 2009a: 1). Another report by Anti-Slavery International notes that while the forced labor of the Guarani and other indigenous peoples has long been documented, recent political and economic change in the countries, including land reform and privatization, have exacerbated unfree labor in the region by eliminating territorial and land rights (Kaye 2008: 23-30). This has increased

"severe poverty, a lack of food and water security, a series of human rights abuses related to land rights, child labor, and discrimination" (UN 2009a: 1).

Research of this kind demonstrate that the vulnerability of indigenous peoples to unfree labor has arisen through a context of land reform, privatization, and through the loss of customary rights, and so is not an individual vulnerability rooted in population growth as

64 Bales and others contend, but rather, is a collective vulnerability rooted in historic and racialized instances of dispossession.

Similar dynamics surround the highly gendered relations of unfree labor, which are referenced only in passing in neo-slavery scholarship but rarely, if ever, analyzed in any meaningful way. The UN estimates that over 56% of "modern day slaves" are women and girls, while some anti-slavery NGOs estimate this percentage to be as high as eighty (2009a).

According to the ILO, that the majority of people subjected to forced labor are female is related to the gendered vulnerabilities characterizing both the supply and demand sides of the trade in human beings. It argues that "these vulnerabilities are the result of political, economic and development processes that may leave some women socially and economically dependent on men, as well as without protection or recognition under the law, inadequate access to healthcare and education, little opportunity to own property, and poor employment prospects" (US 2009: 36). Another recent ILO report, Give Girls A

Chance: Tackling Child Labor, a Key to the Future (2009a), estimates that over 100 million girls are involved in forms of child labor, with many exposed to its worst and most unfree forms. The report notes that the danger of girls being forced to work is linked both to countries' gender orders as well as the gendered impacts of increasing poverty rates and declining direct access to subsistence. It also warned that the 2008-2009 economic crisis could push up the numbers by increasing poverty, prompting cuts in national education budgets, and a decline in remittances of migrant workers which often help to keep children in school. Similarly, noting that the pressure resulting from the ongoing economic crisis is

65 causing more young women to seek work away from home, the head of the ILO's program against forced labor noted that "vulnerable workers—particularly migrants, including young women and even children—are more exposed to forced labor because under conditions of increasing hardship they will be taking more risks than before" (US 2009:

35). These reports demonstrate that women and girls' vulnerability to forced labor is not individual and related to population growth, but rather is collective and historical, deeply rooted in recent, and highly gendered processes, of economic and social transformation.

While numerous examples could be drawn on to further highlight the salient racialized and gendered dimensions of unfree labor today, the example of unfree labor related to temporary migration to industrialized countries for domestic labor is interesting since case studies of this form of "modern-day slavery" are featured prominently in the neo- slavery literature. While the neo-slavery literature has explored various case studies as anomalous and unrelated instances of exploitation, emphasizing the great diversity of those subject to unfree labor, however, a range of scholars and community organizations have documented the link between widespread incidents of unfree labor that characterize live-in migrant domestic work in industrialized countries and the problematic immigration and labor policy regulations that give rise to them. In the US, for example, Human Rights

Watch has documented that such workers—not covered by regulations— are commonly paid significantly below the minimum wage, with the median hourly wage at

$2.14 and some paid as low as $100 a month, and the median workday at fourteen hours, while many work up to twenty hours a day (Human Rights Watch 2001: 1-13).

66 Additionally, domestic workers face widespread constraints to their mobility and freedom and many have been forced to work under the threat or reality of sexual and physical abuse.29 Perhaps most importantly, the majority of domestic workers in the US enter with a B-l visa, meaning they can never legally change employers, and to do so would mean losing their legal immigration status and possibly facing deportation. The same is true in

Citizenship and Immigration Canada's Live-In Caregivers (LCP) Program, through which temporary foreign migrant workers perform live-in domestic work such as childcare, elder care, cooking, cleaning and "any number of other household tasks." Both countries have failed to address the structural mechanisms that deny migrant workers the ability to exert rights, resulting in a situation where some laws "can directly contribute to an individual's vulnerability to slavery practices by excluding them from particular rights or protections which are available to the general population, and making them increasingly dependent on their employer" (Kaye 2008: 14). While statistics breaking down the countries of origins of those domestic workers subject to such severe constraints so as to fit the neo-slavery literature's definition of "modern-day slavery" are not available, an examination of the racialized and gendered demographics of those performing domestic labor in general indicates that there is clearly not an "equal opportunity for anyone to be enslaved." Eighty- four percent of those who enter Canada in the LCP program are women, and eighty

29 For example, there have been widespread incidents wherein employers confiscated workers' passports; denied workers the right to leave the employers' premises after work hours or completely denied the right to leave unaccompanied; failed to give workers house keys; misrepresented US law, culture and the "dangers" of US streets; prohibited workers from speaking with anyone outside the employers' immediate families, either in person or by telephone; and denied workers the right to attend religious services (Human Rights Watch 2001; Bakan and Stasiulis 1997; Arat-Koc 1997; Oxman-Martinez 2004).

67 percent are from the Philippines (Oxman-Martinez 2004). The remaining twenty percent

are primarily from Mexico and Jamaica. Similarly, ninety percent of those who enter the

US with a B-1 visa for the purpose of domestic labor are women and the majority of

temporary foreign workers in the US migrate from Asia and Latin America. Highlighting

the raised vulnerability of women migrant workers to unfree labor, the ILO noted in its

2007 Global Report that these workers are "particularly vulnerable to discrimination, exploitation and abuse of all kinds, including harassment, violence by employers and coercion by employment agencies, forced labor, low wages and inadequate social coverage"

(2007: 31).

Perhaps because the neo-slavery literature understands unfree labor as a relationship involving individuals, rather than as something institutionalized and underpinned by state labor market and immigration policies, their accounts contain no analysis of these types of racialized and gendered immigration statistics, nor of the abuses associated with the massive surge in temporary foreign workers programs in the US and Canada in recent decades.

Rather, Bales seems to conclude, as does much of the literature, that since case studies of unfree labor in the domestic sphere involve people from multiple ethnicities and countries of origin, race is no longer an important dimension of studies of unfree labor. This assumption renders the literature unable to grasp racialization as a historical product of specific forms of social life, and incapable of questioning the ways that race and racism are historically constructed in various contexts and how this is related to labor exploitation.

While it may be true that key differences surround the dynamics of racialization and labor

68 today in comparison to previous eras, to acknowledge that these are complicated and

historically variant processes is very different from arguing that they no longer exist.

Refusing to acknowledge that people's relation to unfreedom in labor today is not gender,

race, or class neutral, the neo-slavery literature's account extends the liberal myth that

capitalism has promoted racial and to those persons who are perhaps the best living proof to the contrary.

Unfortunately, although a growing number of Marxist scholars have argued against

this notion, the similar claim that capitalism has dissolved race and gender as key social categories is prominent in many Marxist literatures where there has often been an assumption of capitalism's inherent ability to undermine inequality. These accounts are usually based on an assumption that capitalism is a system in which work, like all else, finds its price based on supply and demand, not on color and culture, and that since labor is abstract, mature capitalism is, or should be, colorblind. Ellen Meiksins Wood, for example, argues that capitalism is uniquely indifferent to the social identities of those it exploits since its unique form of economic appropriation allows it to depart from pre-capitalist, extra- economic modes of domination. Because individuals' labor power is "abstract" under capitalism, human beings are reducible to interchangeable units of labor, and can therefore also be abstracted from any specific social identity. In this line of thinking, although capitalism can and does make ideological and economic use of gender or racial oppression, this oppression has no privileged position in the structure of capitalism. Wood argues, for example, that "there is a positive tendency in capitalism to undermine such differences, and even to

69 dilute identities like gender or race, as capital strives to absorb people into the labor market

and to reduce them to interchangeable units of labor abstracted from any specific identity"

and that capitalism "is uniquely indifferent to the social identities of the people it exploits"

(2000: 266). While she does acknowledge that "on the other hand, capitalism is very

flexible in its ability to make use of, as well as to discard, particular social oppressions"

(2000: 266), this acknowledgement is somewhat mute in the face of her (and many other

Marxists') pains to demonstrate that capitalism has a tendency to undermine difference.

As Roediger explains, there are many lines of reasoning that have led Marxists to

downplay the importance of race in the history of capitalism: "The enduring appeal of the

argument linking capitalism to the inexorable erosion of race thinking lies in the fact that

not just one but several different lines of reasoning serially undergird the case for making

such a magical connection" (2008: 69). It is unclear which conception of race, gender, and

exploitation explains the total paucity of the Marxist literature on unfree labor to provide

any meaningful account of racialization, gender orders, and unfree labor, either

theoretically, or in the case studies they document, from which a sustained discussion of

race and gender are notably absent. It is clear, however, that the development of a

framework that can grasp how racialization, gender orders, and unfree labor have been historically intertwined in specific contexts and relations of power, is desperately required if we are to come to a deeper understanding of the social relations surrounding contemporary

unfree labor.

70 Can the Free Market Eradicate Unfree Labor?

Finally, one of the most notable characteristics of the neo-slavery literature is their optimistic assumption that unfree labor can be eliminated within the coming decades without any major economic, political, or social transformation. Downplaying the challenges that capitalist globalization poses for the elimination of unfree labor they argue that today is rather a uniquely appropriate time for "the final emancipation" of slaves. As

Bales writes: "Never has the world been so rich, never have travel and communication been so easy, never have so many countries been ready to work together, never has the end of slavery been so easily within our grasp" (2007: 4). Related to the literature's understanding of unfree labor as a relation of domination between individuals that is ontologically distinct from the global economy, the neo-slavery literature assumes that it is possible to eradicate existing unfree labor through individual and state action in the next twenty-five years, and, once eradicated, there is apparently nothing about the global economy that could cause unfree labor to return. Yet, this assumption glosses over key features of the global economy documented earlier in the chapter as factors that have given rise to unfree labor, and ultimately, the neo-slavery literature's proposals to eradicate unfree labor fail to address the real challenges involved, offering individual solutions to what is, rather, an issue of systemic concern.

The literature's proposals for the abolition of modern-day slavery generally emphasize both better state and enforcement and the need for individuals to facilitate awareness of slavery and free slaves from exploitative conditions. Bales (2007) provides the most detailed plan of action, emphasizing the role of individuals as he outlines

71 a range of remedial strategies and more general principles, including programs for

replicating and up-scaling successful models of "slave raids" pursued by individuals,

protecting "slave liberators" and ex-slaves from backlash from slaveholders, and for refining

rehabilitation efforts.

The literature's emphasis on individual action seems to result from the reluctant

observation that in spite of a growing grassroots human rights movement advocating the

elimination of modern-day slavery, and increased regulatory efforts by states, NGOs, and

international organizations like the ILO and UN over the past ten years, unfree labor

continues to be on the rise. In this context, rather than questioning the systemic factors

that have underpinned the expansion of unfree labor in recent decades in spite of the

increased efforts of activists and policy makers to eliminate it, Bales and others argue that

individual action to find and free slaves might be the most effective strategy for eradication.

But if, as documented earlier in the chapter, the free market itself gives rise to unfree labor,

how can the eradication of unfree labor occur without fundamental economic change?

Won't the same mechanisms that underpinned the massive proliferation of unfree labor in

recent decades undermine individual emancipation efforts by again giving rise to unfree labor?

Such questions remain unasked and unanswered in the literature. Yet, as follows

from the research presented in previous sections in this chapter, these questions are key because they focus our attention on the ways that capitalist globalization poses real challenges for the eradication of unfree labor. While the ILO and UN do not critique

72 capitalism, per se, their research demonstrates clearly that the capitalist global economy has given rise to unfree labor in recent decades. A recent UN Human Rights Council survey, for example, noted that "many states identified globalization and its impact on the liberalization of markets and the privatization of various sectors of the economy as key factors putting additional pressure on the labor markets and therefore hindering efforts to eradicate forced labor" (UN 2009: 88). Another report goes so far as to anticipate that instances of slavery will increase as poverty rates continue to rise around the world and direct access to subsistence decreases. It also predicts an expansion of "forced, cheap, and child labor by multinational companies strapped by financial struggles" (UN 2009: 39).

Not only does the neo-slavery literature fail to address these factors that pose major challenges to the eradication of unfree labor, but they also fail to explain how unfree labor can stay eliminated as long as the free market that gives rise to it remains. Even if community awareness programs and individual initiatives to free slaves were a feasible means of eradication, which seems unlikely given the scope and severity of the problem and the measures that companies and states have gone to in order to conceal it, there appears to be no consideration in the literature that unfree labor could re-emerge. Rather, linked to the notion that unfree labor rises through a generic and individual vulnerability to violence and deception rather than historic and collective vulnerabilities related to the dispossession, poverty, and gender orders inherent in the global economy, the literature assumes that once freed, there should be no reason that an ex-slave should have difficulty finding gainful employment. This notion overlooks the complex and contradictory spatial, class, gender,

73 and race based dynamics of the global economy which mediate people's access to employment, as well as overlooks the severe levels of unfreedom that can be present in the waged labor that scholars presume ex-slaves will be absorbed into. When considered in relation to a deeper and more historical understanding of the global economy, at best, the assumption that unfree labor could be eliminated through waged labor begs further clarification, and at worst, seems dubious indeed.

The notion that neo-slavery could be eliminated without fundamental economic, social, or political change, and could be somehow prevented from returning, seems even less plausible in the context of declining state regulation and enforcement of labor abuses. In the US case, for example, while some authors do acknowledge the challenges inherent in implementing anti-slavery measures, most cite with optimism that the US has recently included in anti-trafficking legislation a specific provision on forced labor, and they imagine this will pave the way for a gradual increase in forced labor prosecution in the coming years.

Yet, over the past ten years, in spite of an increase in documented unfree labor cases, and several rounds of legislation that were considered equally promising at the time, the US has actually decreased its enforcement efforts targeting forced labor. Careful examination of

US involvement in efforts to combat "human trafficking" reveal that the country's relationship to unfree labor is a complex and contradictory one. While, in recent years, the

US (as well as Canada and Europe) has become party to various treaties to combat human trafficking, critics have argued that such laws are primarily used to penalize people who transport "illegal migrants" across borders and in attempt to abolish all forms of sex work

74 (particularly in urban areas of capital accumulation) and would seem to have very little to

do with getting rid of the "new slavery" (Bernstein 2007, 2010).

It is worth noting, for example, that the US and Canada comprise two of ten

countries that have refused to ratify the ILO's 1930 Forced Labor Convention. As will be

documented later in the thesis, this is because both countries have institutionalized prison

labor programs that contravene the forced labor convention, wherein inmates toil for private corporations and the goods produced are sold on the free market.30 Yet, since the

late 1990s, responding to the broad coalition of evangelical Christian and secular feminist

activists and nongovernmental organizations who have self-identified as "modern-day

abolitionists" in their struggle to combat what they see as a diverse yet intertwined array of human right abuses, state agents in the industrialized countries of the global North have embraced the anti-trafficking and "abolitionist" cause. As a range of scholars have

demonstrated, however, in regards to the US case, the spate of anti-trafficking laws have largely been used almost entirely to step up criminal penalties for those who aid illegal immigrants in migrating and settling within US borders (understood as slave-dealers) and to crack-down on sex work (understood by modern day abolitionists to be self-identical with trafficking and slavery). Although the US Trafficking Victims' Protection Act, for instance, officially defines the crime of human trafficking to include forced labor as well as forced sex (where the latter is understood to be categorically distinct from the latter) in

30 The explanatory report that Canada submitted to the ILO regarding its refusal to ratify the convention cites concerns that the convention would render illegal any form of prison labor that involves private enterprises. The US, similarly, cited questions about the potential effects of this convention on the extent to which the private sector may be involved with inmate labor (ILO 2007).

75 terms of current US enforcement priorities, media attention, and NGO practice, sex work

constitutes the paradigmatic instance of what 'modern day slavery' is assumed to be

(Bernstein 2007: 130). Thus, while many neo-slavery scholars and NGOs have seen US

anti-trafficking law as a progressive response to the mounting attention they have directed

towards the "traffic in women" and forms of "," their moral panic surrounding sex work has often overshadowed the fact that the vast majority of unfree labor (including that of women and girls) takes place in factories, households, and agricultural settings in both industrialized countries and across the global South and regulatory efforts have done very little, if anything, to address this. In sum, in Elizabeth Bernstein's words, while the US anti-trafficking laws have "stepped-up criminal penalties for pimps and sexual clients

(considered by modern abolitionists to be slaveholders), imposed financial sanctions upon those nations deemed to be taking insufficient steps to stem , and stipulated that internationally based NGOs that do not explicitly denounce prostitution as a violation of women's human rights are to be disqualified from federal funding" (2007: 129), they have neither been designed to combat, nor have they actually effected, unfree labor as such.

These laws, alternatively, need to be seen as part of a wider regulatory matrix that criminalizes irregular migrants and those who facilitate their migration.

This reality goes completely unacknowledged in the neo-slavery literature. For example, noting that unfree labor is widespread among irregular migrants to the US since industries such as construction and agriculture depend on cheap irregular labor for growth and profit, Bowe, who has a less optimistic view of the state than his colleagues, notes that

76 there have been an incredibly small number of trafficking investigations relative to the high incidents of trafficking the US government estimates to be taking place. While up to

50,000 people are presumed to be trafficked into the US for labor purposes each year, just

639 investigations were opened by the Department of Justice between fiscal years 2001 and

2006. Only 360 defendants have been charged, resulting in 238 convictions, primarily of those who have facilitated the mobility of (rather than actually exploited) irregular migrants

(2007: 53-54). Rather than questioning the state's complex and contradictory relationship to anti-trafficking law, the neo-slavery literature chalks ineffectiveness of this kind up to limited resources, bureaucracy, or more urgent priorities such as the "War on Terror." That the US and Canadian states, understood in the neo-slavery literature as key partners in the struggle to end forced labor, both have institutionalized programs that contravene the key international convention against forced labor indicates that these states' relationship to unfree labor is not neutral and demands a deeper and more historical investigation than is featured in the neo-slavery literature.

In sum, the severe limitations in the neo-slavery literature's conceptual framework, as well as in their skewed understanding of the causes and key features of unfree labor today, lead its proposed solutions to be similarly limited in their insights. Unable to grasp the systemic factors underpinning the recent proliferation of unfree labor, and unable to grasp the role of the US state in sustaining those relations, the neo-slavery literature proposes individual solutions to an issue of systemic concern. Because their accounts understand the market as part of the solution to unfree labor, these scholars fail to recognize the more

77 fundamental changes required to eradicate unfree labor. Finally, it bears noting that the

neo-slavery literature's notion that unfree labor could be immediately eliminated without

fundamental change seems especially peculiar given that most of these scholars share a view

that slavery originates, at least in part, from dark elements of human nature that have

apparently persisted for centuries. What would prompt such a fundamental shift in human

nature today is ultimately unclear in their accounts.

While one strand of Marxist scholars of unfree labor do little to address the neo-

slavery literature's blind spots in these regards, maintaining the modernization-theory like

notion that the global spread of capitalism will be accompanied everywhere by the decline of unfreedom and a corresponding expansion of the free workforce, another strand of

Marxist thought provides a more promising explanation. Tom Brass and Robert Miles are good examples of this latter line of thinking, recognizing that the issue of unfreedom in the labor processes is not limited to "modern-day slavery", but rather is also inherent in the commodity status of labor under capitalism as a whole, both authors recognize that unfreedom can exist, albeit to a lesser extent, in waged labor relations. Brass, for instance, following from Marx, notes that in capitalism, workers are "freed" in the double sense that they have been "freed" from access to the that secure their reproduction, and consequently are (and must be) free to exchange their labor-power with capital for wages with which to purchase subsistence (1999: 51). At the same time, both

Brass (1999), and Miles (1997), document the ways in which the of labor as a whole gives rise to unfree labor. It follows, then, from these observations that

78 eliminating only those types of labor relations that fit a narrow definition of "modern-day slavery" would first, be insufficient to eliminate unfreedom in the labor market, and second, would actually require eliminating the commodification of labor power overall. While neither scholar has focused much attention towards the challenges and practical considerations inherent in such a line of argument, both are at least able to recognize the limitations of attempts to eradicate one form of unfree labor without addressing the economic, political and social conditions that give rise to widespread unfreedom.

Conclusion

As this chapter has demonstrated, there is a significant disjuncture between the reality of unfree labor today and its portrayal in both the neo-slavery and Marxist literatures. In the first case, failing to recognize that the "free market" has been built on unfreedom for millions of the world's poor, the neo-slavery literature neatly separates coercion and exploitation from processes of capitalist globalization by depicting "modern day slavery" as a static continuation of a transhistorical institution that appears totally separate from the contemporary global economy. This renders the literature incapable of accounting for the key economic, political, and social processes that have underpinned the proliferation of unfree labor in recent decades. Furthermore, depicting an "equal opportunity slavery" in which race and gender are no longer relevant dimensions of unfree labor, the literature fails to recognize the complex racialized and gendered social relations surrounding contemporary unfree labor. Finally, the literature's proposed solutions to modern-day slavery suggest that unfree labor could be eliminated through the promotion of

79 wage-labor and an expansion of the market, overlooking both the tendency for market expansion to give rise to unfree labor, as well as the unfreedom inherent in wage-labor itself.

This disjuncture makes clear that rather than holding the capital-wage labor relationship as unqualifiedly free and then simply relegating various modalities of labor which deviate from the capital-wage relationship as instances of slavery, we need a broader and more systematic way to evaluate modalities of unfree labor, ways that can grasp the dynamic social relations surrounding unfree labor in concrete historical reality. However, and in the second case, while Marxist scholarship on unfree labor has created some helpful openings in this regard, the literature ultimately falls short of providing the dialectical forms of political economy explanation required to understand the fluidity of unfreedom in capitalist society. While Marxist debates have noted that the historical development of capitalism has involved various forms of unfree labor, and have been able to provide a transnational emphasis that connects various economic shifts to historical structures, the debates have been marred by methodological limitations that ultimately render them unable to understand and explain unfree labor today. These have included both the tendency to place ideal type categories prior to the actual historical reality in an attempt to develop fixed, cut to measure definitions of unfree labor, as well as a hierarchy of determination that subsumes gender and race into class.

Finally, it bears noting that while ILO, UN, and NGO reports are invaluable for empirical data on unfree labor, they provide little by the way of analysis. The limited analysis contained in ILO and UN reports, rather, reflects a key limitation of the neo-

80 slavery literature (which such reports are, in many ways, part of), seeing certain aspects of modern capitalism as abhorrent, whereas capitalism itself is not questioned. As Jens Lerche notes "this has had the effect of depoliticizing forced labor issues, isolating them as

"unnatural" elements of capitalism and avoiding politicization that could lead towards a general critique of capitalism" (2007: 7). The paucity of all three of these bodies of research to analyze and explain the reality of unfree labor and its relationship to the free market system implies that an alternative analysis, which can more accurately account for the dynamics of contemporary unfree labor, is necessary.

As the next chapter will argue, the move towards a theoretically and empirically coherent analytical approach to unfree labor relations requires conceptualizing unfree labor not an anomaly in global capitalism, but as something that has proliferated as part of over all societal transformation. Breaking from the formal abstractionism generally employed in

Marxist studies of unfree labor, such an approach could be fruitfully developed through a feminist historical materialist framework that conceives of the material foundation of social life as the productive and reproductive activities of everyday life, and emphasizes the ways that the conditions and organization of these activities are transformed by social struggles.

This framework would grasp free and unfree labor dialectically, as concepts that are worked and reworked in relation to the embodied labor involved in the making of US and world history rather than conceived of as ontologically distinct ideal types. As the research regarding race, gender, and unfree labor makes clear, such an approach would need to explore free and unfree labor in the context of an ensemble of social relations, affording a

81 deeper understanding of the fluidity of actually occurring levels of unfreedom than can be grasped through economism. It would also need to open up a methodological space to theorize liminal forms of labor, such as women's unpaid domestic labor and prison labor, which have hitherto been under-theorized in both the neo-slavery literature and Marxist theory.

82 Chapter 2: Labor, Unfreedom, and the Feminist Historical Materialist Method

When looking at the level of concrete historical analysis, neither the liberal nor the Marxist theories of unfree labor provide much by way of analytical clarity or insights. While on the one hand, the liberal literature severs unfree labor from the actually existing political economic system of which it is a part, Marxist accounts have tended towards a formal abstractionism that obscures more than it reveals about the specific history of labor and unfreedom throughout capitalism. As such, both approaches remain unable to explain the proliferation of unfree labor alongside the globalization of capitalist social property relations, and more directly relevant for our purposes, to explain the presence of unfree labor in the contemporary US and how this is organized by race and gender.

In order to understand unfree labor today, and its constituent role in the history of capitalism, there is a need to develop historically integrated, dialectical forms of explanation that veer away from economic reductionism and incorporate robust and nuanced social analysis. Since, when examining the contradictions and complexities of actually existing labor relations, the simplistic binaries and categorical ideal types utilized by both the neo- slavery and Marxist approaches become completely untenable, developing a deeper understanding of unfree labor also requires moving away from unhelpful dichotomies and acknowledging the fluidity of the actually existing levels of unfreedom that have characterized labor under capitalism. This implies a need for forms of thought that can

83 break down dualisms and destabilize static and classificatory approaches and that, rather than positing a dichotomy between capitalism and pre-capitalism on the basis of the presence of unfree labor, can begin to link the most unfree forms of labor that have characterized capitalism's historical development directly to the social relations of capitalism itself.

This premise of this chapter is that a fruitful starting point for developing such forms of explanation lies in the feminist historical materialist (FHM) approach. While feminist historical materialist work has rarely focused explicitly on unfree labor, I begin the chapter by arguing that nevertheless, it provides key insights and a strong analytical foundation for a study of labor and unfreedom in capitalism. Departing from many political economists' tendency to centralize a priori categories instead of exploring in historic specificity the social relations that have upheld and contested capitalism, feminist conceives of the material foundations of social life as the productive and reproductive activities of everyday life and emphasizes the ways that the conditions and organization of these activities are transformed by social struggle. In addition to FHM's general analytic strengths and innovations, I argue, the method also offers key insights to a study of labor and unfreedom. Most importantly, FHM's success in documenting unwaged domestic labor as a constituent part of the history of capitalism rather than something that exists as somehow separate from or outside of capitalism leads us towards the recognition that capitalism, as a mode of production in the historical sense, has involved various modalities of labor, each characterized by distinct forms of unfreedom.

84 I argue further, however, that the strength of these insights need to be built upon, and the scope and method of FHM need to be expanded in order to build a coherent analytical approach that can conceptualize and explain the full range of actually occurring levels of unfreedom associated with labor in capitalist society. In particular, there is a need to overcome the tendency within FHM to conceive of the constraints and exploitation that women face in relation to domestic labor as anomalous, and to develop a more systematic account of the similarities and dissimilarities of experience across the spectrum of modalities of labor exploitation in capitalism, recognizing that each involves distinctive forms and degrees of exploitation, immobility, devaluation, coercion, and is shaped by distinct racial hierarchies and gender orders. I argue that Marx's own method and writings about free and unfree labor are helpful here, and that, in particular, his ability to grasp the dialectic movement between waged and slave labor during his time of writing leads us away from binary thinking and towards a more systematic way to evaluate labor and unfreedom in capitalism. Integrating key insights from Marx's work into an FHM framework, this chapter develops a feminist historical materialist approach to labor and unfreedom that is uniquely suited to relate unfree labor to the overall development of the capitalist economy and is therefore the best foundation from which to explore the case study of prison labor which comprises the remainder of the thesis.

85 The Heuristic Advantages of Feminist Historical Materialism

In order to understand the key insights that FHM offers to a study of labor and

unfreedom, it will be helpful here to first outline the general methodological innovations of

feminist historical materialism and to grasp the strong analytic foundation that it offers to a

study of the global economy in more general terms. I will focus, in particular, on three

methodological innovations of FHM: (1) its centralization of the productive and

reproductive activities of everyday life as essential dimensions of the ontology of the global political economy; (2) its conceptualization of reproductive labor as a fundamental

component of the capitalist mode of production; and (3) its ability to grasp the complex

and multiple subjectivities and agencies of human subjects.

Before beginning, however, it is important to note that "feminist historical

materialism" is admittedly an imperfect designation since there are differences within the work that I am referring to with this term. I am using this shorthand, however, to refer to

the theorists and ideas associated with a political economy perspective that has emphasized the interdependence of both production and reproduction in capitalist society and, consciously breaking from the structuralism and formalism common to much Marxist political economy, has integrated into explanations of the global economy an analysis of the productive and reproductive activities of daily life as its material foundation.31 This tradition is intellectually rooted in feminist political economy but reaches its most robust

and theoretically coherent expression in more recent work that attempts to move beyond

31 See, for example: Bakker and Gill (2003); Bezanson and Luxton (2006); Armstrong and Armstrong (1983) Brenner and Laslett (1991).

86 early feminist political economy's narrow conceptualization of women's oppression and

exploitation in the capitalist economy,32 to develop an integrated analysis of the labor and

social relations involved in concrete and historically specific configurations of production

and reproduction in capitalist society. This body of work has also been referred to as "social

reproduction theory" (in, for example, Ferguson 1999; LeBaron 2010; Rioux 2009),

however, because there remains within feminist work a lack of heuristic clarity and

consistency in regards to the concept of social reproduction33, to avoid confusion, I will

refer to this group of theorists and ideas as feminist historical materialism. Isabella Bakker

and Stephen Gill articulate perhaps the clearest expression of this framework in Power,

Production and Social Reproduction (2003), where they synthesize and innovate upon earlier

debates in both feminism and historical materialism to outline a hybrid feminist historical materialist approach. For the sake of both clarity and brevity, my discussion of FHM will

draw heavily on this work.

First and most fundamentally, rather than attempting to understand and explain

the global political economy exclusively in terms of the interplay between states and markets as many contemporary Marxists do, FHM conceives of the material foundations of social life as the productive and reproductive activities of everyday life and emphasizes the ways that the conditions and organizations of these activities are transformed by social struggles. Rooted in the observation that political economy work has "largely failed to fully

32 For an excellent review of the limitations of early feminist political economy work, as well as for a genealogy of social reproduction theory, see Ferguson (1999). 33 For a good review of the various usages (and theoretical inconsistencies and confusions) of the concept of social reproduction within feminist political economy see Luxton (2006).

87 integrate into explanations of the restructuring of world society the analysis of

transformations in fundamental social processes, and the mechanisms and institutions

upon which societies and communities as well as power and production, are built" (Bakker

and Gill 2003: 3), and drawing attention to the senses in which "social relations are

transitory and are transformed through the activity of human beings, largely connected to

and constituted by production and social reproduction in a specified historical context,"

(2003: 22) FHM has challenged the tendency in much of political economy to omit from

their conception of capitalism any analysis of the social foundations of economic life.

Overcoming this crucial limitation, feminist historical materialist work has

emphasized the significance and historic specificity of the capitalist separation between the

productive and reproductive activities of everyday life, which lies at the heart of the

gendered and racialized divisions of labor involved in capitalist society (Coontz 1988; Mies

1999; Laslett and Brenner 1989) and has demonstrated that the gendered, classed, and

racialized character of this separation generates a fundamental contradiction between

capitalist accumulation and sustainable and progressive forms of reproduction for the

majority of the world's population (Bakker and Gill 2003; Mies 1999; Picchio 1992).

Noting that capitalism, as a mode of production in the historical sense, has involved

fundamental changes in the ways that people meet their subsistence and reproduce

themselves, and the role of the household within these strategies, feminist historical materialists have argued that the development of industrial capitalism has fundamentally

undermined the unity between production and reproduction that had previously existed, in

88 part, by separating spatially productive and reproductive activities, and eventually through

the privatization, subordination and theoretical occlusion of the latter (Federici 2004; Mies

1999). Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner note, for example, that during the rise of

industrial production in early modern England, as families lost the capacity to coordinate

productive and reproductive tasks as they lost control over productive property and work

processes to capitalist employers, the classed, gendered and racialized character of industrial

production created a conflict between the demands of reproduction and the demands of

production for capitalist accumulation (1989: 386-7, see also Federici 2004: ch. 3).34

Historic observations of this kind have allowed feminist historical materialists to

demonstrate that the specific forms that production has taken in various conjunctures of

,4 See, for example Laslett and Brenner (1989), Mies (1999). These accounts argue that in the preindustnal economy based on household production, home and commerce, production and social reproduction, women and men, were located in the same world of daily experience. Since the disembedding of the market from society involved a spatial separation of productive and reproductive activities (and eventually the privatization, subordination and theoretical occlusion of the latter), the development of industrial capitalism fundamentally undermined the unity between production and social reproduction that had previously existed. As a broad generalization needing many clarifications, men no longer organized the family labor but were instead the providers of income on which the household survived, while women took increasing responsibility for the education and training of children but rarely contributed to family enterprise. This peaked, in the 19th century, with Victorian models of femininity and the creation of the full-time housewife, redefining women's position in society and in relation to men Class-based and raciahsed social relations, however, mediated this model of domesticity (McChntock 1995; Federici 2004) and working class families rarely achieved the same kind of polarity between the home and the workplace that defined separate spheres in the middle class. Rather, before the consolidation of capitalism and the grounding down of petty capitalists by the factory system, working-class families exercised labor divisions, motherhood and sexuality in a different way, and while men and women did increasingly inhabit separate spheres, unlike middle-class wives, working- class women's sphere included a range of activities clearly crucial to the family's economic survival (Laslett and Brenner 1989, Federici 2004). Eventually, however, the bourgeois separation of commodity production from the reproduction of labor power extended too, to working class households, making possible the development of a specifically capitalist use of the wage and of markets as a means for the accumulation of married working- class women's unpaid labor. This shift, which played out through working class men's complicity in the new gendered division of labor, and struggles to outlaw women's participation in wage labor, also created a class of non-married proletarian women who had almost no access to wages, thus being forced into a condition of chronic poverty, economic dependence, and invisibility as workers (Federici 2004 75) There is much discussion about how and why these shifts in working-class households occurred, but the debates demonstrate that working-class meanings of masculinity and femininity were created by men and women in conflict with eachother and in shifting alliances over and against capitalist employers (Laslett and Brenner 1989)

89 capitalist society (as it has contradictorily developed across space and time conditioned by

social struggle) has been shaped by, and has shaped, the form that reproduction has taken

(Bakker 2007; Roberts 2008; Nakano Glenn 2002). Analysis of this kind also draws

attention to the ways in which class and gender relations have changed as a part of overall

patterns of social transformation.

Furthermore, a historical perspective linking capitalism and the reproductive

activities of daily life brings the dynamic relation between the two into clearer focus,

allowing FHM to question the changing nature and organizations of livelihood across time

and space and the ways in which these transformations correspond to reconstitutions of

social relations and subjects. While Marxists have explained the rise and reproduction of

capitalism primarily through the concept of production (especially through an analysis of

the rise the capital-wage labor relationship)— feminist historical materialists have

integrated into this historical account an analysis of social reproduction, a concept which

generally refers to at least three moments of reproduction: (1) human or biological

reproduction; (2) the reproduction of the labor force in the household and community; (3)

the social (re)production of social systems in their totality through time (Edholm, Harris,

and Young 1977; see also Luxton 2006; Bakker 2003). While for early feminist political

economists, starting from the observation that in capitalism, an enormous amount of

socially necessary labor—albeit unpaid, non-market labor—is performed in private households, usually by women, a primary intention of integrating an analysis of

reproduction was to correct "the sex-blindness of Marxist theory" by highlighting the roles

90 and experiences of women in the capitalist economy,35 more recent work has been more broadly focused on the inter-constitutions of production and reproduction as these form material foundations upon which states and markets rest (Bakker and Gill 2003: 4).

A second, and related analytical strength of the FHM approach is that it is well suited to grasping the dynamics and importance of diverse modalities of labor, especially unwaged labor, in the global political economy. While, as will be discussed in greater depth in a moment, conventional Marxist approaches tend to assign methodological primacy to the wage-earning class and have focused on the wage relationship itself as a defining feature of capitalism without taking into account the different modalities of unwaged labor upon which all production and exchange rest, FHM recognizes that such a focus reproduces the liberal binary between the private (non-capitalist household) and the public (capitalist factory) and fails to problematize how states, markets and households are interrelated

(Luxton 2006: 35-40). Underpinned by this observation, and its methodological commitment to centralizing the productive and reproductive activities of daily life, FHM has developed a much broader understanding of labor under capitalism than other forms of thought; an understanding that includes the relations of unwaged, not directly waged, and

35 For this reason, and because of the explicit link between socialist feminist scholarship during that time and the political project of women's liberation, it is not surprising that some early feminist epistemologies simply substituted gender in the place of class as the primary variable in their hierarchies of determination. While this early work went a long way towards highlighting the experiences and subjectivities of women in capitalism, and towards challenging their systematic erasure in abstract and yet totalizing Marxist theory, one outcome of this method, however, was to create a discursive reproduction of the public/private divide within academic literature: whereas feminist political economists theorized reproduction, households, and bodies, mainstream political economy maintained its focus on production, states, and markets, and almost nobody examined the articulations between these two realms.

91 highly precarious labor, as well as forms of work (such as domestic and sex work) which are

often conceived as existing somehow outside of the capitalist mode of production.

The roots of this broader conception of labor are visible in early feminist political

economy writing, in spite of the fact that much of this early work confined its investigations

to unpaid reproductive labor, documenting, for example, the oppression and exploitation

involved in household and caring labor, and the ways that domestic relations of unfreedom

contribute to the production of hierarchical relations of class and gender (Picchio 1992;

Armstrong 1996). More recently, FHM has begun to link the labor and oppression within

the household to other forms of racialized and gendered work in capitalism, both paid and

unpaid, such as sex work, care work, temporary foreign migrant work, and precarious labor

more generally (Agathangelou 2004; Bakker and Gill 2003; Bakan and Stasiulis 1997; Giles

and Arat-Koc 1994; Vosko 2010). While, as I will argue later in the chapter, FHM's

conception of labor could be even further broadened and its theoretical coherence even

further developed, the analytic strength of its premises and the depth and breadth of its empirical documentation provide a rich foundation, linking feminist insights on "waged and not-directly-waged labor to a nuanced, differentiated and class-based perspective on the global hierarchy of labor" (Bakker and Gill 2003: 6). This allows FHM to identify how

forms of production and exploitation of labor are related to class-based, racialized, gendered and sexualized aspects of labor supply and control, and to understand how relations of power apply differently to different workers.

92 In highlighting the significance of diverse modalities of labor in the development of capitalism, FHM is able to link oppression and exploitation across diverse contexts, spaces, and experiences, complicating and refining the homogenous, spatially narrow theorizations and representations of the "working class" that predominate and developing a strong foundation from which to interrogate the concrete histories of various modalities of labor in the development of capitalism. We will asses in greater depth the innovations and limitations of FHM's thinking about labor and unfreedom in a moment, but for now, suffice it to say that while Marxist accounts of free and unfree labor have tended to divorce the concept of labor from the bodies of those actually performing it—a tendency which is not unique to Marxist writing on labor but rather is related to a wider methodological shortcoming of much of 20th century Marxist analysis which often deploys key concepts such as "class," "exploitation," and in our case, "free" and "unfree" labor in ahistorical and abstract ways, using these concepts, as Ferguson has argued, as a sort of "counter-science to political economy rather than as a means of revealing the social relations they represent"

(1999: 6)—feminist historical materialism opens up a space to look at the concrete bodies associated with different modalities of labor and under different circumstances, unfettered by economistic concerns. Moving beyond the formalism of many Marxist analyses of capitalism, labor, and unfreedom and their tendency to place a priori categories prior to the actually existing experiences of social classes, FHM's analysis of daily life and the laboring bodies shaping and experiencing it offers a strong analytical foundation for developing a deeper understanding of capitalism, labor and unfreedom.

93 The third and final methodological strength of the FHM tradition I want to highlight here is feminist historical materialists' ability to grasp the complex and multiple subjectivities and agencies of human subjects. Unlike many streams of Marxism which emphasize the methodological primacy of a disembodied, abstract conception of class, feminist historical materialism conceives of capitalism as an ensemble of layered social relations, including the relations of race, class and gender, and has successfully documented the ways that race and gender have become organizing axes of oppression within capitalist life and labor. Feminist historical materialists, for example, have documented the historical continuities in the gendered and racial divisions of paid reproductive labor (Nakano Glenn

1992, 2002), the ways that gender, citizenship, and racialization shape the experiences and exploitations involved in domestic, sex, and other forms of precarious labor (Agathangelou

2004; Arat-Koc 2006; Bakan and Stasiulis 1997; Chang 2000; Vosko 2010), and, more recently, the violent and coercive gendered and racialized relations associated with the prison-industrial complex (Sudbury 2005; Gilmore 2007, 2009).

While it is true that early feminist political economy work focused more narrowly on the layering of class and gender, and while there does remain a need for FHM to further develop nuanced, historical and political conceptions of racialization in particular as a key dimension of capitalist domination, feminist historical materialist analysis has in recent years developed a "more rigorously materialist analysis that points to the consequences and inter-relations of different sites of oppression: class, race, nation and sexuality" (Goetz

94 1991: 151).36 While various streams of FHM have reoriented their analysis towards

addressing multiple subjectivities through different heuristic lenses, such as by developing

anti-racist feminist historical materialist epistemologies (Bakan 2008; Bannerji 2005), or

through a social ontology approach which combines the analysis of social relations of production with the role of human subjectivity and the way this is constituted and constrained by different moments of class formation, racialization, sexuality and gender

(Bakker and Gill 2003), the result has been that FHM, as a paradigm, has become epistemologically and ontologically more dynamic and better able to grasp the complex subjectivities and agencies of a wider range of human subjects. These developments make it possible to historicize the ways that class, race, and gender are constituted in and through each other differently in every spatial and temporal location, as well as to elucidate the significance of racial hierarchies and gender orders as these have become "centerpieces of capitalist rule" (McNally 2002: 127).

It bears noting here that underpinning feminist historical materialist's ability to grasp the complex and multiple subjectivities and agencies of human subjects is their methodological centralization of human bodies as crucial sites of political, economic and

36 It bears noting that this more rigorous and theoretically coherent forms of thought have developed, at least in part, in response to interventions by Black, queer and post-colonial feminisms which have highlighted the shortcomings of a "'women's' liberation project, as well as post-structural feminisms" interventions recognizing the socially constructed and fluid nature of identities. While further theonzation is needed, recent work in FHM exhibits promising momentum in that direction, and much work provides quite nuanced analysis of the inter-constitutions of race, gender, class and sexuality as well as greater theoretical coherence in regards to labor and racial and gender oppression (Bakan 2008; Nakano Glenn 2002; Agathangelou 2004). Furthermore, while rarely drawn on in contemporary FHM, it is important to acknowledge the foundational work of early anti-racist Marxist-Feminists like Angela Davis, Selma James, and Manarosa Dalla Costa also provide rich accounts and theonzations of race, gender and class that could be fruitfully brought together with, and lend greater analytic coherence to, current work in FHM.

95 social processes and contestations. While centralizing the body in analyses of social relations is not new or exclusive to FHM,37 and any genuinely dialectic conception of history and spatiality should account for this level of analysis, non-feminist political economy approaches have tended to focus on macro and meso analytical levels, and have often obscured the relevance of the micro level. Among other effects, this erasure has hidden and naturalized the sphere of human reproduction, as well as patriarchal and colonial violence. Opening the intellectual space within political economy to examine the ways in which various power regimes have been made manifest through coercion and the disciplining of human bodies, FHM asserts the centrality of the micro level in understanding the global political economy and is able to link the macro-structural to the micro-personal (Ferguson 2008; Ling 2000) through questions regarding the changing nature and organizations of livelihood and reproduction through time and space and the ways in which these transformations correspond to reconstitutions of social relations and subjects. FHM's ontological grounding of the body within capitalist development complicates the dialectic that non-feminist approaches posit between structure and agency, and enables us to understand how transformations from above and from below constitute capitalist globalization.

Sue Ferguson's recent article, "Canadian Contributions to Social Reproduction:

Feminism, Race, and Embodied Labor" (2008) neatly captures these heuristic strengths.

Rooted in an understanding of the economy not as a thing or structure, but a historically

37 Rather, it builds on Foucauldian approaches and even Marx's own approach (Fracchia 2008).

96 changeable set of social relations—the product of people's conscious practical activity—

Ferguson integrates a discussion of socio-geographic location into the social reproduction

feminism framework. She demonstrates that FHM's broad conception of labor allows us to

build an understanding of racialization into the "ground floor of , to establish a

method by which race and racism, like gender, can be present and accounted for in the

beginning" (Ferguson 2008: 54). Insofar as FHM foregrounds human agency and keeps its

focus securely on the social whole (which incorporates the economic, cultural, political and household practices and institutions associated with national and global capitalist

relations), she describes, "it provides a framework in which individual experiences are portrayed as discrete moments within a capitalist totality" (Ferguson 2008: 54-55); a totality comprising, in Bakker and Gill's words, "a certain contradictory unity, albeit a unity in diversity" (2003: 17).

In sum, as a method that conceives of capitalism as an ensemble of layered social relations and questions how these social relations are produced and reproduced, in large part through the productive and reproductive activities of daily life, feminist historical materialism attends to the incorporation of race and gender as fundamental organizing axes of the labor system, and, in turn, the ways that the labor system has been organized in ways that create and re-create race and gender categories and relationships. In short, because feminist historical materialism can grasp as internally and intimately related to capitalism the social relations that other approaches have externalized, and because it veers away from mechanical causality in attempt to capture the dynamic flux of social life, the framework

97 offers rich and dynamic theoretical tools with which to examine life and labor in the capitalist global economy.

Modalities of Labor and the Capitalist Mode of Production

In addition to FHM's general analytic strengths and innovations, the framework also offers key insights to a study of labor in the capitalist economy. Here, I will focus on the most fundamental and important of these insights—FHM's (sometimes implicit) recognition that capitalism, as a mode of production in the historical sense, has involved various modalities of labor, each involving distinct forms and layers of unfreedom. I will argue that FHM's success in documenting unwaged domestic labor as a constituent part of the history of capitalism, rather than something that exists as somehow separate from or outside of capitalism, as well as their recognition that labor cannot be explained as an ontologically distinct, anomalous phenomenon separate from the broader historic, economic and political circumstances surrounding it, leads us away from economistic concerns, formal and abstract debates and a priori categorizations, and towards greater analytical and historical clarity in regards to capitalism, labor and unfreedom. While most of FHM has focused more narrowly on unwaged domestic work, I argue that the strengths of their insights could to be built upon, and scope and method in regards to labor expanded, to build a coherent analytical approach that can conceptualize and explain the full range of actually occurring levels of unfreedom associated with labor in capitalist society. Here,

Marx's dialectic method, as well as his analysis of the analytical and historical movement between waged and chattel slave labor during his time of writing, can be fruitfully

98 integrated to develop a more systematic understanding of labor and unfreedom in capitalist development.

Marxist accounts of the rise and reproduction of capitalism have tended to ascribe methodological primacy to the capital/wage labor relation, stressing, contra the liberal notion that the capitalist is a timeless and natural feature of human society, that capitalism is in fact a historically specific mode of production and form of social and economic organization distinguished by the commodification of land and labor power and characterized by the capital/wage labor relation (Wood 2002; McNally 1993;

De Angelis 2007). Such accounts draw heavily from Karl Marx's analysis of the rise of capitalism, where, critiquing the liberal narratives that described its development as a spontaneous and relatively peaceful process, he pointed to the violence associated with a range of processes of "primitive accumulation" which separated people from the land and resources they once relied on for their subsistence and eventually compelled them to sell their labor-power on the market in exchange for a wage (Marx 1990: 873-6). It was only after this great historical dispossession, Marx argued, underpinned by a draconian legal code

(popularly know as the "bloody code" or "bloody legislation") that the market was able to emerge as the primary mechanism governing and disciplining the lives of the majority of the

English population, and that the capital-wage labor relationship emerged as capitalism's essential social relation. As Ellen Wood argues, "[t]he essence of Marx's critique of the classical political economists' 'so-called primitive accumulation' is ... that no amount of accumulation, whether from outright theft, from imperialism, from commercial profit, or

99 even from the exploitation of labor for commercial profit, by itself constitutes capital, nor will it produce capitalism," (Wood 2002: 36). Rather, the specific precondition of

capitalism is a transformation of social relations resulting from those historical processes through which "great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their subsistence and hurled onto the labor market as free, unprotected and rightless proletarians" (Marx

1990: 876) or, as described by David McNally, the processes which "bring about the separation of a large and growing proportion of the laboring population from means of production which could provide them with adequate subsistence" (1993: 7).38

Marxists' emphasis on the capital/wage labor relation as the central and definitive feature of the rise and reproduction of capitalism has been important insofar as it has enabled them to expose the capitalist economy as a human and historic organization and to document the histories and experiences of wage earning populations. At the same time, however, the methodological primacy ascribed to the capital/wage labor relation has also been problematic insofar as it has tended to obscure the reality that capitalism, as a mode of production, has also always involved other modalities of labor that do not conform to this relation, such as unpaid domestic labor and various other forms of unpaid, forced and/or bonded labor (Federici 2004; Mies 1998).

38 Marx is quite keen here to point out that central to the creation and naturalization of this relationship were violent processes of enclosure and dispossession through which direct producers were expropriated and a social transformation of the organization of agricultural production took place which involved a destruction of communal practices. The capital-wage relation, then, did not come about naturally but relied on previous moments of violent dispossession which ultimately resulted in the creation of free laborers who had "nothing left to sell but their own skin" (Marx 1990: 874). In short, as Marx describes, "it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, played the greatest part" (1990: 874), and that "capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, in blood and dirt" (1990: 926).

100 As a range of historians (Allen 1997; Linebaugh 2006; Linebaugh and Rediker

2000) have convincingly demonstrated, capitalism has always involved, and even at times has given rise to, modalities of labor that do not conform to the capital/wage labor relation.

This is clearly illustrated through feminist historical materialist attempts to document the ways in which capitalism has involved the widespread subjugation of women as the unpaid reproducers of the labor force, and further, how the rise and instantiation of the capitalist market in Europe frequently involved the simultaneous rise of an unpaid, and in many senses involuntary, class of domestic workers. In Caliban and the Witch (2004), for example, Silvia Federici makes a compelling case for the need to reconsider the history of primitive accumulation to account for the ways in which the separation of commodity production from the reproduction of labor power made possible the development of a specifically capitalist use of the wage and of the market as a means for the accumulation of women's unpaid labor, a dynamic she refers to as the "patriarchy of the wage"39 (Federici

2004: 68). She argues that while many women initially established greater independence through the rise of capitalism, as productive and reproductive activities became sexually differentiated and the carriers of different social relations in the late eighteenth century,

This is not to suggest, of course, that capitalism signified the beginning of gendered divisions of labor, but rather, is to note that the particular form that the gendered division of labor takes in capitalism has been part of a wider gender involving systematic female subordination. It is important to acknowledge, as David McNally (2006) does, that wherever systems of class differentiation have developed, male-dominated kinship networks have became the form in which private property is accumulated and transmitted across generations; there is indeed no record of a class-divided society which is not also male dominated. But while it is true that women's subordination to men has not been unique to capitalism, but rather is part of a patriarchal longue duree since it appears to have arisen thousands of years ago in many parts of the world, alongside the emergence of structures of social and class inequality, we can also map crucial shifts and discontinuities in the way this domination is organized and the originary moments of capitalism in early modern England certainly constituted one of these shifts.

101 and as women were increasingly excluded from waged occupations in many European states, the rise and expansion of capitalism and the wage earning class redefined women's position in society and in relation to men, violently disciplining their bodies and labor in the interests of capital accumulation. The sexual division of labor that emerged through these social transformations not only fixed women to reproductive work (peaking in the

19th century with the establishment of the full time housewife), but increased their dependence on men, enabling the state and employers to use the male wage as a means to command women's unpaid domestic labor (Federici 2004: 60-131). These shifts, which played out through working class men's complicity in the new gendered division of labor and struggles to outlaw women's participation in wage labor, also created a class of non- married proletarian women who had almost no access to wages, thus being forced into a condition of chronic poverty, economic dependence, and invisibility as workers (Federici

2004: 75). For these reasons, Federici argues, "if it is true that male workers became only formally free under the new wage-labor regime, the group of workers who, in the transition to capitalism, most approached the condition of slaves was working class women" (2004:

98).

The key insight here is the recognition that the specific form that the capital/wage labor relation took (as capitalism contradictorily unfolded across time and space) was intimately bound up with the specifically capitalist use of women's unpaid and socially devalued labor to reproduce the waged labor force, and therefore, the recognition that the spread of the capital/wage labor relation also involved the spread and institutionalization of

102 an unpaid, and in many senses coerced, modality of domestic labor. Thinking about the senses in which wage labor's specific form was shaped by, and also shaped, the specific form that non-waged, socially devalued household labor took leads us to the recognition that even in its origins, capitalism has involved modalities of labor that do not conform to the capital/wage labor relation, but nevertheless comprise a fundamental dimension of its form of social organization.

While seemingly obvious to anyone who grappled with the history of women's domestic labor in capitalism, or unwaged labor more broadly, the suggestion that capitalism involves diverse modalities of labor goes against the grain of much of Marxist thought about labor under capitalism. As noted in the previous chapter, rather than understanding capitalism as a social totality involving diverse forms of labor organization and surplus appropriation, these thinkers have often resolved the apparent contradiction of labor that does not conform to the capital/wage labor relation by externalizing it from the social relations of capitalism, understanding it, instead, to be a remnant of the feudal mode of production. Formal and abstract conclusions of this kind, however, provide little by way of analytical clarity or insights at the level of concrete historical analysis, and tend rather to unhelpfully fragment social reality into seemingly isolated, static, and dichotomous pieces, failing to recognize that productive and unproductive labor, men and women, are part of the same world of daily experience, even if not often portrayed as such in theory. Feminist historical materialism, contrarily, makes it clear that changes to the conditions and organization of both productive and reproductive activities have occurred as part of the

103 same overall pattern of social transformation associated with the rise of capitalism. Further,

noting that both forms of labor comprise essential dimensions the social foundations of

economic life, FHM is able to lend richer insight and a more unified explanation of social

transformation in multiple realms of society. Thus, if we veer away from economistic and

abstract concerns, and strive instead for robust and historically integrated forms of political

economy explanation, the apparent contradiction of capitalism's diverse modalities of labor

disappears since we can understand capitalism as a mode of production in the historical and

epochal, rather than the technical and economistic sense of the term that is often put forth

in contemporary Marxist analysis.

As Jarius Banaji has argued, while Marxist work has tended to conflate the two,

Marx in fact ascribed two distinct meanings to the concept of mode of production. While

one of these meanings was "indistinguishable from the 'labor process'" (Banaji 1977: 4), the

other usage carried a broader and more specifically historically meaning "of a period or

epoch of production, a social form of production" (1977: 4-5). While it is outside the scope

of this paper to engage with the "modes of production" debate of which Banaji's work was a

crucial part, it should be clear from the previous chapter's discussion of the Marxist unfree

labor debates that this group of thinkers tend to utilize the former meaning of mode of production, determining whether something is capitalist or non-capitalist based on the

form of surplus appropriation in the labor process, (i.e. based on the quantitative presence

of the capital/wage labor relation). But building on Banaji's analysis of Marx's second

meaning of mode of production, Abigail Bakan explains, "the critical feature in defining the

104 capitalist mode of production in the historical sense is not the presence of wage labor as a phenomenon, but the social relationship between wage labor and capital" (1987: 77). She argues further, "It is not the form in which labor is performed that distinguishes, for example, the feudal mode of production from the capitalist mode. More importantly, the labor process does not determine the specific laws of motion which compel the process of surplus extraction to be conducted in a given way" (1987: 77). Stated differently by Phillip

McMichael, "With respect to the industrial capitalist regime, whereas metropolitan wage- labor historically anchors world capitalist relations, it is not the sole form of labor involved in global commodity production. In temporal terms, wage and non-wage forms of labor coexist within the same universe of value relations, each influencing the other" (1991: 325).

When mode of production is understood in this epochal sense rather than in the technical and economistic sense that Marxist writers generally use it, it is indeed possible for the capitalist mode of production to involve diverse modalities of labor.

This is clearly illustrated by Robin Blackburn's major study The Overthrow of

Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848, which demonstrates that "at least nine-tenths of American slaves were put to commodity production"—a situation he defines as "systemic slavery" linked to plantations and commodity production which were dominant by the eighteenth century (1988: 7, 9). Because the slaves of the New World "were economic property and the main motive for slaveholding was economic exploitation," the species of slavery that prevailed in the Americas in the eighteenth century, therefore, should not be seen as a relic of the Ancient of medieval world where slavery was ancillary (1988: 9). This study

105 powerfully documents the systematic rise and expansion of a system of unfree labor and positions it at the very heart of commodity production— as responsible for supplying the most coveted and economically important items in Atlantic and European commerce

(1988:3).

Bakan's (1987) case study of Jamaican plantation slavery in the early eighteenth century further illustrates this point. She argues that while, as a system based on slave labor fostered during the rise of a system based fundamentally on the of labor, plantation slavery appears as an anomaly in the development of capitalist production:

if we understand wage labor as 'capital-positing labor', and not simply as paid labor in wages, then the apparent anomaly disappears. Jamaican slavery can be identified as part of the general historic epoch during which capitalism became predominant as a 'mode of production' on a world scale. Yet the specific form of labor exploitation was not marked by the wage labor/capital relationship. (1987: 81)

"The slaves," she continues, "were not wage laborers, but without the existence of the wage labor/capital social relation, slave labor could not have been capital-producing labor. Were it not for the general contribution of wage labor to the expansion of capitalist production, slavery would not have been part of the capitalist mode of production in the historical, epochal sense of the term" (1987: 85). The key point here is to note that the deployment of labour is correlated with modes of production in complex ways. In Banaji's words, "Not only are modes of production not reducible to forms of exploitation, but the historicalforms of (relations of production in the conventional sense) lie at a completely different level of abstraction from the numerous and specific ways in which labour is or can be deployed" (2010: 6, his emphasis).

106 It was from a similar vantage point that Marx drew a distinction between the pre­ capitalist slavery of antiquity, and plantation slavery in the Americas:

In antiquity, one could buy labor, a slave, directly; but the slave could not buy money with his labor. The increase of money could make slaves more expensive, but could not make their labor more productive. Negro slavery...presupposes wage labor, and if other, free states with wage labor did not exist alongside it, if, instead the Negro states were isolated, then all social conditions there would immediately turn into pre-civilized forms. (Marx 1991: 224)

Here, he is noting that the specific form that slave labor took in that particular moment was shaped by the specific form that the social relationship between wage labor and capital took at the same time. In another passage, he notes that, "While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact the veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New

World as its pedestal" (1990: 925, emphasis added). Or, in yet another quote, "As soon as peoples whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave labor ... are drawn into a world market dominated by a capitalist mode of production ... the civilized horrors of overwork are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery" (1977: 345). Rather than representing a lag in modernity, or an anomalous phenomenon autonomous from the mode of production in which it was located, for Marx, unfree labor was actually a central component in modernization and the spread of global capitalism. Thus, despite differing forms of labor organization and differing processes of surplus extraction, wage labor and plantation slavery are conceived here as separate, but dialectically related, modalities of

107 labor characterized by a single mode of production in the historical, epochal sense in which

Marx uses the term.

This is, of course, not to imply that the very real distinctions between wage labor and plantation slavery can be overlooked or subsumed in a single analytical category.

Rather, it is to note that capitalism has involved diverse modalities of labor, characterized by different forms of surplus extraction, and distinctive forms and degrees of exploitation, immobility, devaluation, and coercion, and that furthermore, these modalities of labor have evolved in and through each other as part of overall processes of social transformation. Or, in Banaji's words, "modes of production have to be constructed as objects of much greater complexity" (than is typical of most Marxist explanations) (2010: 6). Such a recognition is implicit in FHM work, and indeed, has been extensively documented empirically through their work on domestic labor, for example. However, for all of its strengths, a key limitation of FHM work has been that in the absence of a more systematic analysis of unfreedom and greater analytical clarity regarding the broader implications of such a recognition, authors have tended not to emphasize the continuities of experience that exist across the spectrum of labor organization and surplus extraction in capitalism, and have tended to examine the unfreedom and constraints involved in reproductive labor in relative isolation of the unfreedom across other forms of labor organization and surplus extraction.

Because unwaged reproductive labor is often portrayed as the anomalous deviation from waged, productive labor, wherein the latter appears as relatively free and the former relatively and uniquely unfree, there has been a subtle but significant tendency within FHM

108 to map a series of binaries (such as free and unfree, waged and unwaged, male and female)

onto the binary between productive and reproductive labor. This has limited the scope and

extent of FHM's insights related to labor, and in particular, its ability to recognize the

continuities and discontinuities within reproductive labor (for example, the Black slave in

the antebellum South vs. the white, middle class post World War II housewife) as well as

across modalities of labor more generally. It has also meant that FHM has rarely offered a

systematic critique of the unfreedom that characterized capitalism in general, occasionally

leading authors to suggest that if reproductive labor could simply be remunerated through

wages and brought into the capitalist marketplace in a more formal and explicit way, then it

might cease to be exploitative, overlooking the real coercion, alienation, dehumanization

and exploitation that often characterizes wage labor in capitalism.

Yet, while acknowledging the need to overcome binary thinking and to build on the

strengths of feminist historical materialists' insights, FHM nevertheless remains an ideal

methodological framework and set of ideas with which to examine life and labor in

capitalism for the reasons outlined above, and, in particular, because it offers a form of political economy explanation that veers away from economic reductionism and

incorporated nuanced social analysis. While rarely explicitly drawn upon in feminist work

(perhaps because of his failure to analyze reproductive labor or the processes of social

reproduction processes more broadly in any meaningful way), Marx's work actually lends key insights that can help FHM to incorporate a more systematic analysis of labor and

unfreedom. Grasping the fluidity of unfreedom that existed across waged and slave labor

109 during his time of writing, and noting that these modalities of labor existed, both analytically and historically, in dialectic tension with one another, Marx's work offers a broader and more systematic way to evaluate labor and unfreedom in capitalism. Moving away from binary categorization, and constructing categories to reflect the actually existing, embodied labor of his historical era, Marx is able to make sense of the fluidity and messiness of unfreedom, exploitation, coercion and constraint that characterized daily life in his time of writing, noting the similarities of experience that existed while still acknowledging key differentiations.

Marx, Labor and Dialectics

"There is a temptation, reflected in language, to treat universals as connoting fixed or static features of the world; to grasp (begreifen) something through a (universal) concept

(Begriff) is to grip the thing in thought, to get a hold of it, to hold it still. Marx," Alan

Nasser argues, "resisted the temptation" (1975: 492). Rather than using fixed, apriori, once and for all applicable categorizations, Marx substantiated his concepts in relation to the concrete, embodied social relations surrounding him during his time of writing, and the meanings of his categories changed and evolved throughout his texts. McNally reminds us that, "as every serious reader of Capital knows, no category—commodity, value, capital, and so on—can be grasped definitionally. The attentive reader must try to enter into the very movement of Marx's thoughts, following the exhaustion of categories that are supplanted by higher ones, attending closely to the dialectical transitions that complicate the story and precise earlier formulations" (2004: 151).

110 Understanding Marx's method is critical to grasping the depth and significance of his insights related to labor and unfreedom in capitalism. While many Marxists have attempted to extract fixed and cut to measure definitions of free and unfree labor from

Marx's writings, these efforts have actually gone against both Marx's method and trajectory of thought, and the end result of such attempts are static and dualistic ideal types constructed prior to historical analysis that have generally failed to grasp the nuanced and dynamic complexities of Marx's concepts as they emerge and are developed throughout his texts. Without collapsing the important distinctions between the two, Marx considers free and unfree labor neither to be analytically distinct nor historically separated, positing a dialectic relationship rather than an ontologically autonomous one. In doing so, Marx's writing provides insights that help us to grasp the dialectic movement between free and unfree labor, capturing the continuous of both while maintaining the very important distinctions that exist between them in any given historical era, as categories developed and reworked in relation to the embodied labor involved in the making of the real world.

While Marx certainly uses the adjective "free" to describe wage labor, unlike liberal and Marxist writings on unfree labor that have tended to accept free wage labor in capitalism as homogenously and (relatively) unqualifiedly free, and then relegate labor scenarios where unfreedom is present as disconnected instances of "slavery" or unfree labor,

Marx's use of the adjective "free" does not suggest a binary between (free) waged and

(unfree) slave labor. Rather, though the tone of his writing is often overlooked, his usage of

111 the term "free labor" varies between scathing irony that gestures towards the severe constraints that wage laborers experience in both the realms of production and exchange, and more direct comparisons between waged labor and slavery. Marx is eager to emphasize that certain qualities and dynamics associated with slavery are also present in the capital/wage labor relationship, and that, in many senses, "free" wage labor is not really free at all.

Marx contends that rather than involving actual freedom, the emergence of wage labor constituted a mere transformation of the form of people's servitude in comparison to feudal society: "The starting-point of the development that gave rise both to the wage- laborer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker. The advance made consisted in a change in the form of this servitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation" (1990: 875). Marx argued that while in feudalism there was little mystification of people's enslavement, in capitalism it appears on the surface as though people are freely entering in a voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange. But, noting the real and severe layers of unfreedom governing this exchange, Marx contends that the appearance is deceptive: "The relation of exchange between the capitalist and worker becomes a mere semblance belonging only to the process of circulation, it becomes a mere form, which is alien to the content of the transaction itself, and merely mystifies it" (1990:

730). Or, in another passage: "All the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalism's illusions about freedom, all the apologetic tricks of vulgar economics, have as their basis the

112 form of appearance discussed above, which makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed

presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relations" (1990: 680). Rather than

amounting to a genuine liberation from the bondage of feudal society, Marx argued that wage labor literally dehumanizes people by taking from them their "advantage over animals"

(1991: 114) since their ability to produce is used to realize the purposes of the capitalist, for whom the worker's life activity is a use-value.

In concrete reality, Marx notes, the "freedom" of wage labor is conditioned and cut

short by real and corporeal coercion, constraint, and actually existing unfreedom. Eager to emphasize that certain qualities and dynamics associated with slavery are also present in the capital/wage labor relationship, and that in many senses, "free" wage labor is not really free at all, Marx's writing points to constraints and coercion across at least three planes, offering a more systematic means by which we can evaluate and assess freedom and unfreedom in labor. He examines: (1) the compulsions and coercion underpinning people's entrance into labor contracts or situations and their inability to leave the contract; (2) the social relations surrounding their experience in the sphere of circulation; (3) the conditions involved in, and their experience of, the labor process itself.

In the first case, pointing to the violence associated with a range of processes of

"primitive accumulation" which separated workers from the land and resources they once relied on for their subsistence and eventually compelled workers to sell their labor-power on the market in exchange for a wage (1990: 873-6), Marx argued that it was not an "" which peacefully coordinates economic activities, but rather, individual's conditions

113 of livelihood and choices (particularly the choice to enter the wage labor market) were shaped and underpinned by violence, disciplinary legal codes, and a set of social property relations where there is little option other than to submit to the discipline of the capitalist labor process. Rather than occurring instantaneously, Marx notes that the making of capitalism's historically specific market in labor wherein an essential part of the life-activity of human beings (often described as human labor power) is sold in exchange for wages actually involved dispossession and coercion over many hundreds of years. As he describes,

"Centuries are required before the 'free' worker, owing to the greater development of the capitalist mode of production, makes a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by social conditions, to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labor, in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage"

(1990: 382). Or, in another passage, "These newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire" (1990: 875).

By highlighting the currents of coercion and dispossession that underpin workers' submission to wage labor, Marx denaturalizes something that is often taken for granted in accounts of free and unfree labor, that is, the peculiarity and historic specificity of a market in labor, and the violence, coercion and dispossession that underpinned it.

These historic observations about the coercion and dispossession underpinning the rise of the capital/wage labor relation, and more generally, the spread and instantiation of

114 capitalist social relations, in fact form the basis of the first layer of unfreedom that Marx identifies as being involved in the wage labor relation itself. Drawing attention to the specific forms of compulsion and coercion underpinning people's entrance into labor contracts, he sarcastically describes the wage-laboring class that emerged in early modern

England as the "free and rightless " and points out that while wage laborers are juridically free individuals with the right to contract and sell their labor power, they are also

"freed of the means of their own subsistence," that is, they have been dispossessed of direct access to the means of producing directly for themselves. Challenging the notion that people engage in wage labor "voluntarily", Marx notes that the dispossession underpinning the creation of the labor market has left the majority of people no choice but to sell their own labor power, or, as he notes, "nothing left to sell but their own skins" (1990: 874). In short, as he describes, "it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, played the greatest part" (1990: 874).

The second, and closely related, layer of unfreedom that Marx identifies follows from lacking direct access to the means of subsistence and shapes people's experiences in the sphere of circulation. Marx argues that while the laborer appears "free" to enter and exit the labor market, he is not free in that he has no alternative but to keep entering the market over and over again. In short, "The wage-laborer is bound to his owner by invisible threads.

The appearance of independence is maintained by a constant change in the person of the individual employer, and by the legal fiction of a contract" (1990: 723). Or, in another passage, "In reality, the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to the capitalist.

115 His economic bondage is at once mediated through, and concealed, by the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and the oscillations in the market-price of his labor" (1990: 723). Freedom in wage contracts, Marx tells us, only exists from the standpoint of circulation (1990: 519) and "where the labor of children is concerned, even the formality of a voluntary sale vanishes" (1990: 724, n20). Similarly, he reminds us that when children and young people enter the labor market, the male worker becomes a "slave dealer" (1990: 519). Thus, while wage laborers are juridically free, and can, in theory, refuse to contract, Marx notes that the juridical freedom between wage-laborers and capitalists actually mystifies the deeply rooted constraints and limitations that govern this relationship, in particular, that wage laborers are left little alternative and often have no choice but to spend their lives entering and re-entering the dynamics of wage labor.

Finally, a third layer of unfreedom emerges when Marx considers the commodification of labor power, drawing our attention to the conditions shaping, and experiences of, the labor process itself. While liberals argue, and on the surface, it appears that laborers and capitalists enter the market-place as equals each with commodities to exchange (the laborer, her labor power, and the capitalist, money), Marx notes that this

"relation of exchange between capitalist and worker becomes a mere semblance belonging only to the process of circulation, it becomes a mere form, which is alien to the content of the transaction itself, and merely mystifies it" (1990: 730). Because labor power is in fact an inaliable commodity—that is, the worker cannot sell his commodity except by selling himself for sacrificed periods of his life—Marx argues that the exchange of labor power for

116 wages is not in fact an equal exchange, either in value or form (1990: 676). Furthermore, the commodification of labor power involves subjecting the labor process to direct control and supervision, since "in exchange for wages, those who sell their labor power surrender to the capitalist ultimate control over the work to be done, its conditions, pace and organization" (McNally 2006: 89).

Writing about factory conditions in early modern England, Marx notes that wage labor, like slavery, involves distinctive forms and degrees of coercion, alienation, dehumanization, and exploitation. In particular, he describes how, following from the capitalists' goal in production (to appropriate the of workers' unpaid labor) to maximize the amount of surplus labor they appropriate from the worker, work processes are often divided and compartmentalized, and involve strict time disciplines and other measures to limit the workers' freedom and choices in the production process. As workers' bodies are subordinated to machinery and the labor process is subsumed so as to minimize human will, choice, and freedom, he argues that:

all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers; they distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labor by turning it into a torment, they alienate him from the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labor process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into , and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital. (1990: 798)

Noting that the capitalist production process is characterized by alienation, Marx argued,

"What we are confronted by here is the alienation of man from his own labor ... the worker

117 is a victim who confronts it [alienation] as a rebel and experiences it as a process of enslavement" (1990: 990).

What is crucial throughout his analysis is Marx's eagerness to emphasize that certain qualities and dynamics typically associated with unfree labor, are in fact also present, albeit to a far lesser extent, in the capital/wage labor relation. This, as well as the historical connections that Marx makes between "free" wage labor and plantation slavery during his time of writing, summarized earlier in the chapter, highlights the need to reject a dichotomy between free and unfree labor, and to grapple instead with the distinct forms of coercion, alienation, dehumanization, constraint, and exploitation that characterize the spectrum of modalities of labor involved in the capitalist mode of production in the historical sense.

Methodologically, it forces us not to conceive of free and unfree labor in binary terms, but rather as part of a continuous spectrum, involving various modalities of labor, formally free and unfree, and to investigate modalities of labor dialectically as they have changed and evolved as part of the overall social transformations throughout the history of capitalist development.

Conceiving of waged labor and other modalities of labor dialectically means that unfree labor cannot be explained as an ontologically distinct, anomalous phenomenon separate from the broader historic, economic and political circumstances surrounding it.

Dialecticizing the relationship between the capital/wage labor relation and the other modalities of labor that have characterized capitalism's historical development, rather, means acknowledging that free and unfree labor are: "relations, containing in themselves, as

118 integral elements of what they are, those parts with which we tend to see them externally

tied" (Oilman 1976: 15). Conceptually, this involves, "a change of focus...from viewing

independent factors which are related to viewing the particular way in which they are

related in each factor, to grasping this tie as part of the meaning conveyed by its concept.

This does not rule out the existence of a core notion for each factor, but treats this core

notion itself as a cluster of relations" (Oilman 1976: 15). Redialecticizing free and unfree

labor implies the need to construct and rework categories in relation to the actually

embodied labor to which they refer, rather than drawing on a priori and abstract ideal types.

For this reason, while the more sophisticated attempts to define the concept of

"unfree" labor, such as Robert Miles' book Capitalism and Unfree Labor: Anomaly or

Necessity? (1987), are helpful at an abstract level, they may or may not capture the full range

and fluidity of unfreedom existing at the concrete level of daily life. According to Miles, for

instance, the concept of free labor refers to labor which circulates in a labor market, wherein

"formally, the individual can freely choose an employer, subject to the economic constraints

operating within that market at any given time, and is not subject to direct politico-legal

compulsion requiring him/her to make labor available either generally or to a specific

employer" (1987: 31). Key to Miles' understanding of free labor is the notion that the

constraint or compulsion present is strictly economic because "the individual has no means

of obtaining the means of subsistence other than by selling labor power in exchange for

money with which to purchase in commodity form those items essential to material

reproduction" (1987: 31). The concept of unfree labor is then differentiated by the absence

119 or compounding of this economic coercion with the presence of direct physical and/or

politico-legal compulsion to acquire and exploit labor power. Put another way, relations of

production characterized by direct domination can be referred to and understood as unfree

labor (1987: 32). Such a separation is very clear and straightforward, and allows Miles to

shed light on the historical case study he explores in his work. At the same time, and while

Miles' work does emphasize deep historical relations between free and unfree labor in his

time of writing, analytically, he seems to understand these as ontologically separate phenomena. But Marx's work make it clear that conceptually speaking, while each can have

a core relation, each also contains in themselves, as integral elements of what they are, those parts with which we tend to see them externally tied. Furthermore, he highlights the need

to substantiate and develop concepts in relation to the concrete, embodied social relations surrounding in a given historical era, and that the meanings of categories can change and evolve as does the real world.

In sum, rather than representing a lag in modernity, or an anomalous phenomenon autonomous from the mode of production in which it was located, for Marx, unfree labor was actually a central component in modernization and the spread of global capitalism, dialectically related to "free" waged labor during his time of writing. His method and trajectory of thought lead us away from fragmented and dichotomous explanation and towards the conceptualization of a continuous spectrum of labor organization and surplus appropriation in capitalism, and the recognition that more than one modality can comprise key dimensions of capitalism's form of social organization in various concrete moments,

120 and furthermore, that each modality can contain continuous properties and continuities of experience. In Marx's words, speaking of the industrial revolution, the social mode of production consists of "a variegated medley of transitional forms," as diverse as handicrafts, domestic work, and factory work (1990: 602).

Given that the goal of this thesis is to explain the presence of unfree labor in the contemporary US and how this is organized by race and gender, Marx's insights can be best made use of here when integrated into a feminist historical materialist method that centralizes and attempts to explain the unfreedom associated with both the productive and reproductive activities of daily life and can attend to the incorporation of race and gender as fundamental organizing axes of the labor system, and, in turn, the ways that the labor system has been organized in ways that create and re-create race and gender categories and relationships. While Marx offers a more systematic account of labor and unfreedom than

FHM does, FHM provides a more holistic conception of the social totality and is able to explain the ways that social relations are transformed through the activity of human beings connected to and constituted by production and social reproduction in specific historic contexts, identifying how forms of production and exploitation of labor are related to class- based, racialized, gendered and sexualized aspects of labor supply and control, both of which are fundamental to the project of this thesis.

Conclusion Breaking from the formal abstractionism generally employed in Marxist studies of unfree labor, this chapter has argued that a feminist historical materialist method that

121 conceives of the material foundation of social life as the productive and reproductive activities of daily life, and emphasizes the ways that the conditions and organization of these activities are transformed by social struggle, offers a strong analytic foundation and key insights to a study of labor and unfreedom in capitalism. Notable in the documentation of unwaged domestic labor as a constituent part of the history of capitalism rather than something that exists as somehow separate from or outside of capitalism, as well as FHM's recognition that capitalism, as a mode of production has involved diverse modalities of labor, FHM leads us away from economistic concerns, formal and abstract debates and a priori categorizations, and towards greater analytical and historical clarity in regards to capitalism, labor and unfreedom. Observing that the move towards a theoretically and empirically coherent analytical approach to unfree labor relations requires conceptualizing unfree labor not as an anomaly in global capitalism, but as something that has proliferated as part of overall societal transformation, I've argued that FHM's centralization of the productive and reproductive activities of daily life and emphasis on the ways' that the conditions and organizations of these activities change through social struggle, provides a very useful theoretical premise from which to examine unfreedom in labor processes associated with the capitalist mode of production in the historical sense.

While FHM work has rarely analyzed explicitly unfree labor as such, I have argued that there exists within FHM the possibility of developing a unique form of political economy explanation that is able to offer deeper explanations of unfree labor than those utilized by both the neo-slavery and Marxist approaches. This possibility can be realized by

122 developing a more systematic understanding of labor and unfreedom that moves away from

unhelpful dichotomies and acknowledging the fluidity of the actually existing levels of

unfreedom that have characterized labor under capitalism, such as through Marx's dialectic

method. Acknowledging the analytical and historical connections between wage labor and slavery in his time of writing, Marx's dialectical method can grasp the continuities of experience that exists across modalities without collapsing the very real and significant discontinuities and differences that exist. Since, when examining the contradictions and complexities of actually existing labor relations many forms of labor (such as domestic labor) do not fit neatly into the categorical ideal types utilized by both the neo-slavery and

Marxist approaches, Marx's ability to conceptualize the continuities and discontinuities that exist across the continuum of forms of labor organization and surplus extraction in the capitalist mode of production is fundamental to understanding the history of unfree labor throughout capitalist development.

Exploring free and unfree labor in the context of an ensemble of social relations, including gendering and racialization, FHM affords a deeper understanding of the fluidity of actually occurring levels of unfreedom than can be grasped through economism.

Furthermore, FHM opens up a methodological space to theorize liminal forms of labor, such as women's unpaid domestic labor and prison labor, which have hitherto been under theorized in Marxist theory. For these reasons, the feminist historical materialist approach developed through this chapter is uniquely suited to relate unfree labor to the overall

123 development of the capitalist economy and is therefore the best foundation from which to explore the case study of prison labor which comprises the remainder of the thesis.

124 Part II: Prison Labor in Historical Perspective

Comparing two photographs of Angola, Louisiana, one from the 1890s and one from the year 2000, the frequency and candor with which contemporary prison labor in the United

States is associated with slavery is easy to understand. In both photographs black men pick cotton by hand; in the first photo, as slaves on a plantation, in the second photo, as convict laborers on a prison farm. The land has remained unchanged: Angola prison's 18,000-acre farm is a composite of several slave plantations, bought up and converted in the decades after the Civil War, and has grown cotton, wheat, soy and corn for nearly two centuries.

For equally as long, dark skinned bodies have worked the land under threat of violence, paid pennies or not at all, first as slaves, then as convict-lessees, and today, as prison laborers.

Indeed, in the case of Angola, the continuities across time are so obvious and striking that it begins to be clear why, in spite of the frequency of references to slavery in writings on prison labor, few authors noting that prison labor constitutes a form of "modern day slavery" have put forth a systematic argument for this seemingly self-evident claim.

In spite of these similar forms of appearance, however, because the structures and social forces of domination coercing and confining these laboring bodies have not remained stagnant but have changed radically over time, the continuity in racialized unfree labor cannot be taken for granted as something that has merely persisted into the present, but rather is a phenomena which requires explanation. Furthermore, outside of Angola, in the prison factories and fields of , California, New York, Virginia, and the many other

US states which mandate prison labor today, the contemporary and historic links between

125 prison labor and slavery are not always so clear cut and obvious. At first glance, for example,

Washington state prisoners packaging commodities in factories for US corporations appear

to have more in common with their wage-laboring colleagues doing similar work outside of

bars today than they do with historic plantation slavery, which is perhaps what is leading so

many authors to claim that factory prison work is a "new" form of slavery.40 Deeper historical investigation, however, reveals that this specific form of factory prison labor also

has a historic precedent in the expansive industrial prison contracting systems of the

northern states in the late 19th century, which arose and was institutionalized in the context

of attempting to discipline immigrants and social deviants into a wage-earning class

(Gildemeister 1987). The connections between prison labor and slavery, therefore, cannot be uncovered through surface comparisons, or heuristically vague analogies to plantation slavery which position prison labor as its anomalous, contemporary form. Rather, there is a

need to clarify the real historical connections that do exist through a more systematic

account of labor and unfreedom in the historic development of the US, and in particular, by developing a clearer understanding of the diverse modalities of convict labor that have proliferated in various eras of US history and the constituent role that these have played in the country's capitalist development.

40 Journalistic and popular accounts have referred to factory prison workers today, for example, as "a new kind of wage slave" (Brink 2008) and "a slave labor force for the corporate New World Order" (Overbeck 1996). Such accounts generally emphasize that prison workers are largely black and are not paid, and therefore, it is argued, prison labor is analogous to slavery. It is not clear, however, what exactly is continuous or dissimilar in relation to chattel slavery, nor what is continuous or dissimilar from other forms of labor exploitation in the contemporary period besides the obvious fact that prisoners labor behind bars.

126 Contributing a much needed historical perspective to prison labor literatures, this section of the dissertation argues that a fruitful starting point for elucidating the historical and heuristic connections between slavery and convict labor can be found in an examination of the mass rise of convict labor following the formal abolition of slavery during the Reconstruction and Progressive Eras in the United States.41 Exploring these developments within the broader context of the solidification of a juridically free wage laboring class, and exploring the ways that various modalities of convict labor both shaped and were shaped by broader social relations of race, gender, property, penalty, and class discipline, this section builds the historical foundation for the study of contemporary prison labor later in the thesis. It is, in particular, concerned to develop historical insights into two questions that will be posed in the final chapters of the thesis. First, how did it come to be that after a century and a half of drastic social, political and economic transformation in the United States, dark skinned bodies are still laboring under highly unfree conditions, in and outside of prison? Secondly, what should we make of the continuities of experience that exist between these modalities of convict labor and "free" capital-positing wage labor outside of prison? In other words, how did it come to be that in many cases, juridically free wage laborers are subject to similar (albeit often less directly coercive) forms of confinement, regimentation, discipline, and oppression as is used in

41 The refers to the period between the 1865 end of the Civil War to roughly 1880, characterized by the reconstruction policies designed to integrate the former confederate states into the union, and, more generally, to rebuild the country in the aftermath of the war. This period was directly followed by the Progressive Era, which lasted roughly until 1920, characterized by widespread modernization. This chapter, then, is meant to cover (in broad historical strokes) the development of convict labor between roughly 1865 and 1920. See Nakano Glenn (2002) for a more detailed description of key political, economic, and cultural features of the various eras.

127 forced labor as punishment for crime? In posing questions about how we can understand

the continuities and discontinuities in unfree labor across various epochs of US history, this

study of prison labor shifts the focus away from technical and quantitative concerns with

the question of whether prison labor is or is not "slavery" and aims, instead, to capture key

dimensions of the historic arc of unfreedom that has characterized daily life for certain

segments of the US population over the past century and a half and to explain how and why

this unfreedom has come to be.

The section consists of two chapters. Because quite significant legal, social, and

ideological differences underpinned the institutionalization of specific forms of convict

labor in the US South vs. the US North, I explore each of these in turn. Chapter Three

examines the emergence and widespread utilization of the convict lease system in the US

South, whereby states leased large blocs of prisoners to private corporations who were then

responsible for their supervision, securitization, and exploitation during labor processes.

Chapter Four examines the expansive industrial prison contracting systems that flourished in

almost all Northern states between 1820-1900, through which private companies built

factories inside of state or federal prisons. The aim of these chapters, and of the section in general, is not to provide a comprehensive history of prison labor as this has already been

done in far more detail, nuance and depth than would be possible in these pages.42 The purpose is, rather, to come to greater historical and theoretical clarity regarding the roots of contemporary forms of prison labor in a way that can overcome the misconception that it is

42 Comprehensive histories of prison labor in various regions of the United States can be found, for example, in: Gildemeister (1987); Lichtenstein (1996); Mancini (1996); McLennan (2008); Myers (1998); Novak (1978); Oshinsky (1996).

128 an anomalous form of "modern day slavery" whose explanation lies in the pre-capitalist past by elucidating the real and historical connections to various other modalities of labor, both juridically free and unfree, and the ways that these evolved dialectically as key components of the country's capitalist development. In doing so, the chapters demonstrates that from the early days of US capitalism, modalities of unfree labor have contributed to the expansion and profitability of capitalism and have also comprised a fundamental dimension of its form of social organization, in particular, by anchoring its racialized, classed, and gendered social order.

129 Chapter 3: Unfree Labor After Emancipation: Race, Property, and Prison Labor in the Reconstruction of the US South

As soon as peoples whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave labor...are drawn into a world market dominated by a capitalist mode of production ... the civilized horrors of overwork are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery. - Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1

The notion that the 1865 passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution

provided a dramatic, clear cut, historical rupture that suddenly and universally ended

slavery and all forms of involuntary labor in the US is one that figures prominently in the

imaginary of American history. Even the most cursory survey of US history, however, proves this notion to be entirely inaccurate. In historical reality, the end of plantation

slavery came neither suddenly nor biblically, and its slow erosion was not characterized by

the rise of universal freedom and mobility. Rather, even after the formal abolition of

slavery, various modalities of unfree labor were retained and re-enforced through racialized violence and legal mechanisms to limit the physical and social mobility of various segments

of the population. Furthermore, new modalities of unfree labor proliferated in the wake of

those that had become illegal since rather than banning all forms of slavery, the Thirteenth

Amendment actually institutionalized and expanded certain modalities of unfree labor

since it contained a specific provision that permitted slavery and involuntary servitude "as

130 punishment for a crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."43 While various forms of convict labor had long been in existence by the time of Emancipation, the

Thirteenth Amendment's confirmation of the legality of convict labor gave rise to their widespread expansion such that, in the words of James Whitman, "the status of prisoners came, by the time of the 13th Amendment, to be explicitly assimilated to slaves" (2003:

173).

This was true both in the industrial prison contracting system of the US North, as will be documented in the next chapter, as well as in the convict lease system that proliferated in the US South, to which we turn our attention now. Through this latter system of labor recruitment, control, and exploitation, US states leased large blocs of

(almost entirely black male) prisoners as laborers to private companies who were then entitled to exploit them for the length of their sentences or until they had literally been worked to death, which, given that death rates among leased convicts averaged over 40% in some states, often came first (Novak 1978: 33). The regions' capitalists paid lease fees to the state that were a fraction of the labor costs that would have been incurred by paying individuals directly, and through the system were able to amass a "cheap, docile, negro labor" force (Kelly 2004: 11) that was estimated to do between 30-50% more work than juridically free labor (Lichtenstein 1999; Mancini 1996, 58). At the same time, states played key roles in coercing unfree labor for economic development and in doing so both avoided

4,The full text of Section I of the Thirteenth Amendment reads: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or anyplace subject to their jurisdiction" (US Constitution 2004).

131 the costs and responsibility that would have been associated with the massive increase in criminalization following the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, (receiving, instead, a profit of over 372% of the costs of carceral administration (Myers 1998)), while simultaneously terrorizing the larger black population into compliance with a social order characterized by white supremacy, political disenfranchisement, and economic and social immobility (Blackmon 2008: 68-69). For those convicts being leased, however, the system comprised a legally new but experientially very familiar form of bondage, such that Douglas

Blackmon has described it as "not a disappearance of slavery but an evolution of its form"

(2008:351).

Far from representing a lag in Southern modernity, as Alex Lichtenstein has noted, convict labor was actually a central component in the region's modernization, with the most significant and rapidly growing sectors of the economy (such as mining, logging, and farming), relying on and indeed, fighting for the continuation and expansion of, the convict lease system (1994: 188). Rather than taking place in isolation from capitalist development, the convict lease system emerged as part of its associated social transformation, and like sharecropping and the Black Codes, was key in the formation of a racially bifurcated working class, denying wage-earning status to former slaves and anchoring the racialized and gendered forms of unfree labor that were fundamental to the region's industrialization. As Lichtenstein describes, "Rather than constituting an 'archaic' obstacle to capitalist development, destined to be swept away by modernity, unfree labor

132 was an essential element in the accumulation process that made that development possible"

(1994: 188).

With this in mind, after sketching key dimensions of the historic continuum of

unfree labor that preceded the convict lease system, this chapter traces the rise of the convict lease system in the US South in the context of the region's capitalist development.

It is interested, in particular, in how the direct domination of slavery came to be replaced by less direct, but equally violent, constraining, and coercive forms of domination for racialized sectors of the population, institutionalized through the state, creating the conditions for, and indeed reaching its pinnacle in, the convict lease system. To this end, this chapter evaluates the unfreedom that leased convicts faced across three planes: (1) the compulsions and forms of coercion underpinning people's entrance into the lease system; (2) the social relations surrounding their experience in the sphere of circulation; (3) the conditions involved in, and workers' experience of, the labor process itself. Noting that the convict lease system was both anchored in, and in turn reproduced, a racialized demarcation between free and unfree labor, this account of the convict lease system helps to explain how and why the capitalist labor market that emerged in the US South was fundamentally organized by race and gender in spite of the fact that both legally and according to many theories, these distinctions should have been rendered obsolete through capitalist industrialization. Further, it sheds new insights into how and why racialized bodies continued to be associated with unfree labor following their formal emancipation from its

133 most widespread form, and the ways in which racialized and gendered labor relations

anchored the US South's specific form of capitalist development.

An "Ever Turning Wheel of Servitude"

While it is frequently and mistakenly assumed that unfree labor in the US ended

with the 1865 passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, it is even more commonly and

erroneously imagined that unfree labor began with racialized chattel slavery in the first

place, and that this system comprised the only significant modality of unfree labor in US

history. This assumption underpins much of contemporary writing on prison labor, where

chattel slavery and prison labor are portrayed as the only substantive modalities of unfree

labor in US history, resulting in the sloppy and imprecise notions that the convict lease

system was a functional extension of slavery and that contemporary prison labor can be

understood in a similarly functional light. But just because both slavery and convict leasing

are two forms of unfree labor does not make them functional equivalents.

While real historical connections do exist between chattel slavery and

contemporary prison labor, and indeed, as Angela Davis has noted (1998), the era of slavery

continues to haunt convict labor today, because unfree labor in the US did not begin with

chattel slavery, nor was its racialized character inevitable since race has not always been a

fundamental axis of labor oppression and exploitation, these connections need to be

explored through a broader historical framework. The continuum of unfree labor through

American history is long and complex and as historian Peter Kolchin has noted, "although

Americans like to think the United States was 'conceived in liberty'... almost from the

134 beginning, America was heavily dependent on coerced labor" (2003: 1). Far from having one constant form or organization, diverse modalities of coerced labor have been a consistent and constituent part of US history, undermining the antinomy of slave and free labor and instead illuminating the spectrum of labor modalities that lie in between, each with distinct forms of un/freedom. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to trace this history in full, it is important to lay out here key dimensions of the continuum of unfree labor that preceded the convict lease system before examining it in more detail.

From the very outset, as historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker document in The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the

Revolutionary Atlantic (2001), the United States was a country built by convicts, indentured, and slave labor. They note that throughout the sixteenth century rise of capitalism in England, the expropriation of the British peasantry through systemic violence and terror and the enclosure of arable land produced a "huge and desperate population that could be redeployed oversees" enabling the English colonization of the Americas (2001:

56). Fundamental to this redeployment was the transatlantic institution of , through which over 200,000 people (two-thirds of all those who left England, and later, Scotland and Ireland) were shipped to American shores in the seventeenth century alone. While some of these persons went willingly, as the loss of land rendered them desperate for a new beginning, others went unwillingly as vagrants and criminals in

England were often sentenced to work on plantations in the colonies rather than serving jail

135 sentences in England proper (2001: 20).u As Glen Gildemeister has documented, during the last third of the seventeenth century the export of English convicts became a significant flow of labor. A conservative estimate is that during the four decades from 1661 to 1700

4,500 convicts embarked, and the sale of convicts to companies exploring the Americas lowered the cost of maintaining European prisons. Significantly, as Linebaugh (2005) documents, there was a strong historical relationship between the need for policing the unruly working classes in Europe and providing the cheap labor necessary for the first wave of colonization. As Linebaugh and Rediker describe, "some had been convicted of crimes and sentenced to penal servitude, others were kidnapped, while yet others went by choice— often desperate choice—exchanging several years labor for the prospect of land and independence afterward" (2001: 58).

In the context of plentiful land and scarce labor, and after failed attempts to institutionalize a system of Indian slavery in the colonies (Kolchin 1987: 11), during the seventeenth century, indentured servants became the foundation of the labor force in

Anglo-America. As Kolchin describes, "These immigrant servants, as well as colony-born

Americans bound out for poverty, debt, or crime, were virtually slaves during their periods of indenture, bound to do as their masters ordered, subject to physical chastisement, forbidden to marry without permission, and liable to be bought and sold. Like slaves, some

44 Labor within the colonial prisons found its origin in the blending of an institution—the English workhouse—and an idea— reformation through humane treatment and labor. From the time that the first house of corrections appeared in England during the second half of the sixteenth century, then, a crucial connection existed between the prison and forced labor. Work programs were instituted in early houses of corrections, enforced by physical punishment, in order to "correct" the behavior of paupers, the unemployed poor, juveniles without trades, and vagrants. In later years, hard labor sentences often took the form of indentured servitude in Virginia and other parts of the "New World." See Sellin (1976).

136 were forcibly separated from their relatives" (1987: 12). As McNally details further,

"Considered property in law, indentured servants were not legal subjects. Their masters had the right to beat, maim, and even kill them. Typically, their status did not differ considerably from that of black slaves. They could not marry without permission, and they could be sold, put up as stakes in bets, inherited, or used to pay debts" (2009: 5). While their indenture was legally finite, in reality, many died of exhaustion, overwork, and/or brutality before their terms of indenture were complete. In the mid-seventeenth century, for example, close to half the servants in Virginia and Maryland died before their terms of indenture were finished (Kolchin 1987: 12). Reflecting on this set of historical circumstances, Williams remarked that "indentured servitude was the historic base upon which American slavery was founded" (1944: 19). Chattel slavery differed from indentured servitude in some crucial respects, however, most significantly since its institutionalization marked the emergence of racialization as a form of labor domination and organization, and the associated bifurcation of free and unfree labor in the US along first racialized and later gendered lines.

Importantly, at the time that indentured servitude was most widespread, differences in skin color did not yet map onto the distinction between juridically free and unfree labor. As Williams' study famously demonstrated, unfree labor in the Americas was not initially based upon race but rather was "brown, white, black and yellow; Catholic,

Protestant and pagan" (1944: 7). Indentured servants were transported from various countries, primarily in Europe, and had many different skin colors. Indeed, for more than

137 150 years, over half of the white emigrants to North America came as indentured servants

(McNally 2009: 5). Of the 92,000 European immigrants brought to Virginia and Maryland between 1607 and 1682, for example, more than three quarters were British and Irish chattel bond-laborers, and many of the remaining were convicts who were held in bonded labor for much longer periods of time (Allen 1997: 119-130). Indeed, American ethnic groups considered white today—including Jewish-, Irish-, Italian-, and Polish-Americans— once occupied a liminal status in their new country and only gradually achieved the status of white (Roediger 2005). And furthermore, while the bonded labor of Africans supplemented that of European immigrants as early as 1619, it was over a century before a racialized system of hereditary chattel slavery came to be the backbone of the labor force in the US South.

As Theodore Allen documents in The of the White Race (1997), racialized slavery came about only after the problem of controlling an increasingly rebellious laboring class compelled the colonial elites in the Americas to choose a strategy of racial domination. In the context of increasing social unrest, culminating in Bacon's Rebellion in

1676 where groups of white servants, Indian bonded laborers, and black bonded laborers united in opposition to the elite classes, the ruling planter elite sought, in one members' words, to "improvise a style of leadership" appropriate to "the undisciplined and frustrated citizenry" (Allen 1997: 240). Eventually, as they settled on and pursued a strategy of racial domination, Allen notes "race consciousness superseded class-consciousness" such that the

"continental plantation was able to achieve and maintain the degree of social

138 control necessary for proceeding with capital accumulation on the basis of chattel bond- labor" (1997: 240). Bondage became fixed on Africans in the 18th century and the concept of the "white race" was "invented as the social control formation whose distinguishing characteristic was not the participation of the slaveholding class ... but the participation of the laboring classes: non-slaveholders, self-employed smallholders, tenants and laborers"

(1997: 251-252). It was the laboring class, then, who became the principle element in the day-to day enforcement of racial oppression

Indeed, far from being imposed exclusively from above, from the beginning, race was a social relation that arose and was perpetuated through contradictions and actions at many levels of society, and came to be anchored not only through labor relations, but also through penal institutions and relations of punishment, legal codes, and everyday relations of social reproduction. In this sense, as Evelyn Nakano Glenn points out, "race and gender...are the product of men's and women's actions in specific historical contexts ... One can examine how gender and race differences arise, change over time, and vary across social and geographical locations and institutional domains" (2002: 17). While racial division was a consequence, not a precondition of US slavery, once it was instituted it acquired a social potency of its own.

The key point here is to note that while chattel slavery was part of the continuum of unfree labor characterizing the development of the United States, it differed from previous modalities of unfree labor in crucial respects, especially since for the first time, "a system of white supremacy and black inferiority were constructed in which freedom was

139 increasingly identified with race, not class" (McNally 2009: 5-6). While all Northern states passed emancipation acts between 1780 and 1804 (arranging for gradual rather than immediate emancipation, and with other forms of highly unfree labor proliferating in its place), racialized chattel slavery remained a central economic institution in the Southern states, expanding with the westward movement of the population. As Kolchin notes, "By breaking up existing families and forcing slaves to relocate far from everyone and everything they knew," this migration "replicated (if on a reduced level) many of the horrors" of the

Atlantic slave trade (2003: 96). By 1860, in the US South, there were over four million slaves.

As Nakano Glenn has documented, as racialized hereditary chattel slavery became widespread, the movement for political equality among white men led to a shift in the meaning of economic independence (which had long been defined in terms of property ownership), and white male independence came to be anchored in the notion of "free labor" (2002: 57). As she describes, "There was a gradual differentiation in which statuses between freedom and slavery, such as indentured servitude and master-servant relations, were eliminated for native white men while continuing for blacks and other people of color

(and sometimes immigrants). The category of unfree labor thus became racialized as nonwhite at the same time that free labor was racialized as white" (2002: 56).45 She notes

45 It is important to note that throughout these periods, as today, modalities of labor were not always clear cut or distinct. This was true at the level of daily life since many people labored under circumstances that did not fit easily into one modality or another and the porosity of these categories throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century meant that someone could be involved in multiple modalities of labor within their lives. It was also true in the historical sense since even as chattel slavery became dominant, other forms of debt bondage, peonage, and indentured servitude continued to exist alongside of it.

140 further that throughout this period of social transformation, the assumption that

independent manhood entailed control and ownership of wives' and children's labor

remained stable, and that this meant that as women across racial lines continued to be

excluded from the category of free labor and therefore from economic independence, particular configurations of race and gender were solidified as social hierarchies shaping people's access to mobility, property, and power. While constructions of free and unfree, independent and dependent became more clearly polarized and racialized in later centuries, as we will see in a moment, initially, the emergence of a "free" laboring class alongside the rise of racialized chattel slavery in many ways had more to do with shifts in ideology than changes in material conditions as white men organized to protest forms of relative unfreedom they had experienced (such as connotations of servility in relation to their identity or various employment tasks) and these came to be seen as inconsistent with white male adulthood.

Indeed, it is important to note that while often conceptualized in binary terms, there were commonalities of experience that existed between free and unfree labor at the time.46 While some forms of relative unfreedom that white men had commonly experienced

(such as connotations of servility in relation to their identify or employment tasks) came to

46 This was often noted in debates about the nature of freedom in US society. Even John Adams noted the illusory character of freedom in wage labor in a 1777 speech to the American Continental Congress: "It is of no consequence by what name you call the people, whether by that of freemen or slaves; in some countries the laboring poor are called freemen, in others they are called slaves; but the difference as to the state is imaginary only. What matters is whether a landlord employing ten laborers on his farm gives them annually as much money will buy them the necessaries of life or gives them those necessities at short hand ... The condition of the laboring poor in most countries—that of the fishermen particularly of the Northern states—is as abject as that of slavery" (Adams, as quoted in as quoted in Wilson 1933: 16)

141 be seen as inconsistent with white male adulthood, and indeed, attempts to overcome these

underpinned the formation of various civil and labor associations, it is important not to

overstate free laborers' conditions of livelihood during this time since these were often

characterized both by poverty and various forms of compulsion to enter into highly unequal

labor contracts. Interestingly, southern slave owners, in defending their own system of

chattel slavery during the slavery controversy in the United States during the 1850s,

repeatedly pointed out the coerced character of "free labor" exploitation at the time which

they argued resulted in a similar (and in many ways worse form) of bondage. Senator J.H.

Hammond of South Carolina, for example, noted in an 1858 speech to the United States

Senate:

The senator from New York said yesterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Ay, the name, but not the thing ... for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that and who has put his labor on the market, and takes the best he can get for it, in short your whole class of manual hireling laborers and "operatives," as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life, and are well-compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated. (Hammond as quoted in Wilson 1933: 17)

While Senator Hammond's analysis obviously, and problematically, attempts to play down

the violence, physical bondage, and exploitation that characterized slave life, his comparison

is helpful in pointing out the continuum of unfreedom that connected various modalities of

labor during that period. Since throughout this period, as Nakano Glenn has noted, there

remained a continuum during between extreme independence and extreme dependence, it

is important to note the gradations of freedom-unfreedom that existed, even among juridically free persons (2002: 61).

142 In sum, understanding racialized chattel slavery not as an anomalous system of unfree labor in the history of the United States, but rather as one of the many and widespread modalities of unfree labor characterizing US history since the earliest days of colonial settlement, frames the emergence of convict leasing after the Thirteenth

Amendment in a new light. When we recognize that unfree labor did not begin with chattel slavery, nor was its racialized character inevitable since race has not always been a fundamental axes of labor oppression and exploitation, then it becomes clear that the specific forms that unfree labor has taken in various eras of US history cannot be taken for granted as immutable, nor can its form be understood in isolation from the political economic moments of which they comprise fundamental dimensions. Rather, like the organization, character, and conditions of juridically free labor, the organization, character, and conditions of various modalities of unfree labor have been negotiated and shaped by social struggle, by the actions of men and women in particular historical contexts. The rise of the convict lease system is no exception here, and so as in other periods of US history, there is a need to be attentive to its particular form, and the shifts prompted in the character and organization of unfree labor as it was institutionalized through social struggle following the abolition of slavery for those who had not been convicted of crimes.

From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison

When the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude

"except as punishment for a crime," the Federal government established convict labor as a legal, constitutional form of unfree labor, confirming the state's property right in the labor

143 power of its prisoners. While states had long exploited convict labor directly, and although a couple states (most notably Alabama and Louisiana) had begun to lease convicts to private corporations before the Civil War, the 1865 passage of the Thirteenth Amendment marked the beginning of a widespread expansion of convict leasing wherein southern states began to use convict leasing on a relatively large scale, transferring their property right in convict labor to private corporations in exchange for substantive revenues, often up to

372% the costs of carceral administration (Myers 1998: 11). Fulfilling southern capitalists' need for a cheap, disciplined labor force in the context of the abolition of slavery as well as providing states with the necessary revenue to fund the massive carceral expansion that anchored the post-Civil War white supremacist social order and industrialization, the convict lease system constituted a distinctive modality of unfree labor in the historic arc of unfreedom characterizing US capitalist development, as well as a truly unique penal system.

In Lichtenstein's words, "only in the South did the state entirely give up its control of the convict population to the contractor, and only in the South did the physical 'penitentiary' become virtually synonymous with the various private enterprises in which convicts labored" (1999: 3).

Rather than building actual jails, the South's "penitentiaries" were "great rolling cages that followed construction camps and railroad building, hastily built stockades deep in forest or swamp or mining fields, or windowless log forts in turpentine flats" (Mancini

1996: 59). Indeed, in spite of the massive increase in carceral populations, for half a century after the Civil War, the Southern states built almost no new prisons, and the few they did

144 have were reserved for whites and played a peripheral role in those states' criminal justice systems. Instead of prison, persons convicted of criminal offenses were sent to sugar and cotton plantations, as well as to coalmines, turpentine farms, phosphate beds, brickyards, and sawmills. As often as not, convicts were sent to these work places directly from the places of their convictions- sometimes being detained, convicted, and leased in the same day as part of "one of the harshest and most exploitative labor systems known in American history" (Mancini 1996: 2).

Far from being decipherable in abstract or economistic terms, the significance of the convict lease system only really comes to light when it is examined in the context of how it shaped and sometimes very violently curtailed peoples' autonomy over their own bodies, their freedom to enter into and exit labor contracts, and their access to property, mobility, and the means of their own reproduction. For those reasons, and establishing consistent criteria from which to examine the modalities of convict labor discussed in later chapters, the freedom/unfreedom of leased convicts will be examined here across three planes. First, I examine the conditions involved in, and workers' experience of, the labor process itself by documenting the lived reality of convict lease camps and labor processes. Second, I examine the social relations surrounding convict labor in the sphere of circulation, namely by documenting the role that states and corporations played in coercing black labor for the lease system. Third, I document the compulsions and forms of coercion underpinning people's entrance into the lease system and interlocking modes of unfree labor through a discussion of the racialized criminality and the restrictive legal codes that proliferated in the

145 wake of the Thirteenth Amendment, noting the fluidity of unfreedom characterizing labor

relations across modalities at this time in history. I argue throughout this account that the convict lease system was a fundamental dimension of the form of social organization

characterizing the rise of industrial capitalism in the US South, and also that it contributed

to the expansion of capitalism, in part, by anchoring its racialized, and class based, and gendered social order.

"One Dies, Get Another": Convict Leasing, Brutality, and the Racial Bifurcation of Punishment While the brutality and blatant racism associated with convict labor might lead one to conclude that it was a regressive departure from the South's modernization efforts, convict labor was actually a central component in that process. Because convict leasing appeared in an era in which the abolition of slavery and the spread of capitalist wage-labor relations were held up as dramatic worldwide examples of moral and economic progress, and because convict labor recruited and disciplined by southern capitalists, concentrated in some of the most significant and rapidly growing sectors of the economy, "represented the crucial relation of production in the distinctive Southern path to modern capitalism"

(Lichtenstein 1999: 77), the convict lease system cannot be understood as the persistence of a pre-capitalist form of labor coercion, but rather must be understood as the extension and elaboration of a new modality of unfree labor wholly compatible with regional industrial development. This implies that, rather than positing a dichotomy between capitalist and non-capitalist modalities of labor based on the presence of brutality and violence, there is a

146 need to link the most brutal and appalling features of unfree labor to the relations to capitalism itself.47

There can be no doubt that the convict lease system comprised a modality of unfree labor. As will see in a moment, underpinned by a carceral matrix, the majority of convicts were arrested for committing no real crime but rather were charged with offenses such as

"using obscene language," "vagrancy," and very minor thefts which were reclassified as felonies as the state became a key player in the coercion of black labor for use by private corporations.48 Entrance into this system of labor exploitation was thus highly coerced, and furthermore, labor was unremunerated and performed under the threat of violence.

Convicts' ability to leave the lease system was curtailed both by their legal sentences and the brutal violence against their bodies; convicts were routinely "whipped into unconsciousness" and worked until they "dropped dead in their tracks" (Oshinsky 1996:

61). They were unable to withhold labor since to do so meant subjecting one's body to torture at the hands of managers, who supervised labor processes with whips and shotguns.

47 Of course, such a claim goes against the grain of a number of Marxist accounts, most notably, those who have argued that slavery in the south was not, in fact, capitalist (Genovese 1966). Following Jairus Banaji in arguing that Marxists have no good ground for resisting the idea of a "slaveholding capitalism" in the American South, the arguments advanced here follow Orlando Patterson's critique of Eugene Genovese's pre­ capitalist conception of the Old South. As Patterson argued contra Genovese, slavery in the South was "American slave capitalism," and slavery was indeed simply a "variant" of the capitalist system (1979: 52). See also Lichtenstein (1999) for a thorough critique of Genovese's position. 48 Blackmon's account, for example, details the triviality of the alleged offenses for which hundreds of black men were being held. In one mine, for example, "the crimes of eight were listed as "not given." There were twenty-four black men digging coal for using "obscene language," ninety-four for the alleged theft of items valued at just a few dollars, thirteen for selling whiskey, five for "violating contract" with a white employer, seven for vagrancy, two for 'selling cotton after sunset'—a statute passed to prevent black farmers from selling their crops to anyone other than the white property owner with whom they sharecropped—forty six for carrying a weapon, three for bastardy, nineteen for gambling, twenty four for false pretence" (Blackmon 2008: 99).

147 Indeed, "the rawhide whip, iron shackle, sweat box, convict cage, and bloodhound were

[convict lessee's] most potent instruments for eighty years" (Lichtenstein 1999: xvii).

Working conditions in the convict lease system were deplorable: convicts were

frequently worked for 15-17 hours daily and for the remaining hours were crammed into

rolling iron cages where they were kept shackled even while sleeping and eating, fed below subsistence amounts, disease was rampant, and those who worked in mines were deprived of sunlight for years at a time, going to work before the sun rose and returning after sunset.

Convicts were beaten for breaking the rules, for falling behind in their work, or sometimes for the pleasure of the guards (Oshinsky 1996: 61). Water torture- the pouring of water into the convicts' nostrils and lungs- came to replace whipping in some worksites as the torture of choice since it did not incapacitate the already weakened prisoner for labor, making it possible for the convicts to go back to work right away unlike whipping which made them sore (Lichtenstein 1999: 122). Convicts who attempted to escape were frequently shot or immediately recaptured by the prison's bloodhounds. "Before convict leasing officially ended," David Oshinsky describes in Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, "a generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions far worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves" (1996: 1).

It was the subordination of all penal functions to the single goal of labor extraction that gave convict leasing its unique character as a particularly brutal penal system

(Lichtenstein 1999: 130). While there were initially some attempts by the state to oversee the conditions of convict leasing, states soon ceded all control over the convicts once they

148 were leased to private firms. As Adamson explains, "While leasing was less brutal in the early years of Reconstruction than after the Democrats gained power, it was impossible to prevent abuses, since convicts were scattered throughout the region and state officials usually yielded all disciplinary rights and responsibilities to the overseers.

Although some states had penitentiary boards, their members either sided with company officials or lacked the power to do anything about inhuman conditions" (1983: 561). As a result, he notes, "black convicts throughout the South were starved, chained to eachother at night in overcrowded, dirty stockades, overworked and forced to continue working while sick, and whipped, occasionally to death" (1983: 561).

This cruelty was clearly geared towards disciplining convicts into a subordinate position in society and the white supremacist social order, and was also, to some extent, geared towards disciplining the new black working class as a whole. But it was more immediately directed towards ensuring higher productivity than could be procured from free workers, and therefore, extracting more labor from their bodies in a shorter period of time. In his study One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-

1928 (1996) Matthew Mancini argues that given the indisputable similarities and continuities between chattel slavery and convict leasing, it is, in fact, the differences and discontinuities that provide the most interesting perspective on convict leasing. He notes that the was actually greater with the lease system than it was during the

149 system of slavery that preceded it.49 Chattel slaveholders were not only responsible for the maintenance of the laboring subjects, but were expected to guarantee the maintenance of the entire slave community, including the children and elders who were not able to work.

Lessees, on the other hand, were only responsible for individual convicts, each of which represented a labor unit, and importantly, lessees only paid half price when an individual was not able bodied or was elderly and past their working prime. The distinction here is that rather than having property in the person of convicts, as slave owners had in slaves, lessees had a property only in the labor power of the convicts who worked for them. As

Mancini describes:

The individual convict as such did not represent a significant investment, and his death or release, therefore, was not a loss. When considered as a source of labor, then, slaves received a "wage" best thought of as aggregated, convicts one that was individual; as a form of capital, by contrast, slaves were individually significant, convicts collectively so. This does turn out to be a relevant distinction rather than a metaphysical exercise, for the consequence was an economic incentive to abuse prisoners. These two economic factors— the subsistence or lower-than subsistence "wage" the convicts received and their status as aggregated capital—served to reinforce one another and to make leasing, from the point of view of the economic definition, "worse" than slavery. (1996: 99T00)50

Stated differently by another writer in 1916: "Living conditions in the lease camps were far worse than on the average plantation, and convicts were not as well protected from hazardous and dangerous work as industrial slaves had been. Job safety was a concern of the

49 Importantly, while Mancini treats the rate of exploitation as identical to the rate of profit, most political economists would agree that these are in fact distinct categories. While the former simply compares total profit (surplus value) to the wage bill (cost of variable capital), the latter compares total profit to profit expenditure on labor, machines, and raw material. Mary Church Terell made a similar observation in 1907 when she argued that: "It is no exaggeration to say that in some respects the convict lease system ... is less humane than was the bondage endured by slaves fifty years ago. For, under the old regime, it was in the masters interest to clothe and shelter and feed his slaves property, even if he were not moved to do so by considerations of mercy and humanity, because the death of a slave meant an actual loss in dollars and cents, whereas the death of a convict to-day involves no loss whatsoever either to the lessee or to the State" (1907: 306).

150 mining and tunneling contractors who hired bondsmen, for if a slave were killed or injured as a result of a cave-in, explosion, fire, or flood, the employer had to compensate the slave's owner. There was no such incentive to protect the black convict. South Carolina's prison warden admitted in 1880 that 'casualties would have been far less frequent if convicts were property having a value to preserve'" (Oliphant, cited in Adamson 1983: 566).

Under these conditions, it was profitable to literally work the prisoners to death because the cost of purchasing new ones did not interfere with profits. This is not a figure of speech: in South Carolina, the death rate of convicts leased to the Greenwood and

Augusta Railroad averaged 45 percent a year for a period of two years, 1877-1879. State averages ranked from about 16 percent (in Mississippi) to 25 percent (in ) during this period (Novak 1978: 33). In 1883 a physician in Alabama estimated that most convicts died within three years (Garvey 1998: 352). In that year, 36 percent of the men working at Milner coal mine died. The annual death rate at the camps run by the

Greenwood and Augusta Railroad reached 53 percent (Adamson 1983: 566). In

Mississippi, not a single leased convict lived long enough to serve a sentence of ten years or more, and when they died, their unclaimed bodies were purchased by the Medical School at

Nashville for students to practice on (Oshinsky 1996: 46, 58). The "average life of a convict" in was about seven years (Oshinsky 1996: 61).51

51 In Oshinsky's words, "Their lives were always in peril. A year or two on the Western Carolina Railroad was akin to a death sentence; convicts regularly were blown to bits in tunnel explosions, buried in mountain landslides, and swept away in springtime floods. On the Great Northern Railroad, Texas convicts were starved, whipped, beaten with tree limbs, and hung naked in wooden stocks. At the prison camps of the Grenville and Augusta Railroad, convicts were used up faster than South Carolina authorities could supply them. Between 1877 and 1879, the G&A 'lost' 128 of their 258 prisoners to gunshots, accidents, and disease

151 The outcome of this brutality and super-exploitation of labor power was a much

higher level of productivity than could be expected of juridically free workers. A US

Department of Labor commissioner noted in the 1880s "most of the convicts (92%) are

negroes of the lowest class. They are generally overworked and the death rate is high but...

convicts do 30% more work than free laborers being worked long, hard, and steadily"

(Novak 1978: 33-34). Lichtenstein's estimate is even higher; he calculates that some

convict teams accomplished twice the work of free labor, primarily due to the task system wherein convicts were required to meet an output quota each day, whether of turpentine,

coal, bricks, or cordwood. These quotas were high and above what could be reasonably

expected in the time given, such that, according to a report on conditions at the Dade Coal

Company tabled in Georgia's House of Representatives, prisoners had to "lie in the mud

and water to get out the daily amount of coal that will save them from the whipping boss"

(cited in Adamson 1983: 566). It was their ability to perform twice the work at a fraction of the cost (by working much longer days, and disciplined through violence) that made convict labor so desirable to industrialists. In Oshinsky's words, "The convict was more vulnerable than the free workers, and he paid a greater price. Despised, powerless and expendable, he could be made to do any job, at any pace, in any location" (1996: 59).

The relative ease with which employers could move leased convicts from job to job was also beneficial. On the railroads, for example, convicts were moved from job site to job

and another thirty-nine to escapes. Scurvy was rampant among the survivors, whose bodies were covered with lesions from the vermin on their skin" (1996: 60).

152 site in a rolling iron cage which also provided their lodging at the site. The cages—eight

feet wide, fifteen feet long, and eight feet high—housed upwards of twenty men. These

moving cages were similar "to those used for circus animals," wrote one prison official,

except they "did not have the privacy which would be given to a respectable lion, tiger or

bear." The prisoners slept side by side, shackled together, on narrow wooden slabs. With

no screens on the cages, insects swarmed everywhere. The mobility of convicts, as we will see in a moment, was crucial to both their use in breaking strikes and in stabilizing crisis ridden southern industries, particularly in seasonal and migratory extractive sectors.

Employers, retaining the terminology of slavery, classified laborers according to

their ability to work into first, second, third, forth and fifth class hands. Able-bodied males were referred to as "full hands"; women and children prisoners were known as "half hands"

(Adamson 1983: 560). As they had during slavery, women initially worked alongside men in the convict lease system on plantations and doing agricultural work. As convict leasing became concentrated in industry, and as nineteenth century gender norms fixed women of all races to both paid and unpaid reproductive work, however, it appears that relatively few women were drawn into the system in spite of the fact that all over the country, women were convicted at a higher ratio (against men) of misdemeanors (petty theft, prostitution, vagrancy). Though for those women that were drawn in, it is clear that their gender compounded their abuse and exploitation. Davis notes that female convicts were whipped nude in the presence of male convicts, noting, "That women could be housed, worked, and physically and sexually abused by inmates and guards in camps that were largely male

153 constituted a message that there was a fate even worse than slavery awaiting them" (1998:

80). Hundreds of black children, many as young as six years old, were leased by the state for the benefit of planters, businessmen and financers, to toil in conditions that even some patrician Southerners found shameful and one even declared was "a stain upon our manhood" (Oshinsky 1996: 4).

There was almost complete segregation of white and black prisoners. While black convicts in Mississippi worked on plantations and railroads, not a single white convict left the state penitentiary. It was extremely rare for judges and juries to send white prisoners to convict camps, owing at least in part to the fact that the philosophical and moral justification of the convict lease system lay in the argument that black persons needed compulsory labor to be properly integrated into free society. As Adamson describes,

"Contractors in Alabama were forbidden to mix white and black prisoners. Local sheriffs in Mississippi made sure that whites were never put in chain gangs. 'It was possible,' a camp overseer wrote, 'to send a negro to prison on almost any pretext, but difficult to get a white man there unless he committed some very heinous crime'" (1984: 565). Because almost entirely black convicts worked on the lease system, it was deemed appropriate to continue the corporal punishment associated with slavery, signaling continuity in the racial bifurcation in the forms of punishment reserved for whites vs. blacks. While the pre-civil war criminal justice system in the South was reserved for whites only since slaves were punished by (generally through public, corporal forms of punishment rather than confinement), the post-Civil War criminal justice system was characterized by

154 considerable continuity in how white and black offenders were treated and controlled

(Adamson 1983: 555). As Davis describes: "the derivation of white freedom tended to affirm the whiteness of democratic rights and . As white men acquired the privilege to be punished in ways that acknowledged their equality and racialized universality of liberty, the punishment of blacks," like during chattel slavery, "was corporal, concrete and particular" (1998: 99). Importantly, and in contrast to many scholars' understanding (most notably, Foucault's) that torture had become obsolete in the industrial capitalist countries,

Matthew Mancini points out that the widespread use of torture in connection with convict leasing inextricably linked torture to incarceration itself, noting that "leasing allowed for accumulated reservoirs of human cruelty to overflow in the isolated camps and stockades"

(1996: 75). In this sense, the lease system, as W.E.B. Du Bois described, "was a structural inheritance of slavery wherein black people accused of committing crimes were disciplined by private imposition of labor, using the slave theory of punishment—pain and intimidation—such that convict leasing linked crime and slavery indissolubly in [people's] minds" (1901).

While until 1865 the US North and South had had relatively similar penal systems, in the wake of the abolition of slavery, the US South made a significant departure from the

North by expanding the convict lease system, and in turn, institutionalizing a new modality of unfree labor. One of the true paradoxes of the convict lease system was that while it embodied some continuity in labor and race relations, the adjustments in the political economy of labor coercion coincided with a rapid departure from southern penal

155 traditions, which until then had paralleled those in the industrializing northern states.

These changes in the postbellum South's regime of punishment lay at the heart of the changes sweeping society and "played a central role in the evolution of the region's race relations, forms of labor exploitation, and burgeoning capitalist development"

(Lichtenstein 1999: xviii, see also 19). In this sense, the convict lease system was unique from previous forms of convict labor exploitation in that the form that prison labor took in this era was clearly much more substantially shaped by political economy than by the history of penology in the region. In Blackmon's words, "By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of

African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites" in the interests of rapid industrialization (2008: 7). Or, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, "the whole criminal system came to be used as a method of keeping Negroes at work and intimidating them" (1992: 506).

Corporations, Convict Leasing and the State

The convict lease system originated and became widespread in the US South through complex and sometimes contradictory synergy between capitalist social forces and state level and local governments. On the one hand, strong demand from the South's booming industrialists for a cheap black labor force in the face of the legal abolition of slavery fed into and reinforced the southern states' laws designed to instantiate the post-Civil War white supremacist social and economic order. On the other hand, by leasing convicts to private corporations rather than housing them in public facilities, states avoided both the costs and

156 responsibility that would have otherwise been associated with the criminalization of black populations through the Black Codes52, instilling labor discipline into convicts while simultaneously terrorizing the larger racialized population into compliance with a social order characterized by political disenfranchisement, and economic and social immobility.

There is relative consensus among historians that initially, the post-Civil War fiscal crisis among southern states, as well as the need to stabilize race relations and the economic order, created the conditions internal to states that gave rise to the institutionalization of the convict lease system. Many historic accounts also emphasize that in addition to providing revenue, state decision makers recognized the contribution that convict leasing made to disciplining and managing the destitute and immobile black population. In the words of Martha Myers and James Massey, for example, the leasing of convicts to private enterprise "anchored the system of involuntary black servitude, and it was the ultimate response to those who resisted other forms of labor exploitation" (1991: 269).53 Many historians emphasize that initially, with the southern economy in ruins, and state officials limited to the barest resources, the concept of reintroducing the forced labor of blacks as a means of funding government services was viewed as an inherently practical method of eliminating the cost of building prisons and returning black persons to their appropriate place in society (Blackmon 2008: 53). Since the rationale behind the old system remained

52 The Black Codes were an official body of legislation put in place in the US with the effect of limiting the basic human rights and civil liberties of black persons. As one historian describes, their purpose was "to keep the Negro exactly what he was: a propertyless rural laborer under strict controls, without political rights, and with inferior legal rights" (Stampp, as quoted in Adamson 1983: 559). 53 See also Myers (1998) for a book length study of the disciplinary function of the convict lease system in the New South.

157 intact in the minds of the now dispossessed slave owners, state officials, and great proportions of the general population, it is not surprising that the initial response to this

new situation was to attempt to retain as much of slavery as possible through legislation which seem intended to reproduce, within the new limits, a close approximation of the now forbidden master-slave relationship (Novak 1978).

This is certainly true insofar as it continued the general practice of exploiting the unfree labor of black persons on the basis of their presumed racial inferiority, as well as insofar as it is clear that the convict lease system was institutionalized in ways that incorporated and formalized the social networks and practices of what was in many senses its precursor—the leasing of groups of slaves by private industrial companies from plantation owners during the early 1860s when white industrial workers were conscripted and fighting in the Civil War. Leased slave laborers typically cost $120 a year near the beginning of the war, but their cost more than doubled by the crisis years of 1864 and 1865, and were most popularly used by coal mining and iron works companies in central

Alabama, northeastern Mississippi, and eastern Georgia, some of the first states to institute convict leasing after Emancipation (Blackmon 2008: 49-52). Shelby Iron Works

Company, for example, which throughout the 1860s held a contract with the Confederate government to produce twelve thousand tons of iron a year for the war effort, relied almost entirely on slaves leased from plantation owners, procured through a prominent labor agent, John M. Tillman. Shelby Iron Works leased between 400-450 slaves at a time, and the slave owners received quarterly payments for the leased slaves, while lessees provided

158 their slaves with basic food, clothing, and shelter. It is clear from Blackmon's study that while industrial leasing of slaves took place on a relatively small scale, it was through this practice that the concept of industrialized black labor took a firm hold among the enterprising industrialists who would reshape the southern economy in the half century after the Civil War. In his words, "The renting of slaves, as much as anything, had taught them that masses of black laborers brought under temporary control of a commercial enterprise could be powerfully leveraged in commerce" (2008: 52-53). Indeed, many of the same industrialists who leased slaves prior to Emancipation continued their practice of leasing unfree black labor through the convict lease system in the late 1960s. In some cases, this entailed only a change in legal contract while very little, if anything, changed in the daily lives of those men and women already leased whose status shifted seamlessly from slave to convict. Indeed, all around the South, men and women who were formerly slaves on plantations, or leased slaves in coal mines, steel plants, or farms, were processed and reclassified as convicts so quickly that Emancipation entailed little change in daily life, other than the fact that, as we will see in a moment, the convict lease system was far more violent and exploitative than slavery.

However, without denying the significance of these continuities, it is important to recognize, as Lichtenstein has stressed, that "the convict lease was far more than just a functional replacement for slavery" (1999: 19). Rather, its conditions of existence and the explanation for its mass expansion must also be viewed, in the words of Eric Foner "in relation to the new demands of the postbellum South and not merely as the inertia of the

159 antebellum South" since "convict labor depended upon both the heritage of slavery and the inertia of industrial capitalism" (as cited in Lichtenstein 1999: 21). This conjecture is supported by a number of historical studies that link the impetus behind the expansion of the convict lease system to the South's process of industrialization, and, more specifically, by studies that demonstrate that in the postbellum South, at each stage of the region's development, convict labor was concentrated in some of the most significant and rapidly growing sectors of the economy and was a crucial source of rapid growth and profit in the face of the extreme industrial vulnerability that plagued capitalist enterprises in the postbellum South (Lichtenstein 1999; Myers 1998; Myers and Massey 1991). It is further supported by the fact that convicts were leased not by those "who yearned for the social order of the slave South, but by the region's most ardent advocates of progress"

(Lichtenstein 1999: 189). In this sense, while Du Bois famously argued, "the slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun," and then, with the rise of the convict lease system,

"moved back again toward slavery" (as quoted in Foner 1998: 602), it is important to note that his and others' use of the image of "moving back" toward slavery runs the risk of missing some of the most salient features of the lease system since this particular form of unfree labor was specifically designed and used in the new industrial sectors of the economy, enabling the South's rapid industrialization.

As Lichtenstein has documented, for example, the real impetus for the expansion of the convict lease system came in the 1870s after southern states had very successfully used convict lease teams to construct railroads, laying the indispensible infrastructure for

160 nineteenth century economic development.54 Railroad construction culminated in the

realization by Southern capitalists that the South had vast areas of unexploited natural

resources, as well as (potentially through the convict lease system) the cheap labor required

to access them. Then, as southern capitalists turned to the rapid development of the

region's exploitable resources, convicts played a key role in the increasing vertical

integration of extractive industries which required large concentrations of steady, predictable, controllable labor. Southerners poured "enormous amounts of sweat and

ambition, along with the relatively little money they had, into the products that world markets would buy," wrote historian Edward Ayers. "They rushed to fill the only gap in the national and international economies they could find: cheap iron, cheap coal, cheap lumber, turpentine, sugar and tobacco products. In almost every one of these industries, convict labor played a crucial role" (Ayers 1984: iii). As natural resource extraction and processing became the cornerstone of the South's strategy for capitalist development, prominent industrialists put pressure on state or county judicial systems to lease convicts to their firms, usually before the requisite quota of convicts was even in custody, and as these requests proliferated, so did the convict lease system. When the inflexible cost of this capitalized labor force became a detriment during sudden economic downturns, convict labor proved

54 Railroad companies employed large numbers of convicts. During the 1870s, for example, 2,650 miles of track were laid east of the Mississippi, and over 14,000 miles were added to this network in the following decade. In 1884 more than 5,000 convicts worked on southern railroad building and in South Carolina alone, more than 1,800 miles of track were laid by prisoners between 1873 and 1893 (Adamson 1983: 562).

161 adaptable to other uses, particularly in seasonal and migratory extractive sectors, such as the lumber and turpentine industries (Lichtenstein 1999: 188-189).

As the system increased in popularity and began to turn high profits in the 1870s, states became "recruiters and sellers of forced labor for capital accumulation and the exploitation of the South's resources in the extractive industries" (Lichtenstein 1999: 84).

At the peak of the convict lease system in the late 1970s, revenues from the program brought in over 372% of the costs of carceral administration and in many states, such as

Alabama from 1880-1940, profit from the convict lease system amounted to over 10 percent of the state budget (Myers 1998: 11). The Democratic administrations in

Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida received between $40,000 and $100,000 a year from leasing convicts, and Texas' governor announced that a lease signed in 1878 put "more cash into the treasury in one year than has been paid for the establishment of the penitentiary" (Adamson 1983: 564). As an 1886 Bureau of Labor Report noted, "under the lease system, the total receipts of the state leasing its prisoners are profits, there being no running expenses beyond the payment of a few salaries" (as quoted in Lichtenstein 1999:

19).

Because most historical studies of the convict lease system have been state or county specific, and at times have focused only on one industry within that locale, it is difficult to produce reliable figures as to the actual scale of the convict lease system. Estimates of the number of convicts leased during the Reconstruction era range from between one to two

162 hundred thousand, at the low end to one million, at the high end (Blackmon 2008: 7).55

While hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrest, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of black men and women into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, households, and factories, the different categorization schemes and accounting systems across states, as well as forthright attempts to skew the public record by grossly understating the number of convicts leased, make it difficult to accurately estimate the number of people drawn into the convict lease system. Furthermore, because the lessee alone was responsible for keeping track of the sentence lengths and liberating convicts at the end of their sentences, and because convicts who died were frequently replaced without pause, there are extensive gaps in bookkeeping.56 Though historiographers agree that the number of persons drawn directly into the convict lease system was likely relatively small compared to the size of the total population (though more substantive in relation to the

55 Among the reasons for such a wide range of estimates include the fact that a variety of systems of accounting characterized the convict lease system and many studies have included only some of these systems while excluding others. While not all convict lease systems were administered in the same way, and a US Department of Labor study written at the time providing a comprehensive study of prison labor arranged by the system of labor control in the various prisons, using for this purpose such categories as "contract," "piece- price," "public account," and "state use," these terms indicate primarily different systems of accounting. Mancini notes that "terms like piece-piece and state account were intended to classify prison systems by distinguishing between types of labor management, but serve instead to mislead scholars of prison labor since they establish distinctions that are based on false or irrelevant criteria. Essentially these terms...helped form the structure of an elaborate hierarchy that, in the fashion of the late nineteenth century, carried a heavy load of moralistic connotations" (1996: 14). Not only did the classifications allow states to obscure their real practices, but they also permitted the number of leased convicts within leasing to be undercounted. For this reason, Mancini urges that it is important not to take (as many contemporary scholars do) the 19th century categories at face value. The key point, for our purposes here, is that the widespread and most typical version of the convict lease system was one in which "the state, after receiving a fixed sum for the privilege, paid no attention to the prisoners whatever, while the lessee fed, clothed, guarded, and worked them to his own profit" (Mancini 1996: 15). 56 Reflecting on these challenges, Blackmon notes that "altogether, millions of mostly obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity ... though because scholarly studies have dissected these events into separate narratives, they minimize the collective effect of the decision by hundreds of state and local county governments...to sell blacks to commercial interests" (2008: 7).

163 proportion of the poor black population brought into it), most agree that the convict lease system was by no means marginal to the south's industrial development.

Rather, it is clear that the lease system played a significant role in the capitalist development of the US South. Ayers quite aptly summarizes its contribution:

Convict labor took on an exaggerated importance in the South more because of its context than its mere size...Because the region had so few industries, because those industries were concentrated in relatively small areas, because the products of those industries, especially coal, were so crucial to the growth of the Southern economy, and because Southern labor was relatively unorganized, convict labor could in fact disrupt the wage scale and working conditions of entire southern industries. (1984: 212)

It is also clear that convicts labored for the most successfully integrated southern companies; "those that generally weathered the frequent depressions, swallowed up competitors, defeated challenges of organized labor and moved into the vanguard of southern industrial growth" (Lichtenstein 1999: 87). In the 1880s, for example, local observers agreed that the coal and iron resources of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia were

"destined to revolutionize the iron manufacture of the country," while admitting that the

"important factor in the question of the cheap production of iron is prison labor." In harmony with the planters, the single most common complaint voiced by southern industrialists was their inability to command a reliable, predictable labor force and leasing convicts was one of the most successful solutions to this problem. Drawing further on the case study of iron and coal, Lichtenstein concludes: "Indeed, the regional development of the Lower South's coal and iron industry as a whole demonstrates the degree to which rapid development rested on the ability of southern capitalists to use the penal system to recruit the core of their productive labor force" (1999: 73). Similarly, in a case study of convict

164 coal miners in Tennessee, Karin Shapiro notes that while coal mining never contributed more than one tenth of the state's industrial output, the "labor of thousands of prisoners in

Tennessee's mines was by no means marginal" since it, among other things, "primed the pump of a pivotal extractive industry—coal mining—among which many other industries depended" (1998: 5). The significance of the lease system to southern industry is made even clearer by the fact that when convict leasing was abolished in 1909, production fell by nearly 50% (Blackmon 2008: 351).

Records documenting the substantive figures private firms paid Southern states for convict labor gives a more robust sense of the system's scale. Under a contract with

Jefferson County, Alabama, the US Steel Company paid the local government nearly

$60,000 (equal to well over a million dollars today) to acquire every prisoner arrested during 1908 (Blackmon 2008: 312). Similar standing agreements were in place with twenty other Alabama counties, setting the prices for each laborer between $9 per month for Choctaw County and $28.50 for prisoners captured in the state capital of Montgomery.

In 1884 the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railway Company leased the entire prison population from the state of Tennessee for upwards of a million dollars. And following

Reconstruction, the state of Georgia leased its convicts to three different companies for the sum of $500,000 over twenty years; giving a virtual on the states' convicts to three powerful and well placed industrialists—General John Brown Gordon, a former US

Senator who founded Georgia's Ku Klux Klan; Joseph E. Brown, a former governor who served as chief justice of Georgia's Supreme Court; and Colonel James Monroe Smith, a

165 powerful state legislator who ran perhaps the largest family-owned plantation in the postbellum South (Oshinsky 1996: 64). Providing profits to states for what, without convict leasing would have been a significant expense, and providing labor to companies at a fraction of the free market rate, the lease system, in the words of an 1886 Bureau of Labor report devoted to convict labor, was "the most remunerative of any [convict labor system] in vogue."

State treasuries were not the only recipients of revenues from the lease. Walter

Wilson's 1933 book Forced Labor in the United States notes that "the best citizens and biggest companies made fortunes in the traffic and exploitation of leased convict-slaves.

Confederate generals, colonels, senators and justices of the supreme court were among the biggest dealers" (1993: 41). Although the state government of Georgia, for example, made less money than in Alabama, its state officials did not, as dozens of state officials profited personally from the lease. The career of John E. Brown illustrates this clearly: "Governor between 1857 and 1865 and state senator between 1880 and 1891, and involved in a number of business ventures, Brown entered a bid in 1875 for one hundred convicts.

Although late, it was accepted a day later. The following year, Brown competed successfully for a twenty-year lease even though other bids exceeded his own by 400 percent" (Myers

1998: 10). Three hundred of these convicts worked at Brown's Dade Coal Mines, for which the Georgia treasury received less than seven cents per convict per day. By 1880, Brown had become a millionaire, with profits from Dade alone reaching $100,000 a year, and was so successful that a newspaper reported that he had "turned a coal mine into a gold mine"

166 (Oshinsky 1996: 64). Relationships of this kind prompted one historian to characterize the relationship between capitalists and politicians in regards to convict leasing as a "mutual aid society" (Ayers 1984: 195).

As the system became widespread and its profitability transparent, convict leasing was met with some criticism from free white workers (who accused figures such as Brown, and those black convicts leased, of taking away their jobs) as well as from political reformers who protested the violence and brutality of the working conditions. The reformers were not opposed to convict leasing in principle, but rather drew attention to the failure of lessees to comply with rules and regulations, which resulted in inhumane conditions, escapes, brutal treatment, and untimely deaths for convicts. A system that "pitted rich people against poor people, whites against blacks, and ex-masters against former slaves"

(Oshinsky 1996: 37) the convict lease system was initially met with little resistance except from a relatively unorganized and weak labor movement, though this would change in the early 20th century. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, however, an era notable for its lack of consensus on most things, Lichtenstein notes that "the policy of 'farming out' convicts to industrialists and railroad entrepreneurs, with the goal of stimulating economic development, proved amenable to the advocates of the Presidential Reconstruction in 1866, the US Military, the Radical Republicans, and the 'Redeemers' alike" (1999: 38).57 Even

57 This is well documented in Lichtenstein's case study of Georgia where he contends that while convict leasing was first proposed to stabilize race and labor relations, it was then expanded by politicians across the political spectrum in attempt to foster economic growth. The Republicans in power from 1868-1871 expanded the convict lease system as part of their attempt to use the state to foster growth by liberally granting state aid—in the form of bond endorsements and the provision of forced labor—to railroads. The convict lease system was expanded even further by the Democratic administration which came to power in 1872. The

167 those decision makers who opposed the system, such as Mississippi Governor James Lusk

Alcorn who condemned the "shocking spectacle of a group of convicts followed by keepers with loaded rifled, ready to shoot them as though they were dogs" found little alternative to

the system and ultimately extended the contracts that they initially opposed.

Both fueling and explaining the racial bifurcation in forms of punishment in various ways, evidence indicates that the demand for convict labor among businessmen and corporations was race and gender specific. As Myers and Massey have demonstrated, "the arduous working conditions of convicts under the lease system were perceived as appropriate methods for expropriating the labor of black convicts ... As was the case in other Southern states, there appeared to be little demand for the labor of white convicts and courts were reluctant to sentence whites to work for lessees" (1991: 270). While initially female convicts worked alongside males on plantations and doing agricultural work, as convict leasing became concentrated in industry, the demand for convict labor was clearly a demand for black men's labor. As black women's labor power became devalued in society in general, contractors were sometimes able to pay reduced rates for the labor of the relatively few female convicts who were drawn into convict leasing (and also paid half price for convicts who were sick, disabled, or too old for a full day's labor) (Gildemeister 1987: 35).

There is also evidence to suggest that black women (who unlike their white counterparts were assumed to be idle if married and supported by their husbands) were particularly likely

popularity of the system, in Lichtenstein's words, lay in the capacity of convict labor to "resolve the problem of maintaining rapid growth in the face of the extreme industrial vulnerability that plagued capitalist enterprises in the post-bellum South" (1999 84).

168 to be targeted for arrest and leased in times of shortage of domestic servants (Nakano Glenn

2002: 104). In the 1880s, a quarter of state prisoners in Mississippi were adolescents or children (Oshinsky 1996).

Evaluating the impact of capitalist social forces' demand for black male convicts' labor, Myers and Massey (1991) demonstrate that levels of arrest in Georgia responded at least in part to changes in labor demands. Drawing on research that has emphasized the use of convict lease as a tool specifically designed to subordinate freedmen and exploit their labor for capital accumulation, they note that arrests were frequently made in response to industrialists requests for convicts, and in this sense, the "convict lease system helped solve the dual problems of labor and capital scarcity" (1991: 269). This correlation is further supported by Blackmon's study, which demonstrates that instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the records of county jails indicate thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges and he notes that repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime.

As the state turned ever-larger blocs of black prisoners over to private companies, he argues, an organized market for prisoners began to evolve. Labor agents for mining and timber companies were scouring the countryside to make arrangements for acquiring able-bodied black laborers and records indicate there was rampant corruption and corruption between prison officials, judges, police, and contractors whereby county and state officials received substantive payoffs in exchange for arresting and turning over convicts to private companies

(Blackmon 2008: 64). In Christopher Adamson's words: "County courts were virtual

169 employment bureaus. Company agents traveled from county court to county court to pick up men and women. Often offenders who had work off their debt were arrested while returning home, prosecuted as vagrants, and returned for another stint of unpaid toil"

(1983:560).

As late as 1932 in Georgia, for example, after a plea for more cotton pickers, two sheriffs scoured the town's streets, arresting sixty black men on "vagrancy charges" and turned them over to a plantation owner, making $20,000 and $30,000 each in return

(Blackmon: 375). In 1907 a journalist described a "typical" arrangement in which a turpentine operator paid a local sheriff five dollars a head to provide workers by arresting eighty "husky" men on various minor offenses over a period of three weeks. By 1890

Alabama had regularized the convict leasing system into what amounted to a state-operated : black men age twelve and older were sorted into four grades at different prices for work in mines; black women, children and "cripples" were sent to lumber camps and farms; white men remained in penitentiaries and jails; and white women and children, who were comparatively rare among convicts, were sent to special facilities (Oshinsky 1996: 79).

Reflecting on these circumstances, W.E.B. Du Bois argued that in the South, "the whole criminal system came to be used as a method of keeping Negroes at work and intimidating them" (1992: 506). The racialization of specific crimes through the Black

Codes meant that, according to state law, there were crimes for which only black people could be "duly convicted," and while less serious sanctions were reserved for white males, forced labor, in the form of the convict lease system became the preserve of black males and

170 increasingly associated with black criminality. Through the convict lease system, Du Bois

argued, "The state became a dealer in crime, profited by it so as to derive a net annual

income for her prisoners" (1901: 1). In this sense, criminologist Thorsten Sellin was likely

not too far off when he argued in his book Slavery and the Penal System that, at least

initially, the sole aim of convict leasing "was financial profit to the lessees who exploited the labor of the prisoners to the fullest, and to the government which sold the convicts to the lessees" (1976: 146).

The convict lease system did not happen in a vacuum, but rather, it both shaped and was shaped by the broader social relations of production and reproduction, in ways that were highly detrimental to legally free workers. Evidence indicates that the use of convict labor had the effect of suppressing the wage levels of Southern free laborers. A conservative newspaper, the Birmingham Age-Heraldput this argument directly in 1889: "Employers of convicts pay so little for their labor that it makes it next to impossible for those who give work to free labor to compete with them in any line of business. As a result the price paid for labor is based upon the price paid convicts" (quoted in Mancini 1996: 52). While in

Georgia in the 1880s, convicts were available for as little as a few dollars a month, or in

Florida in the 1890s, where contractors worked men in phosphate mines for $26.40 a year, over time these figures rose as market pressures greatly increased the price of the lease contract, in part through the spiral of subleasing that characterized the system in the early

20th century. Furthermore, while "New South industrialists found the willingness and ability of "free" labor to exercise mobility very frustrating, managers quickly discovered that

171 convict labor served to curb challenges to work rules" (Lichtenstein 1999: 11). Convict

workers were brought in to work side by side along free workers, such that the conditions of

the two groups were not very different, generally signaling a decline in the working

conditions of free workers. Convict workers were also brought in to break crucial strikes

and in many ways immunized southern capitalists against the growing strength among labor organization, antagonizing relations between white and black workers. As Blackmon describes, "The utility of forced labor as a bulwark against disruptions of the South's biggest

enterprises was obvious. Coal mines, timber camps, and farms worked by imprisoned men couldn't be shut down by strikes or have wages driven up by the demands of free men. The new slave labor provided an ideal captive workforce: cheap, usually docile, unable to organize, and always available when free laborers refused to work" (2008: 90). Thus, rather than depend on the "unreliable" free labor market, capitalists in the New South "used the norms controlling race and labor issues to help organize and control their own labor force"

(Lichtenstein 1999: 13).

Finally, in tandem with the criminal justice system that generated its laborers, the lease system helped to forge a new post-emancipation structure of racial subordination for both legally free and unfree workers. Arguing that the resurgence of popular racism activated during the overthrow of the Reconstruction was a more or less concerted plan of action on the part of white elites, W.E.B. Du Bois noted that "Southern capital accepted race hate and black disfranchisement as a permanent program of exploitation" (1992: 626-

7) in a way that fostered and perpetuated racial divisions within the labor market. While

172 states and private citizens alike went to great lengths to keep black persons from moving to

their following Emancipation, many did make it to the cities where they achieved

somewhat greater freedom from direct white control over their lives. The vast majority of

urban black men and women were confined to low-paying, irregular, and low-status positions. Black male workers were concentrated in service jobs, street work gangs,

construction sites, at wharves and docks, and in positions shunned by whites such as livery

stable operators and draymen. Because industrialists were able to use the state to recruit

and discipline a convict labor force, and thus able to develop their states' resources without creating a wage labor force, or without undermining planters' control of black labor, there was a real hesitation among industrial employers to hiring juridically free black men

(Nakano Glenn 2002: 106). In turn, another result of convict leasing was the degradation of labor in industries in which prisoners were concentrated. Since these also happened to be the same industries with high concentrations of free black workers fleeing the agricultural labor market, this tended to exacerbate the southern association of the least desirable forms of non-agricultural labor with a racially subordinated class (Lichtenstein

1999: 192). Du Bois made the astute observation that in this sense, so-called "free" black labor was, in a very concrete sense, chained to black convict labor, for in many industries in which black people sought employment—such as brick-making, mining, road-building— wages were severely depressed by the fact that convicts could be leased from the state at costs as low as $3 a month (1992: 744-745).

173 All of this served to legitimate the notion and justification that the convict lease system was the only way that black men could learn the skills that would allow them to join the free industrial workforce. In 1897, T.J. Hill, general manager of the state-run convict coal mines in East Tennessee, articulated the popular sentiment that rather than being racist or exploitative, the demand for black men's labor via convict leasing was a charitable one: "The occupation of mining has been opened up for the negro," Hill proclaimed. While

"his entry into the craft has been principally through the rugged gates of the penitentiary,"

Hill claimed that through convict leasing, black men were able to acquire industrial skills that they would otherwise not been able to learn since they would have been mired in agricultural labor and the legacy of slavery (Hill, as quoted in Lichtenstein 1999: 75).

For these reasons, the role of the convict lease system as a race and gender making institution needs to be emphasized. The decades during which convict leasing became widespread were ones of considerable ferment in meanings of race, gender and class relations, and as convict leasing clearly anchored and was reproductive of these relations. As the extreme in the continuum of unfreedom faced by black persons, the convict lease system had the effect of controlling a population reluctant to freely assume the inferior and restricted position in the wage labor market created for it through the interplay of disciplinary and restrictive legislation and market forces, reinforced by the racist attitudes and actions of society at large. Subject to racialized laws limiting movement, association, employment, and personal conduct, legally emancipated men and women did not enter a neutral economic sphere, but rather, were re-integrated into the relations of production and

174 social reproduction on unequal and in many senses unfree terms. And like sharecropping, debt peonage, and the other modalities of labor wherein black persons were almost exclusively concentrated, convict leasing shared the avoidance of giving blacks training that could undermine their restricted place in the Southern labor market (Lichtenstein 1999:

26). Rather than taking place in isolation from capitalist development, the convict lease system emerged as part of its associated social transformation, and like sharecropping and the Black Codes, was key in the formation of a racially bifurcated working class, denying wage-earning status to former slaves and anchoring the racialized and gendered forms of unfree labor that were fundamental to the region's industrialization.

Far from playing a neutral or progressive role, states played key roles in coercing unfree labor for economic development, though it is at the same time important to stress that while in hindsight the policies and practices that underpinned the rise and expansion of convict leasing appear as unified and coherent, in historical reality, the convict lease system developed in uneven and contradictory ways. Nonetheless, even if less automatically than it sometimes appears in hindsight, states instituted the convict lease system and were deeply implicated in the creation of interlocking modalities of unfree labor. Daniel Novak aptly reminds us that "it was the 's Bureau, not southern bourbons or the Ku

Klux Klan, which initiated and enforced the regulations that became models for the Black

Codes, the legal foundation and reflection of the new system of forced labor" (1978: x).

175 While the Freedman's Bureau58 did try to protect the rights of the freedmen within certain limits, "the general thrust of official bureau and army policies was highly supportive of [the convict lease] system, and, further, there was a general consensus among the planter class,

the "Black Code legislatures," and the federal government's agents that no other system could or should be considered (Novak 1978: 11). Because carceral populations swelled at a time when southern states had limited fiscal capacity to build new prisons, while industrialists were, at the same time, desperate not to have to pay wages to juridically free employees, and the convict lease system emerged as a "win-win" situation for capitalists and state governments alike. In this way, the convict lease system "emerged as a relation of production suited to modernization while maintaining a commitment to a restrictive racial order" (Lichtenstein 1999: xvi).

Racialized Criminality, the Labor Contract, and the Fluidity of Actually Existing Unjreedom The convict lease system did not develop in isolation of broader social, economic and political transformation, but rather emerged as part of these transformations, and rather than being anomalous, was the extreme in a range of modalities of unfree labor that proliferated in the industrializing South. As an expansive body of historical research demonstrates, while the Thirteenth Amendment formally freed racialized persons from chattel slavery, their freedom was then all but fully undermined through the formation of a carceral matrix that sought to limit physical, social, and economic mobility, denying black persons wage-earning status and reproducing the racial bifurcation of free and unfree labor

58 The Freedman's Bureau was a US federal agency created to aid freed slaves in 1865-1869 during the Reconstruction era of the United States.

176 in the supposedly free market. The slow breakdown of plantation slavery was characterized by the passage of a series of restrictive laws (which came to be collectively known as the

Black Codes) that governed the movement and behavior of, and enforced the compulsion to work among, newly freed slaves.59 In Loic Wacquant's words, formal emancipation involved "an ensemble of social and legal codes that ... sharply circumscribed the life chances of African-Americans while binding them to whites in a relation of suffusive submission backed by legal coercion and terroristic violence" (2002: 46). While formal slavery was barred, and black persons were legally free citizens, the Legislation Concerning the Freed Negro that emerged from the "reconstructed" states of the Confederacy in 1865 and 1866 "made it clear that the white South had no intention of dealing with a truly free black labor force" (Novak 1978: 2). These laws formed the legal basis of the convict lease system, as well as anchored among juridically free persons a racialized division of labor comprised of various forms of debt peonage, sharecropping, and indentured labor, all of which worked to deeply constrain the newfound freedom of former slaves and to re­ integrate into the relations of production and social reproduction on unequal and in many senses unfree terms.

The Mississippi Black Codes were the first to be established, listing specific crimes for the "free negro" including: "mischief, insulting gestures, cruel treatment to animals, and the vending of spirituous or intoxicating liquors" (Oshinsky 1996: 21). Black persons could also be arrested and/or conscripted for riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in

59 This fact has been extensively documented in historical studies of the post-Civil War South. See, for example: Adamson (1983); Novak (1978); Mancini (1996); Lichtenstein (1999).

177 sexual activity or loud talk with white women, and, significantly, for the possession of

firearms since these were quickly banned among black populations (Blackmon 2008: 82).

The first of the Mississippi acts, ironically titled "An Act to Confer Civil Rights on

Freedmen", barred black persons from renting land outside limits, thus ensuring former

slaves could not begin farming on their own, while the next act dealing with "Master and

Apprentice" relationships "as relates to Freedmen, Free Negroes, and Mulattoes" allowed

probate courts to "apprentice" any black child whose parents could not or would not

support him (Novak 1978: 2-3). Such apprenticeships generally involved years of

unremunerated labor from which the minor was not legally free to leave. Redefining petty

acts previously considered misdemeanors as felonies, this body of legislation was clearly written to intimidate the black population (and in particular, ex-slaves who were seen as a

threat to the stability of the social order) into compliance with a white supremacist social

and economic order and to provide easy grounds for arresting those who resisted this order.

Legislators in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas soon copied

Mississippi's Codes, often word for word, and the laws quickly coalesced such that freed

black persons became, in Blackmon's words, "trapped in a catch 22 between the laws

criminalizing the mores of black life and other laws that effectively barred them from

assimilating into mainstream white American society or improving their economic position" (2008: 208).

As Novak demonstrates, a key dimension of this body of legislation was the

redefinition of vagrancy in a way that criminalized and constrained the physical mobility of

178 racialized sectors of the population, as well as institutionalized among them the

requirement to enter labor contracts regardless of the terms or conditions involved.

Whereas vagrancy statutes had previously sought to manage poor non-residents violating

immigration norms in the South by defining a wide range of activities including begging,

loitering, and sleeping in public as crimes for which one could be arrested and put to forced work, from 1865-1867 the definition of vagrancy was expanded in many southern states to specifically target recently freed persons and the statutes were widely used as a means of compelling their labor. In Mississippi, for example, the definition of vagrancy was expanded to include, "runaways, persons lewd in speech or behavior, those who misspend their earnings or neglect their work, and all other idle or disorderly persons" as well as anyone who was guilty of theft, who had run away from a job, or had neglected their job or family (1978: 3). In South Carolina, black persons had to obtain special licenses for non- agricultural employment. In certain states, these laws also required freed persons to have a permit to travel and barred them from renting or buying property and from entering town limits without the permission of his employer.

Institutionalizing the compulsion to work, vagrancy law coerced people into entering labor contracts by mandating that "all free negroes and mulattoes over the age of eighteen" have written proof of lawful employment at the beginning of every year, and requiring that blacks without "visible means of support" hire themselves out during the first ten days of January. In this sense, while the Civil War resulted in the elimination of certain kinds of work such as slavery and involuntary servitude, in its aftermath, the obligation to

179 work was differentially defined and enforced for men and women, whites and nonwhites

(Nakano Glenn 2002: 91). Underpinned by racist assumptions about black persons' perceived inability to labor without white surveillance and discipline, these laws made personal liberty contingent on participation in the highly inequitable and unfree forms of labor recruitment, control, and exploitation that abounded in the "shadow of slavery." As

Mancini describes: "Among the multifarious debilitating legacies of slavery was the conviction that blacks could only labor in a certain way—the way experience had shown them to have labored in the past: in gangs, subjected to constant supervision, and under the discipline of the lash. Since these were the requisites of slavery, and since slaves were black,

Southern whites almost universally concluded that blacks could not work unless subjected to such intense surveillance and discipline" (1996: 25). Informed by assumptions of this kind, and directed towards disciplining increasingly organized freed slaves into the most unfree of societies modalities of labor, this body of legislation, as Adamson has noted, effectively brought back a form of the hiring-out system that had existed under slavery

(1983:559).

The various modalities of debt peonage, indentured labor, sharecropping, and convict leasing that arose at this point in history were porous and interlocked in ways that deeply constrained the social and economic mobility of the black population. While black persons were legally free to select which form of labor to engage in, this "choice" usually amounted only to an incentive to negotiate the most bearable form of forced labor.

Southern planters resorted to coercion in the face of the freed-people's insistence that

180 emancipation gave them the right to define their own conditions of work, to provide or withhold their labor at will, and capitalists sought mechanisms to "free" laborers of the means of production and subsistence so that they would need to bring their labor to the marketplace regardless of the wages and conditions involved. Barred from owning land, but with legal and informal barriers in place to keep them from earning the industrial wages that poor southern whites were so dependent on, freedmen and women were forced to work in agricultural settings for extremely low wages, or payment in the form of food, shelter and clothing.60 While initially Emancipation afforded some black men opportunities in industrial labor, once convict leasing took hold and industrialists were able to procure their labor for much lower rates, and in the face of protests from white men, there was a concerted effort to bar black persons from waged work, especially in the industrial realm. As during slavery, black women were compelled to do "a man's share in the field and a women's part in the home," and children were initiated into field labor when they were four or five years old (Nakano Glenn 2002: 102). In sharecropping situations, debt bondage forced women and children to do field work, sometimes in addition to working as domestic servants for the families of white supervisors or as laundresses or boardinghouse keepers for single male workers (Nakano Glenn 2002: 87-88). Many of

60 Sharecropping arrangements, for example, whereby the formerly enslaved, instead of working for a wage, rented plots of land and paid to the landowner a proportion of the crop, were widespread. Since croppers were compelled to purchase food, clothing and tools from the plantation owners at high prices, and they frequently discovered that their crops failed to pay for their purchases, a system of debt peonage arose whereby "insolvent croppers unable to repay debts from one year to another were required by law to work indefinitely to work for the same unscrupulous planter" (Adamson 1983: 559). Landlords also frequently forbade tenants from keeping a garden or raising hogs so as to force them to be completely dependent on the landlord for daily provisioning, leaving no choice but to survive on credit and to stay until the crop was picked and sold and debts settled (Nakano Glenn 2002: 102).

181 these were women who, in the context of escalating misogyny, were more vulnerable to both state and informal violence while traveling in search of work or a new means of reproduction and so were not as mobile as their male counterparts.

This system of legally free but highly coerced labor was held in place both by widespread economic destitution and racialized violence (which curtailed peoples ability to exit these contracts). It was also upheld through the threat and practice of convict leasing since resistance from the worst forms of legally free labor resulted in a more brutally violent and exploitative modality of legally unfree labor. That said, even those who did comply with vagrancy law and entered into sharecropping or various forms of debt peonage were often unable to escape the convict lease system, since, arrested on false or petty charges,

"black tenant farmers and sharecroppers often returned as uncompensated convict laborers, subject to imprisonment, shackles and the lash, to the same fields where a few days earlier they had worked as independent, free men" (Blackmon 2008: 68). In this sense, far from being an anomalous form of unfreedom in a society otherwise characterized by free exchange, because of the fluidity of unfreedom that existed in the postbellum South, convict leasing is better grasped as part of a spectrum of modalities of labor recruitment, control, and exploitation.61

61 The capital/wage labor relationship was central, and people's ability to enter it had real, tangible consequences for their conditions of livelihood, mobility, and freedom from state coercion. As capitalism often has, however, this period also involved other modalities of labor that do not conform to this relation, such as unpaid domestic labor and various other forms of unpaid, forced and/or bonded labor. Waged laborers, however, largely white male, while also freed of the means of their reproduction had labor contracts, wages, welfare that mediated this such that they could often sustain themselves.

182 Importantly, the Black Codes were also intended to curb the criminal behavior that

Southern whites had long viewed as natural to black persons (Oshinsky 1996: 32) and in this sense marked an important beginning to the fortification of "the equation of blackness and criminality" in the post-Emancipation US society (Davis 1998: 75). This was captured by the then Governor Orr of South Carolina who argued that "while the freedmen must be protected in their rights and property, they must also be "restrained from theft, idleness, vagrancy and crime and taught the absolute necessity of strictly complying with their contracts for labor" (Governor Orr, as quoted in Novak 1978: 4). Labor contracts were enforced by criminal sanctions and the absence of evidence of a labor contract was prima facie proof of vagrancy (Oshinsky 1996: 21; Novak 1978: 2). Those without labor contracts or who broke their contracts were prosecuted as vagrants and either conscripted into the military or sentenced to hard labor, first on local plantations and once convict leasing gained momentum, to private corporations (Adamson 1983: 559).

Indeed, this expanded definition of vagrancy provided grounds to arrest the thousands of former slaves who, in the years following the passage of the Thirteenth

Amendment, fled from the plantations, wandered through the countryside, and flocked to the cities in attempt to secure land or waged work to subsist (Novak 1978: 3; Adamson

1983: 558). "Throughout the South," as Oshinsky noted, "thousands of ex-slaves were arrested, tried and convicted for acts that in the past had been dealt with by the master alone" (1996: 28). As "an offense against the master became an offense against the state"

(1996: 28), the black prison populations expanded exponentially: from 1864-1867, the

183 South witnessed a skyrocketing of its carceral populations. In Georgia, for example, there was a tenfold increase in carceral populations from 1868-1908, while in Mississippi the population quadrupled between 1871 and 1879. While percentages varied somewhat from state to state, the proportion of black prisoners vastly outnumbered whites, and in some states as many as 90% of these new prisoners were black. Of South Carolina's 431 prisoners in the year 1880, only 25 were white, and of Georgia's 1,200 state prisoners in that year, over 1,100 were black (Oshinsky 1996: 63). And significantly, in Blackmon's words,

"instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause of judicial process"

(2008: 7). In another author's words, "There is a failure to fully appreciate how many convicts were kidnapped, held beyond their sentences, or actually innocent of the crimes for which they were incarcerated, the total number of which will never be known" (Fierce, as quoted in Davis 1998: 77).

In sum, a complex system of compulsions and coercion underpinned black persons' entrance into highly inequitable and unfree relations of production and social reproduction, and those who resisted this order were arrested and forced to work under even more exploitative and abhorrent conditions through the convict lease system. As the choice to withhold labor was circumscribed by the criminalization of not having a labor contract, racialized populations were integrated into labor situations that they were often unable to leave, either because they were legally indentured, and/or because contracts were

184 enforced by formal or informal violence. As Rebecca McLennan aptly summarizes, the poor black population of the South following Emancipation were being injured on three fronts. First, she notes, "states and private land monopolists blocked access to land and made them vulnerable to starvation. They then turned to theft, were arrested and confined to hard labor. Then, the state, by absorbing these men into the prison labor system, in turn, displaced freed men who had been lucky enough to find employment or an apprenticeship"

(2008: 74). While formally free, black populations were both deprived of the means of subsisting except through highly unfree and racialized labor situations, and for that reason, compounded by the carceral matrix that underpinned and reinforced it, had little choice except to work. In Davis' words, while the Thirteenth Amendment putatively freed black labor from the total control to which it was subject during slavery, "In actuality, new forms of quasi-total control developed- sharecropping, tenant farming, the scrip system, and the most dramatic evidence of the persistence of slavery, the convict lease system" (1998: 78).

Once they entered the convict lease system, as noted earlier, to withhold labor meant torture, at best, or, not infrequently, death with impunity. It is in this sense that legal historian Daniel Novak argued that through the convict lease system and the racist and disciplinary laws underpinning it, freed slaves were "chained to an ever-turning wheel of servitude" (1978: 44). In his words, "without fanfare the freed slave was plunged into a new labor system that degraded his value as a worker and made his new freedom a mockery"

(Novak 1978: xv).

185 Conclusion

Long into the 1920s, 1930s, and late 1940s, convicts continued to labor, eat and sleep with chains riveted around their ankles. When the convict lease system was slowly abolished in Southern states throughout the first two decades of the 1900s, in the face of white southerners" fatigue with the persistent underdevelopment that helped make unfree labor compatible with the exploitation of the region's raw materials in the first place, and as the labor of convicts became more and more expensive due to growing , the chain gang came to replace the convict lease as the dominant form of penal labor in the twentieth-century South. The chain gang system consisted primarily of black convicts chained together working the roads of the deep South, embodying the brutality of Southern race relations characterized by similar violence and dehumanization as the convict lease system. At the time it originated, however, the penal road gang was regarded as "a quintessential southern Progressive reform and as an example of penal humanitarianism, state-sponsored economic modernization and efficiency, and racial moderation," and was justified through a movement to "take the prisoner out of the cell, the prison factory, and the mine to work him in the fresh air and sunshine" (Lichtenstein 1993: 86, 88). This decisive shift from public to private exploitation of forced black labor marked "the triumph of the modern state's version of the social and economic benefits to be reaped from bound labor, in the name of developing a more healthy, less dependent 'progressive' economy"

(Lichtenstein 1999: 189). Thus, from the Reconstruction through the Progressive Era the various uses of convict labor coincided with changes in the political economy of southern capitalism. As Lichtenstein describes, "In each case the impetus to harness forced labor to

186 the project of infrastructural development and economic growth came not from those who yearned for the social and economic order of the slave South but from the region's most ardent advocates of progress, who sought to reconcile modernization with the racial caste system" (Lichtenstein 1999: 189).

The correspondence between the forces of modernization and the perpetuation of unfree labor that is clear in the convict lease system was no anomaly. Just as chattel slavery in the Americas was a crucial component in the historical development of capitalism, "the extreme forms of labor coercion and control that supplanted slavery in the modern world continued to demonstrate a "progressive" quality; rather than constituting an archaic obstacle to capitalist development, destined to be swept away by modernity, unfree labor has frequently been an essential element in the accumulation process that made that development possible" (Lichtenstein 1999: 188). This chapter has sought to position the convict lease system as something that arose in and through the social, economic and political transformations of post-Emancipation Southern society, documenting that it was neither analytically nor historically separated from the form that juridically free labor took, and that capitalism in the US South therefore involved modalities of labor that did not conform to the capital-wage labor relation but nevertheless impacted its character and form and comprised constituent dimensions of the relations of production and social reproduction. In doing so, I have attempted to highlight that the convict lease system was not an anomalous form of unfree labor whose explanation lies in the pre-capitalist past, but

187 rather, was of many modalities of unfree labor that proliferated as part of overall processes of modernization.

When this is understood, it becomes clear that the creation and spread of the capitalist labor market in the US South involved not only institutionalization and expansion of the capital-waged labor relation that was engaged in by primarily white men, but also involved the spread and institutionalization of various modalities of unfree labor.

The very construction of the notion of a "free" laboring class in the US South, in fact, lay in the ways that juridically free males came to draw on convict leasing and other symbols of race to claim rights on the basis of their status as "free" labor in stark contrast to those in the convict lease system and interlocking forms of debt peonage and sharecropping. As such, the racial bifurcation of free and unfree labor became cemented in the free market such that, as historian Holland Thompson aptly wrote of the convict lease system in 1910,

"What no amount of coercion could accomplish is being done by the silent working of economic forces" (Thompson, quoted in Lichtenstein 1999: 14). Just as Marx argued that it was not an "invisible hand" which peacefully coordinates economic activities, but rather, individual's conditions of livelihood and choices (particularly the choice to enter the wage labor market) were shaped and underpinned by violence, disciplinary legal codes, and a set of social property relations where there was little option other than to submit to the discipline of the capitalist labor process, the free market in the US South was constructed through similar relations of dispossession and disciplinary legal codes, all of which were

188 anchored by a disciplinary and violent system of unfree labor that served to curb alternatives to market participation.

189 Chapter 4: The Prison and the Factory: Industrial Contracting and Class Discipline in the North

In the Northern states, throughout the nineteenth century, private companies built

factories directly inside of state prisons and contracted with state and local governments to

exploit convict labor for private gain, at times generating the equivalent of more than $30

billion a year in goods (McLennan 2008: 90). Through this system of labor recruitment,

control, and exploitation—known as the industrial prison contracting system—US

companies bought the labor power of hundreds of thousands of prisoners for a fraction of

the cost they would have incurred on the free market, generating startling profits and

accruing benefits that enabled them to undermine competitors during a time of rapid

industrialization. Maturing and becoming widespread in 1840, the system initially fulfilled

Northern capitalists' need for a cheap, disciplined labor force in the context of the labor scarcities and rebellions that characterized the early stages of industrialization. At its peak

from 1870 to 1890, companies not uncommonly held exclusive ten to twenty year contracts

for the labor of entire states' prison populations, and tactically used their sizable captive workforces to drive down wages and working conditions for the lowest stratum of the working class. Throughout the 19th century, states, in turn, were able to run prisons as profitable enterprises, collecting income from contractors that often exceeded carceral costs, enabling a mass expansion of coercive power at a time of social unrest associated with growing inequality.

190 Far from existing outside of, or separate from, capitalist development in the

United States, the industrial prison contracting contributed to capitalism's expansion and profitability, and played an integral role in facilitating industrialization and the transition from independent agrarian production to market commodity production (Dubofsky

1996). Like the convict lease system in the South, however, prison contracting was also an incredibly brutal labor system. As private companies and the imperatives of their profit- seeking activities came to exert considerable influence over prison administration, convicts were made to work at unprecedented ferocity and speed and were frequently whipped into higher productivity, causing an unusually high rate of work-related accidents, illnesses, and deaths. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as capitalists experimented with violent forms of labor discipline, the congregate workshops were characterized by such blatant brutality and exploitation that one observer noted that "convicts were treated as slaves" while another described the situation as one in which "the whip made men living machines" while "contractors stockpiled exorbitant profits" (as quoted in Gildemeister

1987: 15). Preceded by a comparatively tranquil system wherein punitive labor was justified as a humane alternative to corporal punishment, the rise of industrial prison contracting marked a substantive shift in the governance of crime, poverty, and deviance.

How can we explain this shift, through which a congregate, industrial, and violently enforced labor regime designed to generate staggering corporate profits became the primary mode of punishment in the US North between 1840-1890? In Michael Ignatieff s words,

"What new exigencies, what new conceptions of pain explain this decisive transformation

191 in the strategy of punishment?" (1978: xiii). Bearing these questions in mind, after sketching key dimensions of the historic rise of the prison as the state's primary institution in the production of capitalist social order, this chapter traces the emergence of the prison contracting system in the US North in the context of that region's industrialization.

Underpinned by the assumption that a study of the rise of industrial prison labor within the Northern states during the nineteenth century must not just be a study of labor inside of prisons but rather a study of labor and freedom within industrial capitalism, this chapter is particularly interested in how industrial prison contracting came to play a key role in anchoring and reproducing the unequal and unfree class, race, and gender based social relations that characterized industrialization.

The chapter begins, in section one, with a historical review of various carceral labor regimes preceding the prison contract system, arguing that rather than comprising a historical anomaly, the prison contract system arose as part of a centuries long tradition wherein capital and the state have used carceral institutions to contain and exploit the laboring poor. In section two, following a brief overview of the prison contract system, I document the unfreedom that convicts faced within it across three planes. First, I examine the conditions involved in, and workers' lived experiences of, the labor process itself by documenting the violence and exploitation that characterized the prison factories, and noting capitalists' attempt to replicate these conditions in factories outside of prison.

Second, I examine the social relations surrounding productive convict labor in the sphere of circulation, namely by documenting the role that states and corporations played in

192 exploiting convict labor. Third, I examine the compulsions and forms of coercion underpinning people's entrance into the system through a discussion of the restrictive and racialized legal codes that proliferated during industrialization. I argue that the carceral matrix created by these legal codes and the prison contract system acted as a legitimizing sanction for the assertion of property rights associated with the burgeoning capitalist class, and was fundamental to the social processes through which the North's previously indentured immigrants, recently freed blacks, and "large class of permanently poor citizens"

(Foner 1995: xxiv) were transformed into a permanent, reliable, and relatively immobile wage-laboring class. In this sense, as I demonstrate throughout the chapter, the industrial prison contracting system comprised a fundamental dimension of the form of social organization that facilitated the rise of industrial capitalism in the US North and as such, played a key role in anchoring and reproducing racialized and gendered inequality and unfreedom in the "free" labor market.

This chapter argues further that when industrial prison contract labor is understood in and through the bodies of those who actually performed it, a discrepancy emerges between liberal criminological accounts of the rise of the prison and the actual logic and impacts of prison labor during this period. While most studies of penal history stress that the period between 1770 and 1840 involved a shift wherein forms of discipline

"directed at the body" were replaced by a carceral discipline "directed at the mind", when the significance of prison labor as a form of punishment is fully understood, this narrative cannot be entirely correct. If we grasp the key changes that the prison contracting system

193 generated in the nature and organization of livelihoods in the Northern states, and in particular its role in creating a disciplined, reliable labor force, then we see that punishment in this period was also necessarily directed at the body since prison labor played a key role in conditioning the bodies of the laboring poor into the cadence and norms of waged labor. As will become clear in Chapter Five, this realization has major implications not only for our historic understanding of carceral power, but also for the way we understand prisons and prison labor today.

"From the Whip to the Workshop": The Rise of Forced Labor as a Mode of Legal Punishment

While it is frequently assumed that the industrial exploitation of convict labor for private gain is a distinctly modern and American phenomenon, it is in fact a phenomenon as old as carceral institutions themselves. While, long before carceral institutions even existed, colonial companies benefited from the British state's practice of disposing of its convicts by shipping them to the US where they worked as indentured servants (Smith

1965: 114)62, the origins of the prison industries stretch back to the early 1700s, when the first "houses of correction" (the precursor to the modern penitentiary) were built in

England, and masters in a range of outward trades, especially textiles and rope making, contracted with the counties for the labor of the incarcerated (Ignatieff 1978: 32). In the

US context, while the use of labor as a mode of legal punishment first appeared in the 1682

62 As Smith documents, the first major instance of labor as punishment in the United States occurred when convicts from England were sent for seven years of servitude in the colonies, (at least 70% of which were sent to the US). The act of returning to England prematurely was punishable by death (Smith 1965: 111).

194 statutes of the newly founded colony, it was in the early 1800s that the first privately owned prison factories appeared in penitentiaries and corporations began contracting with colonial governments to exploit the aggregated labor power of entire institutions' inmates (Gildemeister 1987: 5). The private sector's involvement in the exploitation of carceral populations, then, is far from a new or anomalous phenomenon, and significantly, the income historically generated by the state through the private exploitation of its captive labor force figures centrally in the explanation of how prisons came to play such a central role in the governance of crime and poverty in capitalist society.

While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to trace this history in full, this section lays out key dimensions of the historic continuum of the imposition of productive labor as a mode of punishment in England and the US; the remaining sections of the chapter then examine the prison industrial contract system in more detail.

Punishing the Poor: Instantiating The Market in Early Capitalist Europe

As many historians have documented, the use of labor as a mode of legal punishment first emerged in sixteenth century England as part of the social transformations associated with the emergence of capitalism.63 The drastic redefinition of property rights and the expropriation of the peasantry created a situation where the majority of people

63 As Rosalind Petchesky (1993) has documented, the structure and techniques of confinement were from the beginning articulated with the economic and social needs of capitalist development. Similarly, Melossi and Pavarini (1977) note that prisons (or the penalty of confinement as deprivation of liberty) were unknown in pre-capitalist society. They argue that "the prison (in common with other ancillary institutions) arose at the same time as and in a particular relationship with the capitalist mode of production," resulting in profound structural changes and radical alterations "in the sphere of social control and of the reproduction of the labor force: the relationships between primary and secondary social control were shaken up as was the very administration of various forms of control" (1977: 6). See also: Rusche and Kirchheimer (2003); Linebaugh (1976).

195 became separated from direct access to the means of subsistence and needed to enter the labor market in order to subsist, creating a class of "free workers" who were also "freed" from any means of production. Since, rather than submitting automatically to waged labor, the dispossessed rebelled and resisted the imposition of the labor market, and furthermore, since the "free" proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufacturers as fast as it was thrown upon the world, the expropriated "were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances"

(Melossi and Pavarini 1977: 13). Rather than occurring automatically, the contradictory creation of a market in labor required "decades of coercive measures, embodied in a regime of law and punishment, designed to destroy communal property rights and establish the unfettered sway of capitalist private property" (McNally 1993: 41). The imposition of labor as a mode of legal punishment and the rise of carceral institutions in which punitive labor was housed were fundamental to this shift.

In the sixteenth century, countries such as England, Holland, Germany and

France—the leading regions of emergent capitalism—began to develop a variety of carceral institutions which had in common a concern to put their inmates to work and to train them in the disciplines of industry. In Joanna Innes' words, "The new prisons ... were designed for a very specific clientele: for men and women drawn from the ranks of the laboring poor, guilty of no more than petty delinquencies considered to be especially characteristic of the poor: 'idle and disorderly' behavior of various kinds, unlicensed begging, vagrancy and the like" (1987: 42). The earliest example of such an institution was

196 the London Bridewell (created in 1555), designed to "rid the city of vagabonds and beggars" and put in place a "hiring-out system to allow local tradesmen to exploit its reservoir of labor" (Rusche and Kirchheimer, cited in Garland 1990: 101). As Ignatieff describes, "the bridewells were established for the confinement and deterrence of the host of 'masterless' men thrown onto the highways by the dissolution of Catholic monastic charity, the breakup of feudal retinues, enclosure and eviction of cottagers, and the steady pressure of population growth on a small and overstocked labor market" (1978: 12). Similar institutions— such as the Zuchthaus and Spinnhaus in Amsterdam, or the Hopital General in Paris— were soon established elsewhere, "each unique in its specific inmate composition and organization, but all of them sharing the elements of confinement, forced labor, and reformative purpose" (Garland 1990: 101). While a specifically institutional architecture was still two hundred years away, it was out of these institutions that the idea of the "house of correction" developed—the first institution in which men were both "confined and set to labor in order to learn the habits of industry" (Ignatieff 1978: 11).

The essence of the house of correction, which by the late seventeenth century had become a feature of most European cities, "was that it combined the principles of the poor house, workhouse, and penal institution" (Rusche and Kirchheimer 2003: 42). Designed to set unemployed persons to work, its main aim was to "make the labor power of unwilling people socially useful by putting them to work under supervision within a closely disciplined and orderly regime" (2003: 42). By being forced to work within the institution, the prisoners received vocational training, and it was hoped that when they were released

197 they would voluntarily flood the labor market. As such, these institutions played an important role in anchoring the early capitalist order since their "low wages and training of unskilled workers were important contributing factors in the rise of capitalist production"

(2003: 50). As well as contributing to the emergence of modern capitalism, these institutions also served as the basis upon which the modern penitentiary was later built.

It would be over a century, however, before the rise of the modern penitentiary as the central institution governing poverty, crime, and indigence, since, at this time in history, the efficacy of the house of corrections was far from certain and these institutions were prone to fiscal and ideological crisis. While from 1690 to 1720 in England, a time of high unemployment, expanding population, rising prices, and falling wages, incarceration rates soared and new houses of corrections were built, in the early eighteenth century, non- institutional punishment appears to have come back into vogue, likely related the fact that labor shortage conditions made it advantageous to "keep the deviant circulating within the labor market as much as possible" (Ignatieff 1978: 12). During this period, many houses of correction fell into decay and disorganization and some appear to have stopped being used all together.

The house of correction, however, was not the only institution being used to regulate and impose capitalist social order. Various bodies of legislation passed throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries criminalized various behaviors associated with non-waged forms of subsistence.64 Britain's Vagrancy Act of 1744, for instance, "endowed

64 For discussions of various sets of legislation, see: Linebaugh (2003); McNally (2003); Neocleous (2000).

198 magistrates with the power to whip or imprison beggars, peddlars, gamblers, strolling actors, gypsies, and 'all those who refused to work for the usual and common wage' and it bestowed on them the right to imprison 'all persons wand'ring abroad and lodging in alehouses, barns or houses or in the open air, not giving a good account of themselves'" (McNally 1993: 39-

40). Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, a formalized system of poor relief was established in England, and this system and the institutions associated with it also played an important role. Importantly, in response to a perceived crisis in social control and class relations,65 the Poor Law Report of 1834 punitively amended the classificatory scheme that distinguished between the deserving/respectable and undeserving/unrespectable poor, treating all non-working able-bodied poor people as undeserving of relief, and thus as criminals.

Significantly, as Mark Neocleous has documented, the drafting and institutionalization of the new poor laws overlapped with the development of the police forces in nineteenth century Europe, which, he notes "were an extension for the emerging machinery for managing the poor" (2000: 67). In Britain, the leading personnel and institutions of the new poor laws and the new police were in fact engaged in a symbiotic relationship with one another, exchanging ideas and information, and official reports from both these institutions centralize attempts to dissociate poverty from indigence or pauperism and criminality—the respectable from the unrespectable poor. While the former were generally governed through the poor laws, the latter were governed through

65 As McNally describes, "The issue was not so much that poor relief costs were rising, as it was the view that the relief system sustained attitudes and beliefs that encouraged the poor to stand up for (and revolt on behalf of) the subversive notion that the rich owed them for their subsistence" (1993: 97).

199 increasingly harsh and violent laws and forms of punishment throughout the nineteenth centuries. What is especially important for Neocleous is not only the new poor law's and the new police's common focus on the poor and their distinction between poverty and indigence, but their emergence, not incidentally, within the context of the constitution of a new industrial capitalist order which, to develop successfully, required the creation of a working class conducive to that order.

What was especially significant about the new poor laws and those who championed them was that the problem they identified and sought to address was not poverty, per se, since poverty was viewed as necessary to compel certain groups of people to labor. Rather, the problem they identified was the constant threat of the poor falling into indigence—or, refusing or failing to gain subsistence through the wage and thus to participate in the market. Indigence was viewed as the true threat and evil as it encouraged immoral and criminal offenses, thus rendering society less secure (Neocleous 2000: 65-80).

The aim of the new poor law, Neocleous argues, was to enforce the laboring class's dependence on the wage for subsistence. It did this by limiting out-relief to only the most destitute (such as the non-able-bodied) and by making the conditions in the workhouse worse than those found in the most exploitative forms of wage labor. In so doing, it separated the indigent, or pauper, from the rest of the poor, bringing only them under the domain of the poor law, while, in turn, reinforcing the notion that "as the laboring class the poor were expected to obtain subsistence through the market and the wage" (Neocleous

2000: 69). By creating the legal framework to punish the "undeserving" poor, the

200 nineteenth century institutions and discourses that governed poverty and criminality worked together to police the line between poverty and indigence and to preserve the former while eliminating the threat associated with the latter.

It is important to note that these shifts in the governance of poverty and deviance were deeply intertwined with the rise of liberal political economy (itself a form of knowledge rooted in material transformations associated with the rise of capitalism), which posited individuals as rational economic actors who freely chose both their poverty and their criminality. Rather than acknowledging the ways in which the market had increased insecurity, and seeking to address this insecurity through social and economic policies, the responsibility for poverty and crime was assigned to the individual. As governments and the public opinion became heavily influenced by these ideas, poor relief was made more punitive and access to it was restricted, creating an incentive to work for wages regardless of the pay or conditions involved. It was in this context that poorhouses (previously designed to give some form of relief in the face of insecurity caused by the burgeoning capitalist order) were replaced by ww^houses where those deemed "indigent" were set to work spinning and weaving under conditions of tight discipline.66 Far from being exclusively a state initiative, like the first workhouse in Bristol, many workhouses were established by the merchants of the city for the confinement of the vagabond poor, and were managed by private contractors who, for an annual fee, organized, oversaw, and earned profits from the

^Significantly, some historians have argued that "the indigent", rather than being an actually existing social class of people, were primarily a discursive construct of liberal political economists. Simon Fowler, for example, notes, "able-bodied idlers and shirkers hardly existed outside the imagination of a generation of political economists" (quoted in Ignatieff 1978: 10).

201 labor of the poor. Between 1753 and 1771, at a time of disquiet about the rising costs of poor relief, nine workhouses of unprecedented size and scale—called Houses of Industry— were erected to exploit the "labor of the workhouse poor and deter the able-bodied from

'imposing' on the parish" (Ignatieff 1978: 14). By limiting relief outside the workhouse to only the most destitute and by making the conditions in the workhouse worse than those found in the most exploitative jobs, the expansion of workhouses reinforced the notion that

"as the laboring class the poor were expected to obtain subsistence through the market and the wage" (Neocleous 2000: 69). Such institutions comprise a clear example of the ways in which the punitive arm of the state was used to exert class discipline and to attempt to integrate various sectors of the population into constrictive and unequal relations of production and reproduction. While not a form of legal punishment, per say, the introduction of productive labor in workhouses as a form of discipline to "rehabilitate" the able-bodied poor shared the same ideological and institutional foundations that underpinned the institutionalization of labor as a form of legal punishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alongside the birth of the modern penitentiary.

Alongside the expansion and consolidation of capitalist social property relations, as many historians have documented, the nineteenth century was characterized by fundamental shifts in the governance of poverty and criminality.67 Central here— particularly in England and the US—was the establishment of the modern-day penitentiary and the associated reformist philosophy that those convicted of crime could best be

67 See, for example: Thompson (1976); Garland (1990); Ignatieff (1978).

202 managed through confinement, humane treatment and labor (though, it is important to

note, certain racialized and gendered populations thought incapable of reform continued to

be subjected to corporal punished). This period also involved the widespread use of

imprisonment as a punishment for felonies (previously punished through execution or

corporal punishment), the definition of which was widened to include various forms of

property infringements in the context of the aggrandizement of the property rights of the

gentry at the expense of common rights and customs. While at first only minor delinquents

were sentenced to these institutions, along with vagrants, beggars, orphans, and children

deemed in need of reform, eventually more serious criminals were also sent there, so that by

the late eighteenth century this penal function began to displace the institutions' wider

uses. Designed, like their forerunners, to exploit labor and train new labor reserves, as

David Garland describes:

new penitentiaries were built and old buildings refurbished to secure these economic ends (though, significantly, those jails which were not 'susceptible to commercial exploitation' remained unreformed and in very bad conditions), until, by the end of the eighteenth century, imprisonment had taken the place of physical forms of punishment as the most frequently used response to crime. (1990: 102)

In ideological terms, as McNally has argued, the rise of the modern penitentiary signaled

the advent of a mode of discipline "designed to reform and correct offenders, not merely to

inflict punishment on them" (1993: 40). As he describes, the development of the penitentiary "was an expression of the liberal English materialism which contributed to the

construction of bourgeois society. Central to this doctrine was the notion that human

beings could be remade, by a combination of coercion, education, and changed

203 circumstances, to create a disciplined and industrious labor force" (1993: 40). Advocates of the penitentiary argued that those convicted of crime could best be managed through confinement, humane treatment, and "rehabilitative" labor, all of which would help them achieve "independence" in society after release through participation in the waged labor market (and total dependence on the wage form rather than alternative modes of securing reproduction).

This ideology figured centrally in the development of the US penitential system of punishment which was founded on the belief that convicts should be compelled to confront their guilty consciences by being subjected to the strict routine of "bodily pain, labor, watchfulness, and silence" (McLennan 2008: 36). Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in the US, as the upper classes protested against increasing

"disorderliness, chaos, and criminality" in society, and as Congress began substituting the carceral punishment of imprisonment at hard labor for corporal and public chastisements, the growing conviction that inmates should work at jobs that would punish them but also break them of habitual indolence and familiarize them with "honest industry," anchored the expansion of the penitential system (Kann 2005: 9). Emerging out of the long tradition of imposing hard labor as a means of disciplining the "indigent" and undeserving poor, labor within colonial prisons found its origin in the blending of an institution—the English workhouse, and an idea—reformation through humane treatment and labor.

204 The Introduction of Labor as a Legal Mode of Punishment in the United States, 1786-1830

While prison labor was initially introduced in the US, much like in Britain, as a form of punishment, it quickly morphed into a new regime wherein the organization, form, and discipline of prison labor were oriented almost entirely towards generating profits for private firms. As many historians have noted, emerging and then rapidly expanding in the context of persistent labor shortages, and in the face of widespread rejection among the laboring poor of the idea that waged labor could be a permanent means of obtaining subsistence, the rise of the US penitential system of punishment was fundamentally related to the need for socially useful labor (Rusche and Kirchheimer 2003; Sellin 1976). Just as labor was introduced in English Houses of Correction with the explicit purpose of reforming the indigent poor and compelling them to participate in the labor market, so the installation of private factories inside of US penitentiaries during the early stages of the industrial revolution was done with the intention producing a more stable and reliable wage-earning class. While the institutionalization of solitary, silent, labor as a mode of legal punishment in the US was initially defended as an enlightened and humane alternative to the discredited penal practices of the old world monarchies, as the penitentiary system faced a crisis of legitimacy in the face of widespread moral critique in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and in the face of growing concerns about indigence in society among the upper classes, congregate, productive labor emerged as a new approach to legal punishment.

205 As historian Rebecca McLennan has argued in The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest,

Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State, 1776-1941 (2008), contrary to the conventional scholarly view that the activity of labor was of negligible significance to the nineteenth century "American System" of imprisonment, "forced, hard, productive labor was of foundational importance to the penal order that the states erected on the ruins of the old penitential mode of punishment" (2008: 53). While corporal punishment, hanging, and fines dominated American penal practice through the colonial and revolutionary periods, in the eighteenth century, emphasis on punishment through labor rapidly displaced the traditional forms of punishment (Gildemeister 1987: 5). In 1786, as Pennsylvania legislators faced great pressure from the ruling elite who had advocated that the "criminal and immoral" among the lower class should be forced into honest and productive labor, major criminal code changes replaced branding, cropping, and whipping with fines, confinement, and hard labor (McLennan 2008: 33). Legislators enacted a penal code that provided that all convicts other than those sentenced to hang be sentenced to "hard labor, publicly and disgracefully imposed," noting that this would "produce such a strong impression upon the minds of others as to deter them from committing like offenses"

(Gildemeister 1987: 6). Chained and clogged, this first group of US convicts subject to labor as punishment worked by day cleaning and repairing public roadways and buildings and at night were returned to a common jail cell. This system, however, led to widespread incidences wherein the laboring convicts were involved in property crime, robbery, and public disorder, and legislators soon faced pressure to amend the system.

206 Following much lobbying by ruling elites concerned that rather than acting as a

coercive ancillary to the labor market and encouraging reliance on the wage, the penal

system was in fact encouraging social disorder,68 Pennsylvania became the first of several

states to confine convicted offenders to labor in a "penitentiary-house," modeled after the

British "house of repentance", which stressed a "rigid, mechanical and machine-like

schedule" similar to the one that capitalists were beginning to impose in workplaces across the US (Kann 2005: 3-8). Institutionalized in the wake of the Northern states' ban on slavery and various other forms of juridically unfree labor, and at a time of fierce struggle among juridically free workers over wages and other terms of employment, the introduction of forced, congregate labor as a form of legal punishment comprised a new and important relation of unfreedom in US society (Steinfeld 1991: 125).69 Just as craftsmen rejected the rise of factory work and new forms of labor discipline outside of prison, however, the introduction of congregate productive labor in state prisons was met with widespread

68 Part of a group of reformers who proposed replacing traditional sanctions with lengthy incarcerations where regimens of labor, instruction, and discipline could be applied, Pennsylvania essayist Benjamin Rush published in 1787 an attack on the form that labor as punishment initially took in his Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments Upon Criminals, and Upon Society, warning that "employing criminals in public labour will render labor of every kind disreputable, more especially that species of it which has for its object the convenience or improvement of the state" (as quoted in McLennan 2008: 36). Just as "white men decline labor" in slave-holding states because they associate it with "Negro slaves", free citizens who witnessed the hard public toil of criminals would come to consider labor per se degraded and degrading. If the purpose of the system was to discourage indigence, Rush reasoned, (and therefore to encourage reliance on the wage), the system needed to be fundamentally rethought since it seemed to be encouraging disorder rather than quelling it. Rush argued that rather than laboring publicly, convicted offenders should be sequestered in a "house of repentance" where they would be subjected to strict labor routines, noting that the labor of the convicts should be "profitable to the state," and involve "useful manufacture" (as quoted in McLennan 2008: 36-37). The essence of Rush's suggestion was that labor—if it was to be an effective form of punishment and reform—should resemble as much as possible the actual labor that would enable convicts to avoid indigence following release, and that this labor should be carried out in private so as not to degrade labor per se. 69 As McLennan describes, "in fusing forced, confined labor with legal punishment, the penal code provided for the creation of a new type of master (the imprisoning state), a new kind of involuntary servant (the duly convicted prisoner) and a new mode of forced servitude (involuntary penitential servitude)" (2008: 41).

207 resistance from both convicts and the lower classes in society at large. During this early

republican period, prisoners across the northern states engaged in "mutinies" centered on a

refusal to participate in congregate labor and/or a demand for the same rights, wages, and

conditions that wage workers outside of prison were receiving for performing the same job,

and local authorities found themselves having to repeatedly call out the militia to restore order (Meranze 1996). As prisoners succeeded in resisting the imposition of productive labor as punishment, manufacturers became increasingly hesitant to take on convict labor.

It was only after lawmakers prescribed a series of reforms to enforce order within the penitentiaries, most significantly, repealing in 1819 the ban on use of stocks, flogging, and irons in the workshops, that the practice of selling the labor of convicts to private enterprise gradually became widely and deeply entrenched in US penal ideology

(McLennan 2008: 55). As the income generated through private contracts for convict labor began to resolve the early penitentiary's fiscal crisis, the institution increased in popularity and by the mid-1820s, eight northern states had opened penitentiary houses. By 1830, for the first time in US history, the majority of the country's criminals were undergoing punishment inside of the walls of carceral institutions, centered around a forced, productive labor regime held in check by violent forms of labor discipline, in factories that both reflected, and came to influence, those in the outside world.

The Expansive Industrial Prison Contract System of the 19th Century, 1840-1890 Following the widespread adoption of strict and violent disciplinary regimes in prisons across the North, the increasing use of the contract, coupled with soaring prison

208 populations, signaled the beginning of a new epoch of prison contracting in the 1840s.70

This decade marked the beginning of a widespread expansion, rationalization, and

consolidation of the prison contracting system wherein Northern states began to use prison

contracts on a relatively large scale, transferring their property right in convict labor to private corporations in exchange for substantive revenues, often up to 150% the costs of carceral administration. Fulfilling Northern capitalists' need for a cheap, disciplined labor

force in the context of the labor scarcities and rebellions that characterized the early stages of industrialization, as well as providing states with the necessary revenue to fund the massive carceral expansion that anchored the increasingly racialized, gendered, and economically unequal social order, the prison contracting system constituted a distinctive

70 The most significant and successful introduction of work structured in the same way as the dominant form of factory woik took place in Auburn prison in New York in 1824. Designed to habituate prisoners to "honest industry" and orderly conduct, Auburn prison was foundational in imposing the forms of prison discipline that attracted private corporations to build factories inside their walls. When initial attempts to recruit private contractors interested in buying the labor of the prisoners were unsuccessful since manufacturers feared that convicts would destroy their materials and tools, Auburn officials decided that prisoners would need to be subjected to rigorous discipline and prison labor would need to be sold at low rates in order to make it safe and profitable for contractors (McLennan 2008 58). Drawing on military models and older forms of corporal punishment, officials introduced a new regime of prison discipline that included the suppression of any and all communication, verbal and otherwise, between and among convicts so as to destroy the ability of convicts to collude oi take collective action. The effectiveness of this legime in quelling convicts' resistance to orderly and efficient participation in labor processes soon enticed private manufacturers to bring machinery and materials into the prison workshops, paying a fixed daily (and sometimes annual) rate for the labor of prisoners, and before long, "Auburn was a humming factory producing thousands of tools, rifles, shoes, clothing, combs, furniture, and barrels" (McLennan 2008- 60) The Auburn model was soon replicated across many of the Northern states where, prisons (built entirely with convict labor) instituted strict policies of congregate and productive labor by day, cellular isolation by night, and continual silence By the 1830s, a sentence to "confinement at hard labor" increasingly became an experience of forced, productive labor for private contractors, where labor-saving machines and communal work were mandated alongside factory discipline.

209 modality of unfree labor in the historic arc of unfreedom characterizing US capitalist development, and also anchored the development of the modern penitentiary system.71

As the industrial revolution took hold outside of prison walls, so too did it pervade

and shape labor processes and organization inside of prisons: prison workshops were increasingly built using the same geometric designs of the free factories springing up in major cities, and capitalists introduced into them labor-saving machinery and highly segmented divisions of labor. As they were attempted to do in the outside world, contractors also reorganized the way that labor was measured in prison factories, replacing timed work with "task work" (where prisoners were directed to produce a set number of items) resulting in dramatic spikes in production rates and profit. The prison industries were also increasingly characterized by and , since following the post-Civil War depression, states consolidated and rationalized their prison contract systems, replacing multiple small-scale businesses with just one or two large-scale enterprises they believed would be better able to absorb the volatile markets of the US economy. By

1840, the majority of American prisons so closely resembled the textile manufactories for which free American industry was becoming internationally renowned that upon visiting one of these prisons, British author Charles Dickens noted that he "found it difficult to persuade himself he was in a jail" (quoted in McLennan 2008: 66).72 By the 1880s, the

71 While the convict lease system in the Southern states rendered the physical institution superfluous, in the Northern states, the efficacy and stability of the relatively new and controversial institution of the penitentiary was established, at least in part, because of the profits and productivity of the system of prison contracting housed therein. 72 As she describes, Dickens believed he had found at Eastern penitentiary a form of punishment far more cruel and punitive than any he had seen in England.

210 monopolized and rationalized contract system had expanded to the point that between 75-

95% of Northern prisoners worked in large-scale industrial factories producing the equivalent of over $30 billion a year in goods (McLennan 2008: 90).

Far from being decipherable in abstract or economic terms, the significance of the industrial contract system only really comes to light when it is examined in the context of how it shaped and sometimes very violently curtailed peoples' autonomy over their own bodies, their freedom to enter into and exit labor contracts, and their access to property, mobility, and their means of securing subsistence. For these reasons, I examine the freedom/unfreedom of those persons drawn into in the system across three planes: (1) in the realm of production; (2) in the realm of circulation; and (3) in society at large, investigating the compulsions and coercions underpinning persons" entrance into the system. I argue throughout this account that the industrial prison contracting system contributed to the expansion and profitability of capitalism, in part, by anchoring the industrial North's racialized, class based, and gendered social order.

"The Whip Made Men Living Machines": Labor and Discipline in the Prison Factories

Far from representing a space outside of capitalist development, corporate prison factories were a central component in the North's rapid industrialization. Because the industrial contract system appeared in an era in which the spread of democracy and capitalist wage-labor relations were being held up as dramatic worldwide examples of moral and economic progress, and because convict labor, exploited by northern capitalists and violently disciplined by corporate managers, concentrated in some of the most significant,

211 mechanically advanced, and rapidly growing sectors of the economy, comprised a crucial

relation of production in the Northern states' path to industrial capitalism, the industrial

prison contracting system cannot be understood as somehow existing "outside" of

industrial development, nor can it be dismissed as a "pre-capitalist" form of labor coercion.

Rather, the industrial prison contract system must be understood as the extension and

elaboration of a new modality of unfree labor wholly compatible with, and indeed, playing a

key role in facilitating, the North's industrial development. This implies that rather than

positing a dichotomy between capitalist and non-capitalist modalities of labor based on the

presence of brutality and violence, developing a deeper understanding of the prison

contracting system requires us to link the most brutal and appalling features of unfree labor

to the relations of capitalism itself.

There can be no doubt that the prison contracting system comprised a modality of

unfree labor. As we will see in a moment, underpinned by a carceral matrix, the majority of

convicts were arrested for committing no real crime but rather were charged with offenses

related to "vagrancy" or very minor thefts which were reclassified as felonies as the state

became a key player in coercing the labor power of the working poor in an era of rapid

industrialization. Entrance into this system of labor exploitation was highly coerced, and

furthermore, labor was generally unremunerated and performed under the threat of violence. Convicts' ability to leave the contract system was curtailed both by their legal

sentences and physical confinement, as well as the brutal violence against their bodies; convicts were routinely subjected to whipping and various forms of torture, including being

212 "strung to the ceiling by their thumbs until rendered unconscious" for performing poor or slow work (McLennan 2008: 128-131). They were unable to withhold labor since to do so meant subjecting one's body to torture at the hands of managers, who supervised labor processes with whips and tortured and starved prisoners "whom the keeper perceived to be deeply and willfully resistant to labor discipline" (McLennan 2008: 131). Far from leaving the task of disciplining prisoners to state officials, contractors' foremen often administered punishments directly and at their own discretion, using the prison factories as "penal-social laboratories" where they experimented with various violent forms of labor discipline and divisions of labor. Indeed, while carceral institutions of this age are often described as a

"humane alternative to corporal punishment," in the prison factories, "the whip made men living machines" while "corporations stockpiled exorbitant profits", resulting in one of the most brutal and most profitable systems of unfree labor in the history of the Northern states following the abolition of chattel slavery (Gildemeister 1987: 15).

From the time that the industrial contract system took hold in 1840s, working conditions were deplorable: adult convicts were frequently worked from 14-16 hours daily while children worked from 10-12 hours, on highly sophisticated and dangerous machinery with little to no training, leading to a high number of work-related injuries and deaths.

Convicts were beaten and tortured for breaking rules, for not producing the set number of items in the work time allotted, for accidentally damaging equipment, and sometimes merely arbitrarily (Gildemeister 1987: 117; McLennan 2008: 128-131). While prison factories involved the same regimented routines, standardized schedules, dress, and rigorous

213 programs of daily labor that characterized free factory life, and inmates were conditioned to

conform to the standards of mechanical regularity required by the early factory system

through violent forms of labor discipline, unlike free workers, convicts were crammed into overcrowded, unheated cells at night, fed below subsistence amounts, and maintained "the lowest imaginable standards of living" (Petchesky 1993: 597, 601). Importantly, whereas in the free market factory work was still considered a temporary means to the end of economic independence, in prison factory work became a permanent condition. As Glen

Gildemeister puts it, "Subjected to the same debilitating monotony and rigor as free workers, convicts could not go home each night, much less quit the job. Nor did they have recourse when the job threatened their health and personal safety" (1987: 96).

Their lack of recourse became especially injurious as working conditions in the prison factories declined steeply and rapidly alongside the consolidation and monopolization of the prison contract system in the second half of the 19th century. As social struggles over the terms and conditions of labor raged outside of prison as free shoemakers, weavers, tailors, and textile operators struck and agitated repeatedly against the reduced wages, speedups, and increased mechanization associated with industrialization, prison contractors became determined to "squeeze as much work as possible out of their

[prison] laborers" by raising productivity and heightening control in the prison factories

(McLennan 2008: 119). As prisons became dependent on just one or two contractors for their entire operational budget, prison labor and discipline became completely and directly subordinated to considerations of production and capitalists were able to use prison

214 factories to introduce and normalize new forms of labor organization, discipline, and machinery (Petchesky 1993: 600). Furthermore, as contractors expanded the scope of their power and leverage vis-a-vis the state, prison employment contracts increasingly specified that states were required to provide "able-bodied men" (Gildemeister 1987: 35) meaning that states had a contractual obligation to replace any prison laborers who became sick, were injured, or died as a result of overwork in the prison factories. With the state, under the terms of contract, required to maintain a steady supply of healthy, well-disciplined convict laborers, the contractor tended to work his convicts as hard as he needed to without regard for their welfare, unconcerned about the possibility of illness, injury or death.

As contractors introduced increased divisions of labor, the latest water and steam- powered labor-saving machinery, and new and violent forms of discipline designed to speed up productivity, the shoe, barrel, carpet, comb, textile, steam engine and boiler factories inside prisons soon became some of the most technologically advanced and highly disciplined factories in US industry. With anywhere from 75,000 to 95,000 convicts working in the contract system on any given day, the prison factories contained the most disciplined, deskilled, and immobile labor force in the industrial North. Importantly, while apprenticeships and trades were still prominent in society at large, after trade union pressure in the 1830s led states to outlaw the training of prisoners in entire trades, contractors divided and subdivided production processes such that prisoners were precluded from "learning even a fragment of a trade" (Pennsylvania 1878: 28). In the

Philadelphia House of Refuge, for example, a major US shoe company, Dybert & Co.,

215 contracted with the state for the labor of three hundred children aged six to fourteen, and set a much faster pace, longer hours, and more highly compartmentalized division of labor than could have been imposed on free shoemakers given the period's conditions of labor scarcity and mobility. Arguing that they were "teaching the children a trade," an investigative report published in 1878 revealed that the company was essentially habituating the children in the lowest-skilled, most highly mechanized forms of waged labor beginning to take hold in society at large (Pennsylvania 1878: 28).73

Another measure taken to increase productivity in the late 1860s, was the replacement of timed work with a variation of the task work system (wherein, rather than work for a fixed number of hours, prisoners were directed to produce a set number of items). As McLennan documents, the "over-work" system was designed to motivate prisoners to higher levels of productivity by rewarding them for completing more work than a specified standard, on one hand, and punishing those who failed to meet the minimum, on the other. Contractors set two production levels, one being the bare minimum that every prisoner was required to meet (and dispatched for whipping or the stocks if they failed to do so), and the other a much higher "bonus" target. While in theory, if a prisoner reached the bonus target he or she would receive "some extra tobacco or other desirable item," in reality, the bonus targets were set just beyond what prison workers were physically capable of receiving, such that, "motivated by the promise of better rations or

73 When interviewed by an investigative committee, Dybert & Co's president noted, "The contractors do just as they do outside, almost universally. While the shoes are made by machinery, no machinery can finish a shoe; it must be made in separate parts...[the children] are taught to make a shoe in parts, and having been taught that, are fully competent and prepared to compete with any workmen outside, because that is the system prevailing all over the country" (1878: 28).

216 earlier freedom, prisoners often labored to the point of extreme exhaustion, producing

significantly more than the required minimum but often much less than the bonus level"

(McLennan 2008: 120). Rather than remaining fixed, the levels changed constantly so as to

keep the bonus targets unattainable and to extract as much labor as possible from the laborers. When asked what rules instructors used to regulate the amount of work performed by each prisoner, a former Sing Sing prison officer replied, "None, except as long

as life and body hold out; that seems to be the test" (as quoted in McLennan 2008: 121).

While the introduction of task work, divisions of labor, and rapid mechanization raised (if only temporarily) prisoners' productivity levels such that a prison shoe factory could produce twenty-five percent more shoes than a free workshop of the same size

(McLennan 2008: 121), the contractors' drive to raise production levels had an immediate and palpable impact upon the bodies of convict laborers. A slew of investigators reported that convicts were being driven brutally hard and suffered unusually high rates of work related accidents and illnesses. One investigator, for example, described, "Each prisoner was working so violently, if I may express it, and so rapidly as to excite my surprise that human beings should be compelled to work at so rapid and unreasonable a rate." He continued, "I say 'compelled' because the evidence was before me in the person of an overseer or disciplinary officer paid by the contractor, whose duty was, the Warden informed me, to keep the prisoners at work, keeping their heads down and not looking up from their work, which I considered a most cruel requirement" (1879: 9). As productivity increased, casualties mounted: the "Physician's Report" to the warden of the Indiana State Prison at

217 City listed 245 industrial accidents resulting in permanent disabilities or death in one year for a population of 378, caused primarily by contractors' irresponsibility in not providing reasonable safeguards against the perils of tending steam powered machinery

(Gildemeister 1987: 96). While from 1820 through the 1850s, most penitentiaries relied on the whip more than any other form of labor discipline, the increasingly deadly working conditions of the 1860s-70s were made inescapable by the imposition of cruder and more elaborate forms of punishment. Alongside the increased speed and ferocity in the labor process, and the imposition of divisions of labor and machinery, forms of torture became standardized and consistently administered, or, in Petchesky's words, "punishment came to be perceived as an ancillary of the machine" (1993: 600).

While labor transgressions in the contract system were almost always punished by the imposition of labor penalties that either raised the amount of labor performed on a daily basis or indirectly extended the convict's prison sentence, from the 1870s to the early

1900s (the peak of the system's productivity and profit), they were also and additionally punished by violent forms of corporeal discipline intended to facilitate the prisoners'

"entire submission" to the labor regime (McLennan 2008: 131). Among these was the punishment of stringing up wherein the prisoner was "triced" up by the thumbs using fishing-line and a pulley mechanism attached to the ceiling of a purpose built punishment room. At Sing Sing prison, for example, this machine enabled the prison keeper to lift the prisoner entirely off his toes, resulting in "nerve-tearing pain that the victim could endure only for a matter of seconds" (McLennan 2008: 129). Prisoners were also punished by

218 water torture, called the "cold shower bath," which combined nervous shock with a threat of imminent death by drowning, made even more severe by using the stocks to immobilized the victim during the process. As the Auburn prison physician explained, in water torture,

"the muscles involuntarily shrink from the application of cold. But [when in the stocks] they must bear the whole shock in all its severity... The first effect is strangulation to a most painful degree. The next is aberration of mind, convulsions, congestion of the brain, liver, bowels. The blood, receding from the surface, is thrown suddenly and violently upon these organs, and the above result is inevitable" (quoted in McLennan 2008: 130). In Kansas

State Prison, prisoners who refused to work were "stripped, strapped to a wooden post, and then hosed [with freezing water] at a pressure of about 60 pounds per square inch"

(McLennan 2008: 130). While these forms of punishment had been used in makeshift and informal way before the 1870s, it was only alongside the imposition of divisions of labor, cutting edge machinery, and the task-work system in the great prison factories of the 1880s that they became a routinized, regulated, systematically administered form of discipline

(McLennan 2008: 128-131), testifying to the correspondence between forces of industrialization and the revitalization of old forms of corporal punishment.

While according to Elam Lynds, keeper of Auburn prison, these brutal punishments were administered in response to minor labor infractions because they were

"time efficient" and "only took a small amount of the convict's time away from his labor"

(quoted in Petchesky 1993: 600) other forms of punishment were reserved for those prisoners thought to be more deeply and consistently resistant to labor discipline. Those in

219 the latter category were punished using forms of corporeal deprivation, including isolation, starvation, and dehydration. As McLennan describes:

Although the shock punishment of a slugging or a tricing was relatively time efficient and was meted out as a corrective to poor or slow work, or minor acts of insubordination, corporeal deprivation was generally a more serious punishment that was reserved for prisoners whom the keeper perceived to be deeply and willfully resistant to labor discipline. The prisoner was held for a matter of days or weeks in a stripped-down 'dark cell' or 'dungeon' (which earned the name 'the cooler' for its bone-numbing temperatures) and put on a strict bread-and-water diet. Such punishment aimed at breaking the will of a prisoner by disorienting him and draining his energy. (2008: 130-131)

These cruel forms of labor discipline were geared towards disciplining convicts into a subordinate position in the class-bifurcated society, and were also, to some extent, geared towards disciplining the new immigrant laboring class as a whole, as we will explore in a moment. But they were more immediately directed towards ensuring higher rates of productivity in the prison factories.

McLennan's study documents, for example, that during a water-torture incident in an prison, the prisoner was held down for some time, then allowed to breathe, and finally asked "whether he will now consent to make some bolts" (2008: 130). Similarly,

Sing Sing's prison pharmacist testified in 1882 that prisoners who flat out refused to work were typically thrown in the dark cell, and the length of confinement there was determined by the prisoner's "entire submission" to the labor regime. As McLennan so aptly describes,

"the prison's disciplinary regime took aim directly at the prisoner's body and threatened it with highly rationalized forms of torture, with the undisguised purpose of rendering hard, industrial labor the lesser of two pains" (2008: 135).

220 As it became increasingly clear that the refusal to labor would result in torture at the

hands of contractors or their agents, many convicts submitted to increasingly painful and

exhausting production practices—the same production practices that companies faced

challenges in incorporating outside of prison in the face of working class resistance to the

degradation and mechanization of labor. Thus, the imposition of violent and even

torturous forms of labor discipline, as McLennan reminds us, was ultimately directed at

exerting greater control over prisoners in an attempt to extract more labor from convicts'

bodies in a shorter period of time than could have been achieved in free factories. In her words, "far from being directed at making perpetually docile 'subjects' out of prisoners (as

Michel Foucault argues was the objective of nineteenth-century penology), here, and at

every level of prison administration, the objective was ... of driving the body to render up

immediate, unceasing, bountiful labor in the workshops" (2008: 135). In short, these forms

of punishment were directed towards instilling in bodies the cadence and rhythm of waged

factory work, the same form of work that was being rejected by the laboring poor in society

at large.

Even in the face of such severe forms of punishment, however, some prisoners took

increasingly desperate measures to resist the labor imposed through the contract system. As

Gildemeister describes, "while some of the more embittered and desperate convicts resorted

to arson, others either faked illness or injured themselves to avoid work" (1987: 122). A black inmate in Sing Sing's hat factory, for example, demanded transfer to another contractor but when his request denied, he refused to work. He was then "yoked for four

221 hour intervals," but after two weeks in his cell, he still refused to "work at his business sizing hats." Returned to the hat shop in spite of his protest, the convict "seized a hatchet and cut three fingers off his left hand so as to disable him from this work." Similarly, convicts assigned to the most difficult work in the Ohio Penitentiary, the iron molding shop, often claimed illness, and when that failed to bring relief, some cut off fingers, others "deliberately thrust their feet into molten iron" and one "cut off his own hand at the wrist, to avoid work" (Gildemeister 1987: 122-123).

Reflecting on the divisions of labor, machinery, and discipline of the prison factories, Rosalind Petchesky has noted that they played a constituent role in capitalists' development of "the essential function of management in industrial capitalism, control over the labor process." As she argues, what prison labor provided to an entrepreneurial class that was "still more involved in accumulating capital than in managing production" was an integrated system of supervision and discipline that contained within it the techniques needed to keep the production process going: "control of large bodies of workers,"

"gathering of workers under a single roof," "enforcement of "regular hours," "coercive methods to habituate the workers to their tasks and keep them working throughout the day and the year," "a paralegal structure of punishment," as well as rudimentary processes of accounting and record keeping—in short, a system o[ management. In this sense, "the total economic, spiritual, moral and physical domination of laborers required by the factory system found its prototype in prison industry" (Petchesky 1993: 602).

222 "To Turn Unruly Laboring Men Into Silent and Insulated Working Machines": Corporations, Convict Labor, and the State The industrial prison contract system originated and became widespread in the US

North through complex and sometimes contradictory synergy between capitalist social forces and state and local governments. On the one hand, strong demand from the North's booming industrialists for a reliable labor force in the face of labor shortages and rebellion

(as well as in the wake of the legal abolition of various forms of indentured and slave labor) fed into and reinforced the northern states' laws designed to instantiate the burgeoning capitalist social order, resulting in a fourfold increase in carceral populations between 1855-

1885. On the other hand, by contracting prisoners' labor to private companies, states avoided much of the costs that would have otherwise been associated with increasing the market participation of the laboring poor (especially of blacks, immigrants, and lower class women) through various laws that criminalized poverty and idleness, instilling labor discipline into convicts while simultaneously fostering compliance among the laboring poor with a social order characterized by increasing inequality.

There is relative consensus among historians that at least initially, the state's need to stabilize the early republic's economic and social order underpinned both the establishment of the penitential system as well as the introduction of productive labor into its walls.

Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer's renowned study Punishment and Social Structure

(2003 [1939]), for example, emphasizes that the penitential system in the US—like that in

Britain—was created and expanded with the express purpose of instantiating the social, economic, and political order associated with the rise of capitalism. Just as it had been

223 introduced during the rise of capitalism in Britain, productive prison labor was introduced

in the early days of US capitalism to habituate prisoners (most of whom were deemed part

of the "indigent" poor) into "honest industry" and "orderly conduct," or, in the words of

Elam Lynds, principle keeper of Auburn penitentiary, to "turn unruly laboring men into

silent and insulated working machines" (as quoted in McLennan 2008: 58). This

explanation is supported by a number of reports and historical artifacts that document the

popular conviction that productive labor in prisons would instill labor discipline into

convicts, and thus, it was hoped, establish a more reliable working class. At this point in

history, as the obligation to sell one's labor power on the market was framed legally in

negative terms as an obligation not to be (or to appear to be) "idle," poor people (and in

particular, racialized and gendered populations for whom the obligation to work was

differentially enforced) increasingly served prison sentences for a variety of behaviors

thought to infringe on the property rights of the burgeoning capitalist class (as will be

documented in the next section). Throughout the first quarter of the nineteenth century, as

states created the physical infrastructure to house these convicts, companies slowly began to

contract with individual institutions, on a local level, for the labor power of small numbers

of prisoners.

The introduction of congregate productive labor, however—even on this relatively

small scale—was met with widespread resistance from convicts. As Michael Meranze has

documented in Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in

Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (1996), prisoners attempted to "maintain the practices of the

224 laboring poor", including working slowly and poorly, sabotaging machinery and materials,

refusing to labor, staging slow-downs, napping at their worktables, and putting workshop

tools and materials to various nefarious uses, including the production of counterfeit coins

and duplicates of keys (1996: 190, 227, 247). It was only after 1819, when lawmakers

directed that prison guards could whip convicts or throw them into the stocks or irons,

establishing a new and violent form of prison discipline in institutions across the region,

that the practice of selling the labor power of convicts to private enterprise gradually

became widely and deeply entrenched in penal ideology. Taking hold at a moment when

capitalists thought their lack of a reliable and cheap labor force was inhibiting possibilities

for growth, by 1840, the contract system was utilized in every Northern prison except one,

and was also becoming increasingly prevalent across the US West and Southwest. That the

impetus for this expansion arose from the pull of industrialization is confirmed by a

number of historical studies that demonstrate that in the industrial North, at each stage of

the region's development, industrial contracting was concentrated in some of the most

significant and rapidly growing sectors of the economy and was a crucial source of rapid growth and profit that allowed businesses to undermine competitors and acquire the necessary machinery and materials to further propel industrialization.

As Gildemeister documents, for example, the real impetus for the expansion of the

industrial prison contracting system came in the 1840s after an increasingly powerful class of industrialists had used prison labor to produce footwear and textiles more successfully than they were able to utilize other "cheap and low skilled labor pools" (including women,

225 children, Chinese, and black workers) (1987: 46-47). As Gildemeister describes, after a controversial and failed "experiment" in which entrepreneur James B. Hervey attempted to capture the greater New York laundry market via the employment, first, of young female workers and then cheap migrant Chinese labor, he signed a contract for the labor of 300

Sing Sing prisoners and transferred his laundry business to the prison in 1873. Similarly, the Bay State Shoe and Leather Company's proprietor, Charles D. Bigelow, noted that he first "employed raw Germans, but found it difficult to compete with Boston with them.

Then I took some boys from the Asylum for Juvenile Delinquents, who did very well"

(quoted in McLennan 2008: 108).

Once the shoe and textile industries proved profitable in prison, "they often entered a phase of self-sustained growth. Crafts characterized by early industrialization, product of consumer goods, and competition in widening markets became the backbone of prison business" (Gildemeister 1987: 47). Because of a sustained healthy market for shoes, textiles, brushes, and saddlery, and because companies found they could more easily and successfully introduce divisions of labor and large-scale machinery (reducing the skills required of each worker) inside of prison than outside of it, convict labor quickly entered these industries. A small group of industries that came to rely on the specialization and mechanization at the heart of US economic transformation (especially boot and shoe, clothing, iron goods, and furniture) came to be seen as particularly adaptable to convict labor, and these increasingly came to replace the "heterogeneous welter of small scale enterprises found in most penitentiaries" (McLennan 2008: 54). In the 1840s, the vast

226 majority of prisoners worked for boot and shoe, clothing, stove/hollow ware, harness/saddle, iron goods and furniture industries—the fastest growing industries of their time—all of which are credited with pioneering the American model of industrialization.

As the prison contracting system increased in popularity and began to turn high profits in the 1850s, states built the superstructures that fostered the growth of the prison industries, building new institutions and installing new workspaces along the same geometric lines of local factories. The infamous Sing Sing prison, for example, featured "a new complex of workshops that followed much the same geometric design of many of the free factories that were springing up in and other Northeastern states"

(McLennan 2008: 65). Providing a large array of subsidies that contributed directly to the accumulation of private capital, these factories both reflected and reinforced the factory discipline beginning to take hold across the North. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, factories in the outside world began to reflect the extremely disciplined, silent, and insulated conditions that had been perfected in prison factories, as well as their increased division of labor and use of non-human power. In Gildemeister's words, "even after the rise of labor unions and the growth of more sophisticated management in the 1870s and 1880s, the behavior required of workers [in factories] paralleled that demanded in the prison workshop" (1987: 81).

Though Northern states did not generally take in high profits from their prison industries the way Southern states profited from the convict lease system, many were able to fully cover the costs of incarceration and some even managed to run prisons as profit-

227 making institutions. Though the incompleteness of many states' prison records makes it impossible to track the income from contractors with any precision, the high profitability of the system for state governments is indicated through the trend towards the depreciation of running costs of prisons and in net gains for the state. For example, New York's Auburn penitentiary balanced its books in 1829 and by 1831, generated an annual profit of $1800.

Similarly, Sing Sing prison could count a net gain of $29,000 a year through income generated by the prison industries (Melosi and Pavarini 1977: 140). The income from contractors was a crucial source of revenue that enabled states and counties to expand, and build institutions to support, the coercive power of the state. This primarily took the form of constructing new prisons, but also renovating and expanding existing institutions to house the four-fold expansion in prison populations that took place between the years 1855 and 1885 (Gildemeister 1987: 20-21).

That states openly facilitated the expansion of the prison industries through this period was met with widespread protest from free labor organizations as well as some politicians. The legislature committee in Ohio captured the sentiments of many critics when it described the system as one where the state auctioned its prisoners off as slaves to private businesses: "Under this system, the prisoner is humiliated and disgraced; he is sold as it were into slavery on the block, under the auctioneer's hammer, the State being the auctioneer, and the contractor the purchaser" (1878: 6). While historians' explanations as to why it was that states facilitated the mass expansion of the prison industry vary, most agree that at least initially, from the states' points of view, generating profit from the

228 industries was less important than the disciplinary effects that administrations predicted that productive convict labor would have on the working class in society at large. Melossi and Pavarini have argued, for example, that "the object was thus not so much the production of commodities as the production of men ... in other words, the production of proletarians by the enforced training of prisoners in factory discipline " (1977: 144).

It is worth pausing briefly here to highlight that this point is pivotal to our understanding of states' interest in prison industry—far from being exclusively concerned about profit, states were aware of the disciplinary effects of prison labor and used it to foster the forms of wage labor necessary for the new industrial capitalist order. Like the nineteenth century British poor laws that made conditions in the workhouses worse than those found in the most exploitative forms of wage labor, in the US, the state opened its prisons to industry as a strategy to coercively impose the forms of labor discipline necessary to the new industrial capitalist order. Just as the convict lease system violently entrenched a social order based on white supremacy into the post-emancipation money economy, through the violent forms of labor and social discipline instilled in immigrants and the most marginalized segments of the northern working class, the industrial prison contract system disciplined human bodies into the forms of factory labor that were fundamental for the new industrial capitalist system. Far from being exclusive to the nineteenth century, this is a strategy that has corresponded to moments of significant ferment and decline in the conditions and organization of labor. As we will see in Chapter Five, alongside crucial shifts in the organization of labor during neoliberalism—particularly the rise of flexible, lean

229 forms of production, the state opened its prisons to industry as a strategy to coercively impose the forms of labor discipline necessary to the neoliberal order.

To say that social and labor discipline were important is not to diminish the significance of the income that the contracting system provided for the state—indeed, these aims were mutually reinforcing. Noting that early nineteenth-century institutions of confinement were crucial sources of revenue for the state, Petchesky reminds us that the expansion of the prison industries indicated the rising state's dependence on private capital at least as much as the capitalists' dependence on the state's coercive power and legitimating authority. To this end, she draws on an 1867 report noting that the one thing "harped upon, ad nauseum, by the prison keepers" was "money money money ... The directors of a bank or a railroad could hardly be more anxious for large dividends than these gentlemen are for good round incomes from the labor of their prisoners." In Petchesky's words,

"among the limited sources of revenue at the state's disposal were dependent and deviant human beings who could be traded, conscripted, and put to work. The broad context for this exercise of state power was, of course, the growth of a market in labor, which put value on persons and populations as economic resources" (1993: 596). Documenting the ways in which institutions of confinement were both a means whereby the state broadened a fiscal base and legitimacy, and a means whereby private owners accumulated capital and secured disciplined labor, she argues that rather than one purpose determining the other, "these purposes were mutually reinforcing" (1993: 596).

230 Whatever their motivation, the depth of states' dependence on private businesses to fund their exertions of carceral power became clear during the that surrounded the Civil War across the North, rendering many prison contractors broke and unable to renew contracts. As overcrowding and restlessness quickly spread through prisons, the collapse unleashed new forces of resistance and rebellions in prisons, paralleling those occurring outside, and as the depression deepened, it became clear that contract system had tethered the governance and finances of prisons to a deeply unstable and unpredictable market. Rather than renewing contracts with multiple small-scale businesses as they had through the 1840s and 1850s, prison administrations increasingly demonstrated a preference for just one or two large-scale enterprises that they believed would be better able to absorb the volatile markets of the American economy. As legislators and prison administrators resolved to strengthen, consolidate, and rationalize the contract prison labor system, throughout the late 1870s and early 1880s, consolidation effectively established monopolies and oligopolies in prison labor, lending even deeper advantages to some of the US's most successful and rapidly growing companies (McLennan 2008: 106).

Contracts became even more lucrative as they came to involve greater numbers of prisoners and guarantee contractors almost exclusive use of carceral populations for longer periods of time. Indeed, some states leased their entire prison workforces to just one or two contractors, and contracts ran anywhere from ten to twenty years. In 1878, the state of New

York contracted out 1,300 of its Sing Sing's prisoners to just one oven-molding manufacturer, John Sherwood Perry, a respected and well-known businessman and

231 president of the US association, giving him control over 10% of New York State's entire (free and imprisoned) workforce of oven molders and reportedly making his operation the largest oven-manufacturing business in the world. Similarly, in the Midwest, a shoe manufacturer won a contract for the labor power of the entire prison population of

Wisconsin, and in , a shoe manufacturer won a contract for the entire prison population. As well as controlling all or a large portion of the prison labor of a particular state or county, several contractors were able to acquire contracts for prison labor in multiple states during this period. Peter Hayden's harness and saddle company, for example, grew by 1877 to "include prison workshops in New York, Ohio, and California.

The Bay State Shoe and Leather Company also employed over 1,000 convicts across a number of states" (McLennan 2008: 103). While the total number of convicts included in these contracts varied significantly by state, the industrial contract system as a whole involved just under 100,000 prisoners by 1885, meaning that the convict workforces acquired were significant indeed, amounting to a high percentage of all workers in some industries. In New York, for example, local coopers claimed that the number of prisoners employed at cooperage in Auburn prison equaled half the total number of their fellow tradesmen in New York City (Gildemeister 1987: 133). In 1886, the number making boots and shoes behind bars equaled forty-three percent of the total free shoe factory labor force in .

The economic advantages accrued by companies using convict labor were dramatic, and most generated annual profit margins of upwards of twice their costs (McLennan 2008:

232 84) 74 Companies paid no rent for buildings, storage or insurance, and paid only low (if

any) costs for labor supervision and discipline (as these were tasks shared by the state).

Perhaps most significantly, prison contractors purchased convict labor well below free-

market rates. Although it varied by state, the per diem price of a prison laborer was

anything from one-fifth and one-third the daily wage of a free local laborer in the same

industry. In the case of a Massachusetts shoe contract, for example, the per diem rate of

state prison labor was $0.15 per prisoner per day, compared with the $2.40 that a free

cobbler would have cost per day. Another shoe contractor, using the labor of incarcerated

children at Randall's Island House of Refuge for Boys, paid a monthly per capita price of

only $3.19 per convict laborer, while the same worker in the free labor market would have

cost him $17.34 a month (McLennan 2008: 108). While some contractors attempted to justify this disparity by claiming that prisoners, because they had less training, exhibited

lower productivity rates, an 1886 Bureau of Labor report found that in value of product per

capita, convicts produced almost ninety percent of what free workers produced on an

annual basis (US Bureau of Labor 1886: 192-93). While small portions of these wages were

sometimes held in accounts in prisoners' names, the vast majority of convicts left prison

with between zero and five dollars payment for their work over anywhere from a two week

to ten year period (Gildemeister 1987: 98-99).

There is evidence to suggest, furthermore, that many contractors actually paid less

than the specified prices in their contracts, and that once the contracts had been signed, the

74 In another prison the contractor employed $35,000 capital and the new profits were $22,857, about sixty- five per cent (Pennsylvanial878: 7).

233 state often made concessions to the manufacturer, such as lowering the cost of labor or providing more laborers than the manufacturer was actually paying for (Gildemeister 1987:

35). Lowering labor costs even further, most contracts specified that the company was purchasing the labor power of "able-bodied" men and provided for "disabled laborers" at reduced rates. Contractors frequently exploited the half-pay arrangement, and a New York investigative committee, for example, found over thirty percent of Auburn's convicts working at half-pay in 1852. It was also not uncommon for a contractor to simply refuse outright to pay for the labor for which he had contracted (Gildemeister 1987: 38). It is important to note that although the cost effectiveness of prison labor was undoubtedly an important motivation for contractors, they were also drawn to the penitentiaries because the prison industries seemed to promise a much higher degree of control over workers and the production process than was ordinarily possible in the free market at the time. In harmony with their counterparts in the South following the breakdown of chattel slavery, the single most common complaint voiced by northern industrialists was their inability to command a reliable, predictable labor force, and prison contracting was one of the most successful solutions to this problem (McLennan 2008: 121).

Importantly, far from existing in a vacuum apart from labor relations at large, the

"political and tactical uses of prison labor, its cheapness and constancy, and the apparent ease with which it could be organized and disciplined" (McLennan 2008: 115) shaped the form that industrialization and labor took outside of prison. In fiscal year 1885-1886, for example, American prisoners made goods or performed work worth almost $29 million

234 dollars, a sum equivalent, "as a relative share of GDP, to over $30 billion in 2005 dollars"

(McLennan 2008: 90). At this scale, in addition to being used to break strikes and compel

free workers to work for lower wages and worse conditions, the tactical use of convict labor

also drove down the production costs of goods. For every dollar paid in wages in the US in

1880, for example, there was $5.66 worth of product; for every dollar the contractor paid

for convict labor, there was $8.19 worth of product. In Albany, for example, 100 dozen

large combs which costs $58 to make in a free factory, were being produced for only $15.50

in the prisons (Gildemeister 1987: 133). The effect of the low production costs, and low

prices, associated with prison made goods in certain industries was to spark unemployment

and create a pressure for free workers to accept lower wages and working conditions,

particularly in low skilled occupations. As Gildemeister describes, "When prison products

entered the market, prices fell, free labor wages dropped, unemployment (or

underemployment) climbed, and even the basic nature of crafts outside might change as

contractors introduced new techniques and increased specialization" (1987: 144).

In sum, by providing a cheap and disciplined labor force, and contributing to the

lowering of costs and conditions in the free labor market, the prison contracting system

contributed to the profitability of capital and was key in the formation of US industry and a

disciplined wage-earning class. Far from playing a neutral or progressive role, as prisons

became dependent on just one or two contractors for their entire operational budget, states were central to the coercion of an unfree labor force for economic development, facilitating

the subordination of penal functions to the imperatives of profit. Unshackling employers

235 from most of the practical, political, and rudimentary legal constraints to which they were

subject in "free" industries, "contractors worked with the state's keepers to drive unfree,

rightless prison workers longer and harder than employers could work the waged laborers of

the period" (McLennan 2008: 135). Because states expanded their carceral power at a time when they had limited fiscal capacity to build new prisons, and because industrialists were, at the same time, desperate for a reliable and cheap force of laborers, the prison contracting system emerged as a "win-win" situation for capitalists and state governments alike. In this way, the contract system emerged as a relation of production suited to modernization, while perpetuating old forms of corporal punishment, revitalized, standardized, and taken to an extreme form to create a set of workers that would submit to industrialists' drive for discipline.

The Fluidity ofUnfreedom in the Age of Capital: The Rise of a Permanent Wage Earning Class The prison contract system did not develop in isolation of broader social, economic and political transformations, but rather emerged as part of these transformations, and was the extreme in a range of modalities of unfree labor that proliferated in the industrializing

North. As an expansive body of historical research demonstrates, even after the Thirteenth

Amendment formally freed racialized persons from chattel slavery, various forms of indenture and unfreedom persisted, particularly for people of Chinese, Irish, German, and indigenous origins. Since only entrepreneurs, artisans, and farmers were considered "free men" in the sense used in the ideology of the period, and since even after the Civil War, guarantees for "free soil, free labor, free men" did not really apply for most Americans, a

236 complex of restrictive labor and criminal codes sought to limit physical, social, and economic mobility, attempting to discipline women, black persons, and immigrants into a restrictive and precarious place in the wage-earning class. As the norm of land ownership and economic mobility became associated with white male adulthood, the three million immigrants who entered the North between 1865 and 1873 under the "Act to Encourage

Immigration", as well as the former plantation slaves emigrating North from the South, did not enter a neutral wage labor market. Rather, signifying a crucial shift in the mode of social reproduction, wherein waged modalities of labor (particularly in factories) were previously thought to be a temporary means to the end of economic independence, and laborers enjoyed a great deal of physical mobility, labor and criminal codes were amended reflecting the need to turn the "large class of permanently poor citizens" and new immigrants into a permanent, reliable, and immobile wage-laboring class. These laws formed the legal basis of the industrial prison contract system, and also anchored among immigrants and recently freed persons a racialized division of labor comprised of various form of indenture and the most unskilled, socially degraded, and lowest paid industrial jobs, deeply constraining the mobility and freedom of immigrants and former slaves and integrating them into relations of production and social reproduction on unequal and in many senses unfree terms.

When the prison contract system was initially introduced in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, waged labor was just beginning to take hold in the US; the vast majority of laborers in the colonies were indentured servants, slaves, and contract laborers.

Importantly, while low land prices in the North had to this point facilitated a system of

237 independent household production, as land prices began to rise in the original thirteen colonies in the 1780s, and then in the Midwest in the 1820s, the region underwent a transition from household production to petty commodity production (Post 1995: 406).

At this point in history, statutes in a number of colonies subjected both "hired" and imported workers to penal sanctions for breaches in their labor contracts, such that a class of "free" labor simply did not exist (Foner 1988: 253). By the early nineteenth century these provisions had largely disappeared from colonial codes, leaving the immigrant indentured servants (who were imported in large numbers until the early 1820s) as the only white contractual labor still subject to penal sanctions. By the end of the 1830s, however, while indenture persisted for blacks, the vast majority of imported servants had completed their terms of service, and adult white European servitude all but disappeared, creating a permanent pool of free, propertyless immigrants (Steinfeld 2001: 31).

Until this point in US history, waged work had been considered a temporary means to achieving economic independence and wage laborers, in the words of President Lincoln, were not "fatally fixed in that condition for life," or, as Eric Foner describes, throughout the early stages of industrialization, "turnover rates in factories were extremely high, and for many laborers, physical mobility—'freedom to move'—served as a means of obtaining leverage in the labor market, an essential element of strategies for survival and possible advancement in a market society" (Foner 1970: xxiv). The need to establish a reliable and fixed working class to propel industrialization, however, soon underpinned a shift in norms around wages.

238 Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, while in some parts of the country proprietorship "remained the ideal and was still a possibility for most citizens (particularly small farmers and their descendents), in the Northeast's commercial and manufacturing cities, the increased scale of production, undermining of traditional crafts, and dwindling of opportunities for journeymen to rise to the status of independent master, combined to make "wage labor rather than ownership of productive property the economic basis of family survival" (Foner 1970: xv). While American entrepreneurs continued to import small numbers of European contract workers throughout the 1840s and 50s in attempt to establish a factory system that could rival Britain's, a series of legal code changes attempted to foster a more reliable and disciplined working class among the propertyless already within the colonies. In the context of the increasing monopolization of land ownership, the labor of wageworkers was increasingly elicited by offering workers a choice between performing more or less unpleasant work for wages or inadequate poor relief, at best, and starvation or imprisonment. In 1850, the number of wage earners in America for the first time exceeded the number of slaves, and ten years later, wage laborers outnumbered self- employed members of the labor force, such that the 1850s and 60s witnessed the

"emergence of a permanent working class" and a steady diminution of the prospects for a worker or farm laborer in the North to achieve economic independence (Foner 1970: xvi).

In historian Melvyn Dubofsky's words, "From a nation that at the close of the Civil War was still agrarian and in which half or more of all adults were self-employed, the United

239 States had become by 1920 an urban nation in which the vast majority of individuals

worked for employers" (1996: 3).

Waged labor in the nineteenth century, however, was far from "free" labor as we

know it today.75 For the majority of the century, "free" wage workers were often strictly

bound by contracts which specified not only certain kinds and amounts of work, but also

constraints about where they lived, what was available for them to eat and drink, and what

they might do in their leisure time (Kerber 1999: 53). Furthermore, following the Civil

War, as the Northern states faced a labor crisis, many followed the southern states' lead (in

the form of the Black Codes) and adopted criminal sanctions for breaches of labor

contracts. As legal historian Robert Steinfeld has documented, in the latter half of the

nineteenth century, wage workers in the United States typically did not serve under

agreements terminable at will since a series of criminal code changes made it possible for

employers to enforce labor agreements against waged workers through pecuniary remedies.

As Steinfeld explains, adopted by every state except , the new "common

75 Eric Foner provides a good overview the rise of wage labor "During the first half of the nineteenth century, American law adopted the definition of wage labor as the product of a voluntary agreement between autonomous individuals. The freedom of free labor arose from the non-coerced nature of the contract itself, not whether the laborer enjoyed economic autonomy. This legal transformation both reflected and reinforced the shift in toward entrepreneurs and , while in some ways limiting the actual liberty of wage earners. Court-ordered specific performance of a labor contract fell into abeyance, no longer deemed compatible with the autonomy of the free laborer; but by the same token, the legal doctrine of 'employment at will' also relieved employers of any obligation to retain laborers longer than economically necessary . While labor itself was not legally enforceable, the labor contract was held to clothe employers with full authority over the workplace Thus, work rules that seemed extremely arbitrary to employees had the force of law behind them, and any who refused to follow reasonable commands could be legally dismissed without payment of wages due. Judges invoked the definition of laborer as an autonomous individual to impede workers, via conspiracy laws, from organizing collectively to seek higher wages, and to prevent them from obtaining compensation from employers for injuries on the job (as free individuals, they were presumed to have knowingly assumed the risks of employment). 'Free labor' did not, in other words, contradict severe inequalities of power within either the workplace or labor market" (1995: xvi)

240 law doctrines held that as a general matter contracts of service for a term or to perform task or piece work would be construed as entire and no wages would be owed to a worker who had voluntarily abandoned the contract before completing the term or task" (2001: 291).

Workers could also be fined for breach of contract, and when they failed to do pay (as the majority did) could be prosecuted as debtors and sent to jail, where the prison contract system acted as the ultimate measure to "reform" the rebellious and habituate them into the permanent condition of wage labor. As Steinfeld notes, "The origins of modern free wage labor are not to be found in the free contracts in free markets of the first half of the nineteenth century but in the restrictions placed on freedom of contract by the social and economic legislation adopted during the final quarter of the century" (2001: 10). In industrializing America, the law became "the ultimate source of an employer's power to force a worker to chose between wage work and a more disagreeable alternative to work"

(2001: 19) and the contract system became a means to habituate workers into factory work as a permanent, unchanging condition.

Facing increasingly long contracts, and with fewer wage earners achieving economic independence, as the nineteenth century wore on, wage workers complained more and more bitterly that the power of property was making them slaves to their employers

(Steinfeld 2001: 13). The metaphor that crystallized this discontent—""— implicitly challenged the contrast between free and slave labor, and by the 1870s, a common critique among the labor movement was that coercion was as inherent in industrial

241 capitalism as it had been under slavery.76 Strikes and job action took place across industries around the country, where there was a growing consensus that the freedom and economic mobility promised in American society was a "brutal fiction" amounting to little more than the opportunity to either be exploited or to starve. It was only after Congress passed "An

Act to Encourage Immigration" in 1864, flooding Northern cities with three million new immigrants by 1873, who, along with blacks, were forced into accepting the lowest forms of waged labor that, in the late 19th century, organized labor began to accept waged labor as a permanent means to obtain subsistence. As political rights began to be linked to self- ownership associated with white manhood, and as various forms of servitude came to be considered unacceptable for white male workers, waged labor "allowed white, male workers to escape 'slave' status, but it also gave them a tool to declare others slaves" (Glickman 1993:

221).

White men's upward mobility and rising standards of living relied on the growing social conception that some people with a "dependent nature" (women, blacks, and various other racialized populations) could and would not take advantage of the opportunity to escape the status of wage earner. Underpinned by the growing popularity of various forms of scientific racism and racist reactions to abolitionist debates, white Americans across social classes seemed to agree that these "dependent" races were naturally predisposed to comprise the permanent working class (Foner 1988: 477-481). This shift resulted in denigration in the social position of women, as the differentiation in male and female forms

76 Some Northern labor spokesmen even claimed that their situation was not just akin to that of slaves in the South, but actually worse since Northern workers were more productive and worked longer hours, so more profit was extracted from them. See Nakano Glenn (2002: 67).

242 of labor grew sharper, and women were largely restricted to the lowest-paid jobs in the clerical, sales, and service fields (Dubofsky 1996: 3). Even more surprising, perhaps, domestic servants outnumbered all other categories of employees, reaching over the two million mark in 1910.77 These shifts also resulted in the denigration of the social position of free blacks, who, until the beginning of large scale immigration had formed a significant portion of the region's wage-earning proletariat but then experienced downward mobility as they faced hostility from white craftsmen and white employers refused to hire them.

Similarly, the hundreds of thousands of recently freed blacks who immigrated from the

South to the North following the abolition of slavery did not enter a neutral wage labor market but, in Loic Wacquant's words, "discovered ... another system of racial enclosure, the ghetto, which, though it was less rigid and fearsome than the one they had fled, was no less encompassing and constricting" (2002: 47).78 The millions of recent immigrants and black laborers in the North came to be seen as low-wage competitors who should be barred from skilled employment, and throughout the country, were barred from membership in nearly all labor unions and pushed into the very lowest paid, most dangerous, and least skilled jobs among the wage earning class (Foner 1988: 479). Despite the universalistic vocabulary often associated with "free" labor, as Foner notes, the development of "free labor had little bearing on the actual conditions of nonwhites in nineteenth-century America."

77 As Dubofsky describes, "females were concentrated in domestic service, and more of them found employment as domestics in 1910 than in industry. Not until 1920 would more women work for wages in the factory than in the home, and even then females had to settle for jobs in a more backward sector of the economy—cotton textiles and the clothing trade" (1996: 4). 78 And importantly, far from ending with the official emancipation of slavery in 1865, various forms of indenture persisted for blacks until the very end of the nineteenth century.

243 Increasingly, skin color came to map onto the distinction between freedom and unfreedom in the labor market, but also, as the obligation to work became differentially enforced, in society at large.

Because waged labor replaced various forms of juridically unfree labor, however, workers were deemed to have a choice in their conditions of work because they could leave a job at any time (though, as we have seen, the fact that to do so entailed the forfeiture of back wages meant this was seldom true in practice). Yet, as many studies have documented, underlying this ostensible freedom was a more fundamental lack of choice about whether or not to work at all since a number of vagrancy laws were expanded to define a wide range of activities (such as begging, loitering, prostitution, drunkenness, or entering a town but failing to find work), as crimes for which one could be arrested and put to forced labor in the prison contracting system. While these laws appear somewhat early on in colonial statues, they were strengthened and enforced more vigorously after the Civil War as a central component of white efforts to regain control of black labor in the South and of conservative efforts in all regions to achieve what Eric Foner called "a compulsory system of free labor." Because vagrancy was a status offense, the crime was not what a person bad done but what they appeared to be, those without labor contracts or who broke their contracts could be prosecuted as vagrants and sentenced to hard labor in the prison contracting system without having committed any real crime (Kerber 1999: 54). Furthermore, since according to common law, married women could not sign independent labor contracts, and not until long after the Civil War did states accord them control over wages they earned,

244 the expansion of these laws had the effect of strengthening male dominance at a time of considerable struggle over the meanings of gender and social position of women. While vagrancy laws became a widely used means of compelling labor from newly emancipated

Blacks in the South and from Mexican immigrants in the Southwest, in the North, the laws were imposed as a punitive measure against the numbers of seasonally and temporarily unemployed wage workers visible in the streets of cities and towns, i.e. those resisting (at least temporarily) the dangerous conditions and exhausting pace of wage labor (Nakano

Glenn 2002: 90).

Indeed, the expanded definition of provided grounds to arrest thousands of black,

Irish, German, and other immigrant wage workers who had yet to submit to the ranks of the permanent wage earning class. As criminal sanctions enforced labor contracts and criminalized indigence, the North witnessed a skyrocketing of its carceral population, which increased four-fold between the years 1855 and 1885 (Gildemeister 1987: 20-21).

Given that the enforcement provisions of the civic ordinances on vagrancy made clear gender and racial distinctions, and that the obligation to work was differentially defined and enforced for men and women, whites and non-whites, it is not surprising that carceral populations at this time were comprised primarily of poor, racialized and gendered segments of the population. While percentages varied somewhat from state to state, data indicates that overall, in Northern state prison populations in the last half of the nineteenth century, immigrant males between the ages of twenty and forty years predominated, and

Irish, German, English and Canadian ethnic groups accounted for the majority of the

245 foreign born segments of the penitentiary population. Particularly in the state prisons of

New York and Massachusetts, "Irish and German convicts dwarfed all other groups," and in the 1860s, "over half of Massachusetts' immigrant inmates claimed Ireland as their land of birth" (Gildemeister 1987: 77). Furthermore, as immigration and industrialization fed eachother, the number of foreign born convicts "rose in proportion to the immigrant population in free society." And significantly, through the 1870s, the ratio of black to white skinned people inside the prisons was at least five times the ratio found in free society

(Gildemeister 1987: 79). While proportions of women in state prisons were relatively low, in the lower-level penal institutions that dealt with non-felons, the proportion of women increased sharply since they were convicted at a much higher ratio of misdemeanors, especially prostitution (Gildemeister 1987: 75). As Gildemeister notes, then, "prison ethnicity patterns, then, reflected those found in the industrializing period from 1840 to

1890, although prison populations showed a much higher proportion of foreign born than did free society" (1987: 79).

Importantly, rather than having committed any real crimes, the vast majority of prisoners were arrested on charges related to their status as vagrants, while others were charged with minor thefts as "states and private land monopolists blocked access to land and made them vulnerable to starvation" (McLennan 2008: 74). Evidence also frequently surfaced that indicated collusion between prison officials, judged, police and contractors, making it clear that arrests were made directly in accordance with the labor needs of prison contractors. John T. McDonough, former New York Secretary of State and Chief of New

246 York's Bureau of Labor Statistics, recalled that "in the penitentiaries in the old times, when we did not have enough men to do the work, our police were instructed to put men in there" (as quoted in Gildemeister 1987: 98). McDonough also explained that contractors hired men to watch newly released prisoners, and that if they went drinking or to a brothel and "pushed in a door" they might be arrested for burglary and returned to the penitentiary.

One such man, re-arrested on a simple drunk charge, received a six months sentence instead of the usual two to thirty days because "he was the fastest barrel maker in the state." There is also evidence that contractors paid judges for long-term sentences: one former Albany

County judge, for example, "testified in court 'that he was offered $100 for every long-term prisoner' sentenced to the Albany Penitentiary" (Gildemeister 1987: 98).

Thus, as wage discipline required that alternative or supplementary sources of subsistence (such as petty theft, prostitution, or various forms of poor relief) be sealed off as much as possible, and as the choice to withhold labor was circumscribed by the criminalization of not having a labor contract, racialized populations were integrated into labor situations that they were often unable to leave, often because to do so would involve a forfeiture of wages as contracts came to be enforceable by legal sanction. While formally free following their terms of indenture, immigrant and black populations were both deprived of the means of subsisting except through highly inequitable and unfree forms of wage labor, and for that reason, compounded by the carceral matrix that underpinned and reinforced it, had little choice except to work regardless of the pay or conditions involved.

Subject to racialized laws limiting movement, association, and personal conduct, immigrant

247 and black men and women did not enter a neutral economic sphere but rather were integrated into the relations of production and social reproduction on unequal and in many senses unfree terms.

As industrial and occupational segregation cut off avenues to a large part of the labor market, those who did not submit readily and permanently to most unfree forms of waged work were arrested and forced to work under even more exploitative and abhorrent conditions through the industrial contract system. The message was clear: failure to permanently submit to the relatively unfree forms of waged labor available to immigrants and blacks would result in far greater and more violent forms of unfreedom. In IgnatiefPs words, "as so clearly sensed, the advent of democracy was characterized by an increasing intolerance towards 'deviant' minorities. The tyranny of the majority took as its symbol and instrument the silence, the lockstep, and the bullwhip of

Auburn penitentiary" (1978: 212). As the extreme in the continuum of unfreedom faced by racialized persons, the prison contracting system had the effect of controlling a population reluctant to freely assume the inferior and restricted position in the wage labor market created for it through the interplay of restrictive legislation and market forces, reinforced by racist attitudes and actions of society at large.

Conclusion Until the turn of the 20th century, convicts continued to labor at ferocious speeds in private prison factories, subjected to cruel and torturous forms of labor discipline. While

248 the prison contract system was slowly abolished in Northern states, through the first decade of the 1900s, in the face of resistance from organized labor and a legitimation crisis for the state in the face of widespread critique of the cruelty of the system, it was not until the

Great Depression that the federal government officially banned corporate use of convict labor. Workers had, for decades, assailed contractors for "gross exploitation of a de facto slave labor force and alleged that contractors reaped exorbitant profits at the expense of the very taxpayers with whom they competed," and as early as 1878, a government report summarized "that the contract system of convict labor is an evil; that profits are made by the contractor out of it; that these profits go to the contractor; that the system is injurious to free labor, and that contractors have advantages over other manufacturers, and that the reformation of the convict is not promoted by the operation of that system, have been so far established, that there are but few who will seek to contravene this judgment"

(Pennsylvania 1878: 7). But it was only when free manufacturers and elite members of the capitalist class began to plead for an end to prison labor competition that these concerns were heard over the lobbying of prison wardens and prison contractors who, for different reasons, insisted that the contract system stay in place. In the 1890s, the vast majority of prison workshops shifted from private to state control as laws across a number of states declared that "the contract system of convicts shall not exist in any form, but the prisoners shall be employed by the state, and in such way as to in the least possible manner interfere with or affect free labor" (as quoted in Gildemeister 1987: 246).

249 This chapter has sought to position the industrial prison contract system as something that arose in and through the social, economic, and political transformations of industrialization, documenting that it was neither analytically nor historically separate from the form that juridically free labor took, and that capitalism in the US North therefore involved modalities of labor that did not conform to the capital-wage labor relation but nevertheless impacted its character and form and comprised constituent dimensions of the relations of production and social reproduction. In doing so, I have attempted to highlight that the prison contract system, while part of the continuum wherein states and capitalists have appropriated the labor power of the indigent, propertyless poor, was not a form of unfree labor whose explanation lies in the pre-capitalist past, but rather, was one of many modalities of unfree labor that proliferated as overall processes of modernization. When this is understood, it becomes clear that the creation and spread of the capitalist market in the US North involved not only the institutionalization and expansion of the capital-waged labor relation, but that this took place in and through the spread and institutionalization of various modalities of unfree labor, and as such, prison contracting was central to the currents of coercion and dispossession that underpinned workers' submission to wage labor.

The very construction of the notion of a "free" laboring class in the US North, in fact, lay in the ways that juridically free, and increasingly white, males came to draw on prison contracting and other symbols of race to claim rights on the basis of their status as "free" labor in stark contrast to those in the prison contract system and interlocking forms of indenture retained for immigrants and black persons. As such, the racial bifurcation of free

250 and unfree labor became cemented in the free market even after many explicitly and legally racialized modalities of unfree labor had begun to slowly disappear. Individuals' conditions of livelihood and choices were shaped and underpinned by disciplinary legal codes and a set of social property relations where there was little option other than to submit to the discipline of the capitalist labor process, the free market in the US North was constructed through the subordination of racialized people to the lowest forms of waged labor, anchored by a disciplinary and violent system of unfree labor that served to curb alternatives to market participation.

Importantly, I have also underscored the fact that far from being exclusively concerned about profit, states were aware of the disciplinary effects of prison labor and used it (both directly and indirectly) to foster the forms of wage labor necessary for the new industrial capitalist order. It was essential to the acclimatization of new workers to factory discipline, which, as British historian Sidney Pollard writes, "is a task different in kind, at once more subtle and more violent, from that of maintaining discipline among a proletarian population of long standing" (as quoted in Dubofsky 1996: 5). Just as the convict lease system violently entrenched a social order based on white supremacy into the post- emancipation money economy, through the violent forms of labor and social discipline instilled in immigrants and the most marginalized segments of the northern working class, the state's institutionalization of the industrial prison contract system disciplined human bodies into the forms of factory labor that were fundamental for the new industrial capitalist system. As we will see in Chapter Five, far from being exclusive to the nineteenth

251 century, the disciplinary use of prison labor has also been used in the twentieth and twenty- first century to instantiate crucial shifts in the organization of labor during neoliberalism, an era of similar ferment in the configuration of labor and unfreedom, and decline in the conditions of working populations.

In sum, if punishment (a la Rusche and Kirchheimer) is to be viewed as historically specific phenomena that appear in particular concrete forms, the form of punishment characterizing industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century US appears to include forced productive labor as a central component. In this sense, it must be understood as part of a state centered strategy whose goal was to produce and social order based on the subordination of wage labor to the imperatives of capital accumulation. When viewed in this light, it is clear that even though the number of convict laborers proportional to laborers outside of prison might have been relatively small, convict labor was been fundamental to the production of capitalist order, at least in part because of its role in creating a disciplined, reliable labor force by conditioning the bodies of the laboring poor into the cadence and norms of permanent waged labor.

252 Part III: The Neoliberal Growth and Governance of Prison Labor

Outside the walls of Alabama's Limestone Correctional Facility stands a tall U-shaped metal bar, called "the hitching post", to which an inmate is chained when he refuses to work on the chain gang...The man remains on the hitching post, with hands cuffed above his head, from 8:30 am until 6:30pm. This is Alabama, 1996. (Gorman 1997: 441)

On May 3, 1995, Alabama became the first state to reintroduce the chain gang as a mode of

legal punishment. Though chain gangs were abolished across the US in the 1940s following widespread critique of their systematic exploitation, brutalization, and degradation, in the

mid-1990s, Alabama state convicts were once again padlocked together by the ankle and put to work on public highways at gunpoint, supervised by guards armed with shotguns loaded with double-aught buckshot.79 Notorious symbols of racial terrorism—such as the

"hitching post" and "bell rack"—were reintroduced to degrade convicts (70 percent of whom are African American) and prevent escape, "evoking the horror of countless racial

indignities, from slave ships to forced labor" (Gorman 1997: 443).80 The beginnings of the chain gang itself can be traced to the racialized terror of slavery in the US since it was

initially adopted in the colonies as a way to control and transport slaves (Gorman 1997:

443). Far from being a simple vestige of the past, however, the reintroduction of chain gangs in Alabama and many other states during the mid-1990s has been a key element of

79 A form of hunting ammunition designed to increase the likelihood of killing one's target. The guards had orders to shoot if a convict attempted escape or fought with another inmate. See: Peloso 1997; Gorman 1997. 80 Prisoners questioning orders or refusing to work were chained, for example, to the "hitching post" with hands cuffed above his head, and forced to stand for ten hours under the broiling sun (Peloso 1997: 1470).

253 the ruling elite's attempt to foster neoliberal social discipline and order. For this reason, as

The Economist noted, chain gangs are "as much of a harbinger of the future as a symbol of

the past" (1995: 26).81

While an expansive literature has been dedicated to exposing and documenting the exploitation resulting from private companies' use of prison labor during neoliberalism, few accounts have taken notice of the systematic reintroduction of prison labor as a phenomenon fundamentally related to fostering labor and social discipline. Emphasizing profitability and corporate involvement, rather, the vast majority of contemporary writing on prison labor has focused on the for-profit prison factories that have sprung up across the

US during neoliberalism and companies' sporadic usage of prison labor to produce valuable commodities. As thirty-seven states have enacted laws permitting the use of inmate labor by private industry for the first time since the , over 175 private sector businesses (including Fortune 500 conglomerate Escod Industries and major US multi­ national corporations like Starbucks and Boeing) have moved portions of their production processes behind bars (Chang and Thompkins 2002). While this situation admittedly provides the grounds for a devastating critique of the extreme exploitation that corporations have imposed in their quest for profit, critics focusing narrowly on corporate involvement have tended to overstate both the profitability and scope of private enterprises'

81 Alabama, , Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, , Tennessee, and Wisconsin reintroduced chain gangs, while legislators introduced state bills proposing chain gang requirements in California, Indiana, , Tennessee, South Carolina, Washington and Vermont. Furthermore, five states have enacted statutes that require inmates to spend a portion of their sentences working on chain gangs: Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, and Wisconsin (Peloso 1997: 1467).

254 use of prison labor. And in doing so, these critics have failed to fully appreciate the wider significance of the reintroduction of prison labor and what, when taken as a whole, it tells us about the form that class and social discipline have taken in the neoliberal era and the ways in which power is being tightened around particular bodies.82

Indeed, the premise of this section is that by maintaining a narrow focus on profitability, most critical accounts of prison labor have tended to overlook the wider significance of the resurgence of prison labor which, far from being decipherable in abstract or economic terms, only really comes to light when embodied prison labor is examined in a historical and nuanced way. Furthermore, in the absence of historicism, most critical accounts of prison labor have misleadingly portrayed this phenomenon as something "new" and have rarely noted the striking resemblances and continuities of purpose between historic and contemporary forms of prison labor. While contemporary prison factories, for example, are generally portrayed as new and anomalous spaces of corporate exploitation without historic precedent, as we will see, geared towards both labor discipline and increasing corporate profit margins, they in fact bear a great resemblance to the prison factories of nineteenth century industrializing North, documented in Chapter Four.

Demonstrating that prison labor today is neither a "new" form of "modern-day slavery" nor

82 Many authors have claimed that the surge in prison population has been motivated by the profitability of prison labor. As we will see, however, that the "employment" rate of prisoners has not kept up with the surging inmate population, indicate that this correlation is tenuous at best. Placing neoliberal prison labor in line with the historic tendency whereby it has been used as part of a broader state strategy to coercively impose the forms of labor discipline necessary to the neoliberal order, this chapter argues that chain gangs, flexible factory prison work, etc. need to be understood not through economism, but through an analysis of the full range of social relations that underpin prison labor and that it reproduces.

255 a static vestige of the past, this account contends that a much deeper understanding of contemporary prison labor can be achieved when it is understood as part of the centuries' long tradition wherein capital and the state have used carceral institutions to discipline, contain, and exploit the laboring poor, at times, through racialized forms of violence. At the same time, I propose that prison labor today is both reflective and reproductive of the contemporary political economy, and is being used today (as it has been used historically) as part of a state strategy to coercively impose the forms of labor discipline necessary to the neoliberal order. This is evident in the fact that prison labor is currently being used both directly to break strikes and drive down the conditions and leverage of working populations, and indirectly as it instantiates the closing off of alternatives to wage labor, contributes to a general climate of precariousness, and attempts to discipline the bodies of the deviant poor into lean and flexible production. It follows that neoliberal prison labor— and all of the coercion, exploitation, and racial oppression it involves—is a phenomenon whose explanation lies as much in the political economy of the present day as it does in the historical traditions of the past.

Building on and deepening the theoretical and historical insights developed in earlier chapters of the dissertation, this section questions what the reintroduction of one of the most transparently unfree forms of labor supply, control and exploitation in US history during the late 20th century tells us about the shifting configurations of labor and unfreedom in contemporary capitalist society. In doing so, it deepens and extends the contemporary prison labor literature in two key ways. In the first case, noting there has

256 been a tendency among authors in the critical tradition to exaggerate the scale and profitability of prison labor today, as well as the extent to which private industry's labor interests have shaped carceral policy, this section demonstrates that corporate use of inmate labor has not resulted from an autonomous capital's quest for profit. Rather, developing a sharper and deeper understanding of the social, political, and economic dynamics underpinning the reintroduction of prison labor at this particular moment in history, this study establishes that the revitalization of the prison industry is a strategy that has developed through and cannot be abstracted from the US state as it has restructured to author processes of globalization and re-impose social and class discipline among working populations as part of a general turn towards supremacist politics (Gill 2003: 118). In the second case, while many contemporary accounts present prison labor as a new and anomalous form of unfree labor, neglecting both the long tradition of capitalist and state exploitation of prison labor throughout US history and the ways in which prison labor interlocks with other contemporary modalities of both juridically free and unfree labor, this section offers a more systematic analysis of the reconfigurations of labor and unfreedom that have emerged as part neoliberalism social transformation. Like earlier chapters, this study aims to shift the focus away from technical and quantitative concerns with the question of whether prison labor constitutes a modern form of "slavery" and aims, instead, to capture key dimensions of the historic arc of unfreedom has characterized daily life for certain segments of the US population over the past three decades and to explain how and why this unfreedom has come to be.

257 Chapter 5: Carceral Capitalism: Prison Labor and Unfreedom in the Neoliberal United States

In neoliberalism, like the classical liberal period of the 19th century, carceral power has

become a central component of state strategies to contain the contradictions, insecurities,

and resistances generated by shifting relations of production and social reproduction.

Prison labor has been reintroduced both as a disciplinary component of this carceral

stratagem, and also as a means of financing it.

In the first case, just as prison labor has historically been central to the social

relations through which more deeply unfree forms of capitalist life and labor have come

into being, alongside crucial shifts in the neoliberal relations of production and social

reproduction—particularly the rise of flexible, lean, and precarious forms of labor—the

revitalization of prison labor has been part of a broader strategy to aggressively impose the

forms of labor and social discipline fundamental to neoliberal order. Prison labor has been used both directly (to break strikes, replace free workers, drive down the wages and leverage of working populations and to instantiate the criminalization and closing off of alternatives

to wage labor), and indirectly (as it has forcefully habituated the bodies of the deviant poor

into the most flexible and low-skilled forms of free market labor) as part of a continuum of neoliberal strategies to undermine the collective power of working populations in ways that compel them to depend on an increasingly precarious labor market for their survival rather than non-market forms of social provisioning. Prison labor is best understood, then, as part

258 of a continuum of carceral institutions and relations (from the to the

penitentiary to the lock-down school) designed to impose market discipline by force onto

working populations.

In the second and deeply interrelated case, in the context of skyrocketing carceral

costs (expenditure on incarceration increased by 660% from 1982 to 2006) (US Bureau of

Justice 2006), as mass incarceration has become the preferred response to governing the

social insecurity generated by neoliberal economic and social policies, the reinvigoration of

the prison industries has been a state attempt to recover the cost of mass incarceration by

appropriating inmates' labor power. In the context of the 1970s fiscal crisis, after legislation

limiting the scale of the prison industries was overturned in 1979, the state reinvigorated its

corporate entity, the Federal Prison Industries (FPI) and put prisoners to work making

products that the government would have otherwise needed to purchase on the free market

(e.g. office furniture, military uniforms and equipment, textiles, electronics). In a similar

vein, prisoners have come to provide a number of municipal services—ranging from data

entry and digital mapping to street cleaning to underwater welding—as states have cut costs

by shedding public sector employees. With over 50% of the US' three million inmates performing 6-8 hours of labor a day towards the running and operation of the prison, and

another 10% working 40 hour weeks for FPI and increasing numbers of inmates providing

state services, prison labor programs have cut carceral costs and have also enabled reductions

in other forms of public spending. And since the Prison Industry Enhancement Act (which

allows private businesses to profitably contract for prison labor and sell their products on

259 the free market) was passed in 1979, private companies such as Boeing, Starbucks, and

Fortune 500 conglomerate Escod Industries have also cut costs and restored profitability by exploiting state-subsidized, lean, flexible, prison work teams.

As in other periods in US history, inmate workers in neoliberalism confront substantive unfreedom: paid between $0 and $1.90 an hour after 80% of their wages appropriated by the state, they are frequently exposed to high amounts of toxic chemicals, work in dangerous environments, and face disproportionate amounts of workplace injuries

(Burton Rose 1998; Dougherty 2008; Herivel and Wright 2007, 2003). They are forbidden from making eye contact or communicating with other inmates while working, are punished—at times violently—for labor infractions, and are individually and collectively deprived of the legally guaranteed power to affect production conditions and the conditions under which they exchange their labor for a wage (Grossman 2005;

Guilbaud 2010; Featherstone 2000). Because prison workshops are at the end of subcontracting chains whose components operate in competing sectors subject to tight time constraints, prisoners are often required to work at an inhuman production pace, and for this reason, are advertised by government corporations as the "The Best Kept Secret in

Outsourcing" (UNICOR 2010). In short, as neoliberalism has involved an intensification of carceral power (including the coercive forms of class discipline typical of earlier eras of capitalism) geared towards instantiating and reproducing capitalist markets, unfree prison labor is once again being used both as a cost-cutting strategy and as a key disciplinary instrument in the governance of crime, poverty, and deviance.

260 This chapter begins, in section one, by documenting the rise of criminalization and

incarceration as strategies to punitively manage the contradictions and insecurities

generated by neoliberai social and economic policies. Then, in section two, following a brief

overview of contemporary prison labor's general features, I document the unfreedom that

contemporary prison workers face across three planes: First, I examine the conditions

involved in, and workers' lived experiences of, the labor process itself, revealing the violence, coercion, and exploitation that characterizes prison labor. Second, I analyze the social relations surrounding for-profit prison labor in the sphere of circulation, particularly, the

role that states and corporations play in exploiting convict labor. Third, I examine the compulsions and forms of coercion underpinning people's entrance into the system through a discussion of the restrictive and racialized legal codes that have proliferated during neoliberalism, particularly those that criminalize alternatives to market based strategies of reproduction. Throughout this account I contend that rather than being experienced uniformly, neoliberai prison labor is informed by and reproductive of various hierarchies including those based on class, gender and race.

Punishing the Poor: Carceral Expansion Under Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism has been characterized by the expansion of states' use of carceral power to instantiate shifts in the relations of production and social reproduction.83 As a number of sociologists, feminist criminologists, and others have documented, rather than

This has not been an anomalous shift but has taken place in the context of a broader shift away from hegemonic politics and towards supremacy as a mode of rule (Gill 2003: 118).

261 being concerned with crime control per se, the mass extension of policing and incarceration have been the US state's strategy to contain the social disorders, insecurities and resistances generated by neoliberalism, including highly unequal patterns of capitalist accumulation, the rise of precarious forms of labor, and the disintegration of Keynesian-era social welfare protections. In Loic Wacquant's words, after forsaking the Fordist-Keynesian social compact in the mid-1970s, "the United States launched into a unique sociohistorical experiment: the incipient replacement of the welfare regulation of poverty and of the urban disorders spawned by mounting insecurity and racial strife by its penal management via the police, courts, and correctional system" (Wacquant 2002: 22). Again, this shift has had little to do with actual ruptures in the evolution of crime and delinquency. Rather, as the tension between capital accumulation and social reproduction has been exacerbated by the shift of resources away from social-service-oriented institutions, the inevitable fallout has been managed through the carceral management of the classed, gendered and racialized bodies that have been marginalized by this social order. In McNally's words, "It is prisons—not schools or even job training programs—that secure the disciplinary ethos of neoliberalism" (2011: 119). The US government's increasing reliance on police and prisons to govern social marginality, then, cannot be separated from shifts in the broader political economy that have increased the insecurity of particular segments of the population.

While the story of neoliberal restructuring and the insecurities it has entailed is a familiar one within political economy, to achieve a robust understanding of the neoliberal reemergence of prison labor, it is still important to recount key elements of it here. While

262 the economic success of the post-war boom years left the US, by the end of the 1960s, in a position of unprecedented economic and political power, as commercial profits began to decline in the 1970s, and as the state struggled to balance international interventions with double-digit inflation, a declining dollar, and large capital outflows at home, forces emerged to challenge the Keynesian-era trend of inward economic development, expansionary welfare policies and the strengthened bargaining power of unions (Panitch and Gindin

2004). An important milestone in the shift from hegemonic to supremacist politics in the

US and worldwide, policies designed to undermine working-class power and combat inflation, such as the "Volcker shock"84 of 1979-1982, were officially implemented as policies of "discipline" and "stability," and prompted a huge decline in American standards of living. Rather than responding to these declines with social protections, the state redesigned social policies in ways that compelled dependence on the market, signaling a major shift in the governance of poverty and criminality and the rise of what some scholars have called "disciplinary neoliberalism" (Gill 2008: 196). A punitive program of social reform involving the restructuring of the state and public policy in order to deepen, extend, and secure capitalist markets, disciplinary neoliberalism has been characterized by the rewriting of social and penal policies and discourses in ways that criminalize marginalized sectors of the population and seek to compel them to rely on an increasingly precarious

84 Armed with a conservative monetary policy (and backed by allies willing to impose similar measures in the other OECD countries), Volcker (largely autonomously) reassured financial interests that the state would not allow inflation to undermine the dollar. Subsequently, world interest rates rose dramatically, helping create a global and precipitating the Third World debt crisis. For a summary of the Volcker shock, see McNally (2011: 33-37).

263 labor market for their survival, rather than social assistance or non-market forms of social provisioning (Roberts 2010).

Market solutions to poverty were institutionalized just as markets became increasingly volatile as, from the late 1970s on, "governments and employers around the world launched a coordinated offensive to roll back union power, , and employees' wages, benefits, and conditions of work" (McNally 2011: 42). When workers resisted these attacks, "governments turned to legislation, the courts, the police, and prison terms to do the trick" (McNally 2011: 43). Indeed, and at least partially in response to the racial upheaval and political rebellion that jolted US capitalism in the 1960s and early

1970s,85 as capitalist social forces came to see stable and full employment as a barrier to profitability, unions underwent a discursive and material attack and labor became cheaper and increasingly flexible and precarious in form as employment was restructured in ways intended to re-impose "work ethics" and social discipline on laboring populations. Central here was a rise in unemployment rates and a decline in standards of living: between 1979 and 1983, the national unemployment rate increased by 66 percent (Chang and

Thompkins 2002: 48). The income gap between rich and poor increased by 22 percent between 1968 and 1994, with even more drastic increases in the following decade (Chang and Thompkins 2002: 48). Exacerbating these forms of insecurity, those in power— including members from both political parties and economists of all mainstream

85 As describes of the late sixties and early seventies in the US, "Order seemed to be unraveling: massive anti-war protests on the Mall; a war effort bogged down and hemorrhaging in the mud of Southeast Asia; economic stagnation and declining profit rates; and in cities, skyrocketing crime coupled with some of the most violent riots since the Civil War" (2008: 3).

264 viewpoints— argued that welfare benefits must also be reduced in order to prevent workers from choosing government assistance over low-paid wage labor (Katz 1996: 288).

Subsequently, welfare reforms made the program increasingly coercive and by the late

1980s, the Family Support Act (FSA) sealed the transformation of the program from one that helped single mothers stay at home to raise their children to a mandatory work program (Abramovitz 1996: 350-7). "Workfarist regulatory frameworks," which began as

US work programs requiring participants to "work off their welfare checks and soon morphed into a full-fledged ideological and policy overhaul of traditional rights-and- eligibilities-based welfare systems, have all but eliminated government assistance for the poor that is not conditional on labor force participation (Peck 2001: 10-11). By fostering insecurity in these ways, the state engineered a new political and social climate designed to buttress market discipline and strengthen profitability (McNally 2011: 115).

Contrary to many popular narratives, then, with the transition to neoliberalism, the

American state did not retreat, but rather was restructured in ways that privilege capital and the wealthy at the expense of the majority of the population. Restructuring has involved the institutionalization of commitments to fiscal discipline, low levels of inflation, and the privatization of state enterprises. It has also involved the removal of controls placed on the movement of capital and goods, facilitating the ability of corporations to move production overseas (and into prisons, for that matter) in order to exploit cheap labor and loose regulatory regimes. In addition, states have dramatically reduced social and welfare spending, leading to the increasing individualization and privatization of risk, and the re-

265 privatization of social reproduction (Bakker 2003). Finally, neoliberalism has involved crucial transformations in labor processes and employment norms as production has been made "more 'flexible' largely by making labor so—by tiering wages, altering shifts, increasing insecurity and precarious employment (casual, part-time, and contract work), and enhancing employers' power to hire, fire and reorganize work" (McNally 2011: 47).

Reflecting on these trends, many scholars have argued that neoliberalism has greatly exacerbated the tension between capital accumulation and social reproduction (Bakker and

Brodie 2008; Bakker 2003; Bakker and Gill 2003). It is largely due to this tension in neoliberalism, and the resistances such insecurities generate, that carceral power has become an increasingly prominent feature of neoliberalism. Whereas previously, the American state managed the tensions and insecurities generated by capitalism through a combination of macroeconomic and social policies, in the contemporary era, carceral social relations and institutions have emerged as the preferred response. That is, rather than addressing the problems associated with poverty, growing inequalities, the hollowing out of inner cities, rising levels of unemployment, precarious working conditions, and declining or stagnating wages through progressive economic and social policies, states and market forces have overlapped to create a set of carceral relations that integrate people's current and future life choices and possibilities into unequal and unfree capitalist social relations, as well as limits their social and physical mobility within these relations.

Central here have been the use of prisons and policing to manage the increasingly poor populations who have been economically and socially marginalized by neoliberal

266 restructuring. As many studies in the fields of criminology and sociology have demonstrated, as mass incarceration has emerged as "the preferred public response to the problems created by poverty" (Gilmore 2009: 79), the US prison population has skyrocketed, with the number of people behind bars increasing by 450 percent between

1980-2009 (The Pew Center 2009). One percent of the adult population is now locked up in a federal prison or local jail (one in every 100 adults) and adding those on probation and parole, one in every 31 adults, or 3.2 percent of the population is under some form of criminal justice supervision (The Pew Center 2009).86 Facilitating these drastic increases in incarceration rates has been a "get-tough" law and order regime backed up by "an invasion of ever more brutal and intrusive policing" targeting poor and racialized communities who

"with virtually nothing to lose, might be the most likely to rebel" (McNally 2011: 116, see also: Gordon 2006). In Wacquant's words, "governments are surrendering to the temptation to rely on the police, the courts, and the prison to stem the disorders generated by mass unemployment, the generalization of precarious wage labor, and the shrinking of social protection" (2009: 1). As structural inequality has been individuated and delegitimized, and just as neoliberal economic and social policies have been informed by and operate in ways that reproduce class-based, gendered, racialized and other inequalities and insecurities, so too are the carceral relations that have emerged to deal with them.

Incarceration in the US has always had a class-based and racial dimension, but during the neoliberal era, class and racial inequalities in prison admission have increased

86 While incarceration rates are rising in other countries as well, the US rate of imprisonment is now six to twelve times that of other advanced industrialized countries (Mosley 2009: 8).

267 considerably (Western 2006: 75-78).87 The number of African-American convicts increased sevenfold between 1970 and 1995, and the rate of incarceration for blacks tripled in only a dozen years to reach 1,895 per 100,000 in 1993—amounting to nearly seven times the rate for whites (293 per 100,000). This meant that in 1995, for the first time in the twentieth century, the country's penitentiaries held more blacks than whites: African

Americans made up 12 percent of the national population that year but supplied 53 percent of the prison inmates, as against 38 percent a quarter century earlier (Wacquant 2009: 61).

Overall, more than two thirds of those imprisoned are black or Latino and at the end of

2007, one in every three black men was under some form of correctional supervision (The

Pew Center 2009: 5). Wacquant's major study, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal

Governance of Social Insecurity (2009), links this racialized pattern of incarceration to the racialized insecurities generated by shifting capitalist relations of production and social reproduction, demonstrating that the trend toward mass imprisonment in the US has been directly related to the shift away from the welfare management of poverty and race relations, the decline of manufacturing jobs, and the de-proletarianization of fractions of the black working class. As global capitalists came to find alternative and less rebellious low- wage labor in the form of immigrants and Third World workers, he argues, "the state used incarceration as a means of economic, social, and political exclusion of African Americans"

(Wacquant 2009: 48).

87 They have increased substantively when compared to those typical of the Keynesian welfare state, though not in comparison to earlier eras in US history since, as we have seen, the convict lease system was populated almost entirely by black inmates and blacks were disproportionately represented in the factory system, compared to the free black northern population.

268 Incarceration trends are also highly gendered and in recent years women have been incarcerated at a faster rate than men. According to one study, while men's incarceration rate rose by 300 percent between 1980 and 2000, women's incarceration rate rose by an even more drastic 650 percent (Heimer 2000: 334).88 And importantly, the evidence suggests that gendered insecurity under neoliberalism is a key factor driving the growing incarceration of women, as poverty and the exacerbated tension between capital accumulation and progressive forms of social reproduction has led some women to engage in criminalized activities.89 For example, in one study, the majority of mothers interviewed—an estimated 70 percent of women in jail have minor children—correlated their criminal activity with their economic situation which included the entitlement of needy single mothers to a meager annual cash benefit of $3,345, a lack of low-cost housing, childcare, and medical services for single mothers (Ferraro and Moe 2003: 18). Studies have also identified both a positive correlation between levels of unemployment and rates of imprisonment (Wacquant 2001; Gilmore 2007) and a negative correlation between welfare spending and rates of incarceration (Beckett and Western 2001). In this context, it is not surprising that women, particularly poor and racialized women, who are disproportionately employed in precarious forms of work and dependent on welfare services, constitute the fastest growing segment of the prison population.

While politicians across the political spectrum have championed fiscal austerity and given lip service to reduced government spending throughout neoliberalism, the carceral

88 These trends have not been restricted to the US as poor, young, racialized women and girls are among the fastest growing prison populations in the US and worldwide (Sudbury 200 5: xiv). 89 See Heimer (2000) for a review of this literature.

269 management of poverty has in fact been an extremely expensive strategy. While budgets for education and social spending have been slashed, the budget for the departments of corrections has quietly soared, growing 11% per year from 1990-1996, faster than any other category of state spending (Bair 2008: 1). From 1980 to 1984, total spending on state prisons surged by 74 percent in only four years, from $4.5 billion to $7.7 billion (Chang and Thompkins 2002: 49), and from 1982 to 2006, total expenditure on incarceration has increased 660%, from $9 billion to $68.7 billion (US Bureau of Justice 2006). The cost of policing, similarly, has increased 420% from $19 billion in 1982 to $98.8 billion in 2006, and the dramatic rise in overall carceral costs has steadily absorbed larger and larger percentages of public budgets (US Bureau of Justice 2006). By 1990, carceral costs consumed between ten to fifteen percent of public budgets, posing an obvious contradiction to the neoliberal ideological doctrine of fiscal austerity (Wacquant 2002:

22). As carceral costs soared and fiscal crisis tendencies plagued state budgets, state and federal decision-makers and right-wing think tanks proclaimed a "state of emergency" on the police and penal fronts (Wacquant 2009: 43) and began exerting political pressure to return to the 19th century practice of running prisons as self-sustaining or "even profit- producing entities requiring minimal financial input from the state" (Burton-Rose 1998:

103).

The central means through which pundits proposed this could be achieved, was, of course, through a widespread resurgence of prison labor. After the 1967 President's

Commission Task Force Report on Corrections formalized the decline of the medical

270 model approach90 in the department of corrections and approved a "work-oriented

philosophy of integration," in the early 1970s, the conservative Supreme Court Justice

Warren Burger began calling for prisons to become "factories with fences" reminiscent of

the factory system of the nineteenth century. Lionising the "free-market" conditions of the

nineteenth century, Burger authored a report called Factories With Fences (1996) that

encouraged authorities to "stop wasting the huge asset of convict labor and move to make

prisons hum with productive work." In a similar vein, US Senator argued that,

"We ought to build our prisons with mini-industrial parks, where people go to prison, they

work" (quoted in Rice 2006: 66) while Edwin Meese, former US attorney general and

architect of the Reagan-era war on drugs, editorialized in the Wall Street Journal in 1996

that "the time is ripe to reduce the cost of incarceration by expanding inmate work

programs" (quoted in Parenti 2008: 230). In the mid-1970s, alongside declines in working

class power declined and increasingly volatile markets, as political leaders succeeded in

stirring up public outrage about the "idleness in prisons," legislators began to seriously push

legislation that would revive the nineteenth century system of industrial contract prison

labor. While, as we saw in Chapter Four, that system was scaled down in the early 1900s

and then abolished in the mid-1930s amidst union and manufacturer complaints that they

could not compete against prison made products on the open market, at the end of the

1970s, prison labor was poised for a comeback.

90 The medical model of imprisonment was widespread in the US from the 1940s to the late 1960s. It was premised upon the theory that "an inmate's criminal tendencies could be diagnosed and treated, almost like a physical disease" (UNICOR 2011). During this time, prisoners had access to various forms of correctional education and vocational training. Since the replacement of the medical model with the "work-oriented philosophy", however, the majority of these programs have been cut if not completely abolished.

271 The reinstitutionalization of prison labor began the same year that Paul Volcker told

the American public to brace themselves for painful declines in standards of living. In 1979, legislators passed the Federal Prison Industries Enhancement (PIE) Act, allowing private corporations to enter "joint ventures" with state prisons for the first time since 1935. The

Percy Amendment of the same year legalized the sale of inmate-produced PIE goods on public markets (subject to various restrictions). As we will see in a moment, it has been through the PIE program that states have famously subsidized production (through free or highly reduced rent, utilities, and other incentives) and bolstered profits for some of

America's largest corporations. As of 1983, federal inmates could be required to work forty hours a week, and while most of these jobs took the form of facility support (laundry, food, maintenance, and repairs) designed to reduce prison operation costs, one in every sixteen federal inmates worked for the Federal Prison Industries (FPI), publicly traded under the name UNICOR, producing goods to be sold to government agencies or exported abroad.

Following the federal government's lead, most states have also passed measures mandating that all prisoners work 40 hours per week. In 1994, for example, Oregon voters passed

Measure 17, requiring that every prisoner work 40 hours per week while incarcerated and requiring state legislators to pro-actively market prison labor to private enterprises.91

We will look at the concrete specifics of these prison labor programs in a moment.

Here, the important point is to note that as poverty and criminality have been subjected to

91 Significantly, the prime backers of Measure 17 was "a clique of conservative businessmen who have promoted a host of anti-worker initiatives over the past decade. Led by the owner of the notoriously anti­ union Shilo Inn chain, this group of wealthy businessmen joined together in the early 1990s to form the Oregon Roundtable, whose members each pledged to contribute $100,000 per year to promote a conservative political agenda" (Herivel and Wright 2003: 126).

272 intensified forms of carceral power and carceral costs have surged during neoliberalism, so too has the prevalence of prison labor. Far from a minor development, as we will see in a moment, the reintroduction of prison labor on a large scale during neoliberalism has been a significant development in the evolution of American penology and labor history, reversing more than a half-century of measures limiting prison labor to protect free workers and companies. While measures requiring inmates to work 40 hours a week have been clear and direct attempts to pay for the project of mass incarceration, it is important to underline the point that prison labor has been about more than numbers. Rather, prison labor has also been a fundamental element of the neoliberal crusade to foster the forms of labor and social discipline necessary to a more precarious and more deeply marketized social order among the US working population.

Having demonized poor and dispossessed populations as dangerous criminals and incarcerated them at great expense to other Americans, some scholars have argued that states and the federal government have then forced inmates to labor in an effort to fulfill the ideology of retribution and rehabilitation (Parenti 2008: 230). But the re-imposition of prison labor has also been part of a broader strategy to coercively impose the forms of labor discipline necessary to the neoliberal order. Like the rise of workfare, the resurgence of prison labor has served as a powerful reminder to Americans who are working more and earning less that there is a fate worse, and a status lower, than hard and unrewarding work, and that refusal to secure one's livelihood in the precarious wage labor market will result in unfree labor behind bars. And far from being simply directed towards profits, the violence

273 and brutality characterizing the most recent wave of prison labor has been a targeted attempt to re-instill fear and social discipline into poor and racialized segments of the population who, with little to gain from market participation, have been the most likely to rebel. As alternatives to waged labor have been criminalized and closed off, prison labor has been part of a spectrum of strategies to cure "the illness of the 'slacking' proletariat and the unfitness of character-flawed deviants" (2008: 230). As we will see, in addition to being advantageous to capital by creating a general sense of insecurity, the reintroduction of prison labor has also anchored accelerated labor exploitation and discipline by acting as a coercive ancillary to the labor market.

Finally, it is important to note that rather than simply responding to insecurities generated by neoliberalism, these forms of carceral power has also been central in instantiating and securing the capitalist market, and have been used in the extension and deepening of capitalism in the US and worldwide. Indeed, on a global scale, neoliberal restructuring has been enacted and sustained through what Julia Sudbury (2005) has called the "global lockdown," or the global expansion of carceral institutions and coercive power, which emerged, in part, to quell resistance to neoliberalism and criminalize alternatives to market dependence. These alternatives have varied greatly by context around the globe, but in the US case, have primarily involved drug production and distribution, prostitution, panhandling, and theft (Sassen 2002)).92 For instance, in the US, the majority of prisoners

92 The "global lockdown" has certainly conditioned resistance in various ways, especially following the September 11*, 2001 attacks on the US World Trade Center and the Pentagon, after which resistance has been met with heightened state repression evident in the widespread violent suppression of public protest, law-and-order policing and skyrocketing imprisonment rates, especially for women and racialized groups

274 are not incarcerated for violent offenses (which accounts for only two in ten prisoners) but for a range of so-called "disorderly" and criminalized offences, many of which can be understood as attempts to secure one's livelihood outside of the formal marketplace through selling drugs, prostitution, panhandling, and other means (Western 2006: 38;

Parenti 2008: 217, 239). Further, data indicates that the vast majority of prisoners were

"unemployed immediately prior to their incarceration," strengthening the viewpoint that incarceration is being used to contain the indigent poor in ways that creates a general sense of insecurity and precariousness (Smith 2008: 3). As we have seen, such carceral strategies are not new. Rather, the "modern" police forces and penitentiaries that emerged in industrialized countries in the nineteenth century were central to the fabrication of capitalist social order as they targeted offences such as public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, gaming, begging and other activities that were carried out either for pleasure or as an alternative to wage labor (Neocleous 2000). Just as penal sanction has been an instrument in the political economy of labor force management since the sixteenth century

(Piven and Cloward 1971), so too is it in neoliberalism.

When we understand that the majority of people serving time in US prisons are incarcerated for a range of so-called "disorderly" and property offences, then it becomes clear that forcing prisoners to perform highly disciplined and regimented labor—much like the wage labor that they did not participate in prior to incarceration— is about a lot more around the world (Sudbury 2005). However, in the face of the deepening and extension of numerous neoliberal tensions, contradictions and crises, various forms of resistance have continued to take place at the local, national and global scales, including struggles to democratize economic resources and decision-making, revolts over land and water privatization and the commodification of other necessities of life, against poverty, and struggles for gender equality (McNally 2006: 1-26).

275 than money. Put directly, it has been about punishing the poor in ways that seek to instill labor and market discipline into the prisoners themselves (as their bodies are physically habituated into the regimentation of waged work) and into society at large as prison labor has sent a clear message to working people across the country that failure to freely participate in the market will result in participation by force. As we will see, this is not only true of prison labor in private factories, but is especially central in relation to chain gangs and other very public forms of prison labor. It is to the concrete dynamics of neoliberal prison labor, and people's experiences of it, that we now turn.

Factories Behind Bars: Reinvigorating the Prison Industries

As of 2008, over 80% of federal and state prisoners and over 95% of private prisoners worked during their time in prison. A large percentage of these inmates (40-66% depending on jurisdiction) work to maintain the operation of carceral institutions through facility and grounds maintenance, laundry, cleaning tasks, and food preparation (Bair

2008). The rest work in prison industry, where inmates are employed for profitable production and services and agricultural labor. Far from the classic image of inmate workers manually pounding license plates, today's inmates work in competitive industries manufacturing, assembling, and packaging products that are sold on the free market.

Through "joint-ventures" with private businesses, prisoners have packaged or assembled

"everything from Starbucks coffee beans to Shelby Cobra sports cars, Nintendo Game Boys,

Microsoft mouses and Eddie Bauer clothing" (Schwartzpfel 2009), as well as children's clothing, toys, hotel amenities, waterbeds, fishing lures, golf balls, snowshoes, and many

276 other commodities that sell on public markets (Herivel and Wright 2003). In the federal and state industries, inmates manufacture the office and dormitory furniture that fills universities and government offices, the electronics and textiles used by US soldiers in

Afghanistan and Iraq, and also "make shoes, clothing and detergent, they do dental lab work, recycling, metal production and wood production; they operate dairies, farms and slaughterhouses" as well as provide services for the state ranging from accounting to underwater welding (Featherstone 2000; Brown and Severson 2011).

While the scope and sheer diversity of labor performed by prisoners gives rise to the image of the prison as a full-blown sweatshop—an image reinforced by many critical accounts of prison labor—it is important to emphasize that the percentage of inmates working in the prison industries is relatively small compared to the total inmate population.

While the total inmate population surpassed 2.3 million in 2008 (The Pew Center 2009),

Noah Zatz of UCLA Law School estimated that during that year between 600,000 and one million inmates were working full time (between 40-65 hours a week) in jails and prisons industries across the United States (2008: 868). While the scale of neoliberal prison labor is marginal in comparison to the US workforce, its economic contribution is significant: in

2001, inmates working for FPI and state industries produced $1.8 billion worth of commodities (Correctional Industries Association 2001: 1). Furthermore, in Susan Kang's words, "While forced prison labor remains marginal [in relation to the labor market as a whole], it is still a significant factor because the absolute numbers are quite high and the practice has become normalized and considered a good policy" (2009: 150) in spite of the

277 fact that legally speaking, prison labor is a form of involuntary servitude contradicting all claims to mobility and equality in the free market.

Like the convict lease and prison contracting systems, neoliberal prison labor is legally based in the Thirteenth Amendment that holds that slavery and involuntary servitude are permissible as a punishment for crime. Court cases have since upheld that payment to inmates is not mandatory and that while they are formally "slaves of the state," states have the right to transfer their property in the labor power of prisoners to private businesses in exchange for a fee (Cowen 1993). Different regulations apply to each of the three systems of prison industry currently in operation in the US: (1) the federal and state government-operated prison industry; (2) the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification

Program (PIECP); (3) the prison industries run by private prisons. Because there is a great deal of confusion regarding the scale and administration of each system, it bears pausing for a moment to lay out the key features of each before taking a closer look at what prisoners do and the conditions of their labor.

In the first case, the federal government and every state government own and operate prison industries. The Federal Prison Industries Inc. (FPI), publicly traded under the name UNICOR—a wholly government-owned created in 1934 but relatively inactive until 1983—owns and operates 109 factories in federal prisons across the country, making its prison workforce the largest of the any other single corporation. Over

20% of the prisoners in the federal prison system work for FPI producing commodities

(which, in 2008, amounted to about 21,000 inmate workers) and in fiscal year 2008, FPI

278 generated sales surpassing $854.5 million. Similar to FPI, but on a smaller scale, each of the

fifty states' Department of Corrections owns and operates prison industries through government owned corporations (e.g. Virginia Correctional Enterprises, Washington

Correctional Industries, California Prison Industry Authority). Because the products made in state and federal industries can only be sold to governmental agencies, public organizations, and tax supported entities—where markets are legally guaranteed through mandatory purchase agreements—the major purchasers of public prison industry products are other state organizations. Goods produced in the public prison industries are also sold abroad: Eastern Oregon Correctional Institute for example, sells their convict-made

"Prison Blues" designer jeans—"made on the inside to be worn on the outside"—in hundreds of boutiques across Europe and Japan, with an annual projected sales of over $1.2 million in export revenue (Garvey 1998: 372-3).

The second form of prison industry, the PIECP (legally based in the PIE Act and the Percy Amendment of 1979) allows private corporations to enter into "joint ventures" with state prisons for profitable production. Once a state or county achieves PIE certification from the national office, they can negotiate a joint venture contract with any private company. Through PIECP contracts, states provide private-sector companies with incentives (such as free or reduced rent and utilities), and private corporations pay the state a fee in exchange for a quota of prisoners' labor. PIECP labor has generally taken place inside of prisons, supervised by armed prison guards and publicly paid correctional industry personnel. Increasingly, however, states are using PIECP programs to lease teams of

279 prisoners to businesses who are then responsible for their securitization and supervision

during labor processes outside the prison. While the private sector program remains the

smallest in scale in comparison to the publicly run federal and state industries with only

around 20,000 inmate workers since 1980, because the vast majority of inmates who work

in PIECP are incarcerated for life, the program has been more productive than the numbers

might at first suggest. Further, evidence indicates it is quickly expanding: the PIE program

has doubled in size since 1995, and to date, 37 states and 4 counties have obtained PIE

certification, managing over 250 business partnerships with private industry (PIECP 2011).

Among these private partners have been major US corporations and their subsidiaries,

including: IBM, Boeing, Brother, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell,

Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA,

Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and Starbucks (Paeleaz 2008).

In the third case, as neoliberalism has involved a surge in prison privatization,93

private security corporations (such as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and

Wackenhut Securities) have created their own prison industries inside of the 264 private

carceral "facilities" (which include traditional prisons, camps, and "correctional

complexes") that they currently operate in the US. Holding only 8% of the total US inmate

population, private prisons use the majority of their inmates' labor for institutional

91 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to analyze the rise of prison privatization in any detail, it bears noting that the privatization of prisons and prison services is already widespread in the US and UK. As Adrienne Roberts has noted, "the privatization of prisons has increasingly been secured through long-term contracts, often of 25-30 years, which lock-in the ability of capital to accumulate while locking-out democratic decision-making processes regarding the operation of the prison" (2010: 432). Rather than housing any one particular type of prisoners, private prisoners

280 maintenance, allowing them to cut costs and making their prison businesses more profitable. Only 6% percent of private inmates work for prison industry and 12% are engaged in profitable farm work. Inmates working in private prisons' industries work the longest hours and receive the lowest daily wages of all prisoners— from $0.96 to $3.20 per day in comparison to PIECP prisoners who are the highest paid, receiving an hourly rate of

20% of a state's minimum wage (Chang and Thompkins 2002: 56-60).94

Because data for the prison industries run by private prisons is not available in the public domain, the rest of this section will focus on the PIECP and FPI/state prison industries. In order to remain consistent with the previous two chapters on prison labor, I will evaluate the freedom/unfreedom of those persons drawn into neoliberal prison labor across three planes: (1) in the realm of production; (2) in the realm of circulation; and (3) in society at large.

"Producing Productive People ": The Rise ofPost-Fordist Prison Production

In neoliberalism, as in other eras of US history, the explicit purpose of the prison industries is to ensure that inmates "Learn how to work (i.e. develop good work habits)"

(ACA 1986: 22), or, in other words, to ensure that inmates are habituated into the forms of labor discipline required by the kind of work that the correctional industry leaders deem would be most suitable for them upon release. As described by The Correctional Industries

Association's 1996 report Producing Productive People: "Based in part on the observation

94 Of course, in some states, inmates are not paid at all, while non-industry work is even more poorly remunerated. "According to the Criminal Justice Institute's 2000 Corrections Year Book, the daily wage of federal non-industry work was $.12-$.40/day; in state prisons, daily wages ranged from $1.03-$4.38/day; private prison workers made a wage ranging from $.08-$3.20" (Chang and Thompkins 2002: 154).

281 that many offenders have never been successful in securing or holding jobs in the free world,

this goal rests on the belief that obtaining effective employment after incarceration is largely

a function oflearning the habit of working" (my emphasis) (AC A 1986: 22). Indicative of

the kind of working habits that the correctional industries are eager to foster among prisoners, the two primary forms that prison labor has taken in neoliberalism are: (1) public, humiliating, and highly racialized forms of hard labor (e.g. chain gangs, various

forms of farm labor); (2) low-skilled, flexible, and lean forms of production.

While many prisoners are not paid (since, with the exception of the PIECP program,

courts have held that payment to inmate workers is optional), and others are paid very low

amounts for their labor, far from representing a relation that exists somehow outside of capitalist markets, the re-institutionalization of convict labor has been a central component of neoliberal restructuring in the United States, offsetting the costs of carceral expansion, filling gaps in state budgets, and promoting the profitability of competitive sector industry.

In spite of the fact that prisoners' labor is being purchased by free market corporations, there can be no doubt that prison labor today comprises a modality of unfree labor. As we will see in a moment, underpinned by a carceral matrix, the majority of convicts are arrested for committing minor property crimes such as theft, or attempting to secure their reproduction outside of the formal marketplace (through the sale of small amounts of drugs, prostitution, and other means). Due to the prevalence of "three strikes" and mandatory sentencing laws, prisoners confront sentences that are completely disproportionate to the severity of criminalized behaviors committed. Entrance into this

282 system of labor exploitation is highly coerced, and furthermore, labor is generally unremunerated and performed under the threat of violence. Convicts' ability to leave prison labor is curtailed both by their legal sentences and the violence (and constant threat of violence) that is exercised against their bodies. They are unable to withhold labor since to do so means subjecting one's body to additional punishment such as solitary confinement, extra labor time, extension of carceral term, or being constantly transferred from state to state in ways that deliberately sever their links with the outside world.

While conditions vary across the various systems of industry, inmate working conditions are generally deplorable: prison workers are supervised by armed guards, exposed to high amounts of toxic chemicals, and face disproportionate amounts of workplace injuries and illness. They are punished for withholding labor and for labor infractions, and are individually and collectively deprived of the legally guaranteed power to affect production conditions and the conditions under which they exchange their labor for a wage

(Grossman 2005; Guilbaud 2010; Featherstone 2000). Because prison workshops are at the end of subcontracting chains whose components operate in competing sectors and are subject to tight time constraints, "production demands are sudden and irregular" (Guilbaud

2010: 48) and often require hours and rates of production that exceed those in the free market. Worked between 35-65 hours a week, for the remaining hours prisoners are crammed into overcrowded cells, or in some cases, overcrowded canvas tents in the blazing

283 desert, and in some states, prisoners have been kept shackled outside of work hours.95

Reports of cruel and violent punishment of inmates surface extremely frequently, including allegations of sexual assault, beatings, and torture by prison guards, and yet, courts have ruled that prison labor does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment as defined in the

Eighth Amendment (Dougherty 2008).

Examining the first form of labor work that the Correctional Industries Association is eager to impress upon prisoners, neoliberalism has involved a resurgence of public, humiliating, and highly racialized forms of hard labor. In Arizona's prison labor program,

8,000 prisoners live in dilapidated military-surplus tents in the desert, located between a dog pound, a town dump, and a waste treatment camp. Prisoners are shackled individually, and each prisoner's ankles are tied together with an eighteen-inch link chain (Peloso 1997:

1473-4). According to a CNN report, the world's first female chain gang's daily routine— instituted by Arizona in 1996—was as follows: "At 6am, 15 women assemble for chain gang duty. They work padlocked together by the ankle, five to each chain, and marched military style to a van that transported them to their work site. The women had to bury the bodies of indigents who had died in the streets or in the hospital without family and without the money to pay for a proper funeral."96 Arizona's prisoners work seven days a week, are fed only twice a day, and "get no coffee, no cigarettes, no salt, pepper or ketchup, and no organized recreation ... they have to pay $10 every time they need to see a nurse."97 Sheriff

95 Arizona, for example, shackles prisoners both to the hitching post as a form of punishment and to eachother with an "eighteen-inch link chain" (Peloso 1997: 1473). 96 "Sheriff Runs Female Chain Gang." CNN.com, Oct. 29, 2003. 97 "Sheriff Runs Female Chain Gang." CNN.com, Oct. 29, 2003.

284 Joe Arpaio, who oversees the program, recently bragged that he "got meals down to .40 a day per inmate. It costs $1.15 a day to feed the department's dogs. Now, I'm cutting prisoners' calories from 3,000 to 2,500 a day."98 A US Department of Justice investigation of the prison labor program reported numerous unconstitutional conditions, such as officers "strapping inmates in chairs and using electrical stun guns to shock their testicles and other body parts; handcuffing prisoners, then punching and kicking them; and letting seriously injured and sick inmates languish days and weeks before they are seen by doctors"

(Peloso 1997: 1473-4). While some chain gangs pick up trash or perform other menial tasks in the public domain, in Arizona and other states where prisoner work teams are leased to private agricultural companies, these degrading forms of labor are increasingly performed everywhere from hydroponics greenhouse tomato plants to green chili canneries."

Indeed, the prison labor programs introduced by Arizona and fourteen other states since the mid-1990s have involved public and very strategic forms of cruelty.100 Alabama was the first state to reintroduce chain gangs in 1995 as part of an "experiment" in

"reforming" prisoners. As legal scholar Wendy Peloso describes, the Alabama Department of Corrections initially referred to the experimental chain gangs as "Alternative Thinking

Units." Part of the experiment, apparently, lay in subjecting prisoners to the same forms of hard labor and violent punishment characteristic of both plantation slavery and convict

98 Sheriff Runs Female Chain Gang." CNN.com, Oct. 29, 2003. 99 D. Frosch. "Inmates Will Replace Migrants in Colorado Fields." The New York Times, March 4, 2007. 100 Indicative of this, during days of the convict lease system, the term 'chain gang' was "derived from the fact that prisoners had a heavy steel or iron shackle permanently riveted to each ankle, with a heavy chain permanently fixed to connect the shackles. The shackles constantly chafed against the ankles, causing 'shackle poison'" (Peloso 1997: 1465).

285 leasing, which, after global outcry about their systematic exploitation, brutalization and degradation (made famous by Robert Burns' autobiography I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia

Chain Gang (1932)) were finally abolished in the 1950s. As Peloso describes, during the first few years of the program, punishment was sure and swift as prisoners were chained to the 'hitching post' and guards were armed and instructed to use deadly force to prevent escape (1997: 1470).101 This cruelty was clearly geared towards extracting a maximum amount of labor from prisoners' bodies as they buried the bodies of the poor, built and maintained state parks, worked at hard agricultural labor for private companies, and at a myriad of other physically taxing and undesirable jobs. But importantly, some critics have argued that it was also directed towards a larger strategy to foster labor and social discipline among the poor, largely African American populations disenfranchised by neoliberal restructuring after the ghetto crumbled as a device for caste control (Wacquant 2002).

Building on these critiques, legal scholar Tessa Gorman has concluded that the neoliberal revival of chain gangs has been an obvious move to revive a notorious form of racial terrorism. In her words, "Chain gangs are a loaded symbol. They evoke the horror of countless racial indignities, from slave ships to forced labor. Since chain gangs have been used as instruments in such barbaric systems, they now cannot be used as part of a

"legitimate" system seeking to administer justice" (1997: 443). Rather, she argues, they

101 Since this "experimental wave," following prisoners" rights advocates law suits against state governments challenging the use of chain gangs as cruel and unusual punishment, chain gang conditions have improved, in spite of the fact that courts have consistently held that forcing an inmate to perform hard labor is not cruel and unusual punishment under the Eight Amendment. Some states, due to global humanitarian outrage, have even gone back on their reinstatement and re-abolished chain gangs.

286 have been a strategic instrument in securing the racialized forms of labor discipline required by the South's neoliberal economic order.

Nowhere is the use of prison labor to discipline convicts into a subordinate position in society and a white supremacist social order more obvious than in the Southern states

(particularly Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana) which still have "unpaid prisoners laboring in fields supervised by armed guards on horseback, with no pretense of 'rehabilitation' or 'job training.' In those states the labor is mandatory, and refusal to work brings harsh punishment and increases prison sentences served" (Burton-Rose 1998: 105). A notorious example of this form of labor program takes place at Angola Prison Farm—part of the US' largest maximum security prison, Louisiana State Penitentiary—where, in the words of one investigative journalist:

long rows of men, mostly African-American, till the fields under the hot Louisiana sun. The men pick cotton, wheat, soybeans, and corn. They work for pennies, literally. Armed guards, mostly white, ride up and down the rows on horseback, keeping watch. At the end of a long workweek, a bad disciplinary report from a guard- whether true or false- could mean a weekend toiling in the fields. (Shenwar 2008: 1)

This scene is not a glimpse of plantation slavery or the convict lease system abolished at the turn of the twentieth century, but rather, the present-day reality of thousands of prisoners

(80% of whom are African American) who plant and pick the same crops harvested by slaves 150 years ago. Conditions at the prison are notoriously cruel: former Angola prisoner Robert King noted that because extra work can be mandated as a punishment for

"bad behavior": "prisoners worked out in the field, sometimes 17 hours straight, rain or shine" and prisoners not uncommonly worked 65 hours a week after disciplinary reports are

287 filed. A 2010 memoir by Wilbert Rideau, an inmate at Angola from 1961 through 2001

states that "slavery was commonplace in Angola with perhaps a quarter of the population in bondage" while The New York Times reported that weak inmates served as slaves who were

raped, gang-raped, and traded and sold like cattle, and that this slavery was sanctioned and facilitated by prison guards (quoted in Oshinsky 2010). Another former inmate noted, "In the conventional plantations, slaves were given just enough food, clothing, shelter, to be a financial asset to the owner. The same is true for the Louisiana prison system" (quoted in

Shenwar 2008: 1). One of the most perplexing aspects of Angola is that due to some of the harshest sentencing practices in the country, most Angola prisoners are never released—

97% will die in prison, to be buried by other prisoners, in makeshift graveyards on prison grounds. A sentence to Angola, then, is truly a sentence into a lifetime of unfree labor. Still worse, Angola is far from the only prison farm of its kind—while 16% percent of Louisiana prisoners are compelled to perform farm labor, 17% of Texas prisoners, and a full 40% of

Arkansas prisoners work under similar conditions (Shenwar 2008: 1).

Inmates who work in industrial settings face divergent, but equally troubling forms of abuse as they are habituated into the discipline of lean and flexible production. At first glance, many of the facilities bear a striking resemblance to factories outside of prison.

Inmate workers at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in California sew T-shirts for designer clothing companies Mecca, Seattle Cotton Works, Lee Jeans, as well as wine and beer containers "hunched over sewing machines or welding together stainless steel vats" (Leonhardt 2000). The products, as the New York Times describes, "end up attached

288 to trendy clothing labels like No Fear and in upscale pubs" (Leonhardt 2000). Upon closer

inspection, however, there are some crucial differences between prison labor and US factory labor outside of bars. Supervised by armed prison guards, the mobility of prisoners at

Richard J. Donovan is curtailed by five barbed-wire fences, four identification checkpoints, two guard towers and one 50,000-volt electric fence. Labor processes are supervised by guards and prison industry personnel who are ready to quickly (and physically) intervene in the event of labor infractions and administer violent forms of discipline. In one reporter's description, "The assembly lines at CMT Blues look like those at any other US garment factory except for one thing: the workers are watched over by armed guards" (Light 1999).

Indeed, as has been widely documented by a number of critics, neoliberalism has involved the revival of profitable, low-skilled, and highly flexible forms of labor in the prison industries. Microsoft used Washington state prisoners to pack and ship thousands of copies of Windows software, Starbucks uses prisoners to distribute its gourmet coffees.

AT&T uses prisoners to do telemarketing; a car parts plant uses prisoners to manufacture parts for Honda; and Toys R' Us bussed prisoners in on the graveyard shift, to clean the stock shelves in preparation for the next day's customers. Confronted, since the 1980s, with the imperatives of Post-Fordist production—a paradigm based on global competition and

"flexible accumulation," requiring labor flexibility, segmented labor markets, and the just- in-time system of subcontracting—what has been attractive about prison labor for all of these companies is the degree of flexibility and control that prisons afford over workers.

Because prison workshops are usually at the end of subcontracting chains whose

289 components operate in competing sectors and are subject to tight time constraints, prison

administrators expect production demands to be sudden and irregular, and have gone to

great lengths to ensure that companies can secure hours and rates of production in prison

that exceed those in the free market at a fraction of the cost. In labor historian Gordon

Lafer's words:

Prison employers are excused from minimum wage and prevailing wage laws; they pay no health insurance, no unemployment insurance, no payroll or social security taxes, and no workers' compensation; they pay no vacation time, sick leave, or overtime. Prison workers can be "hired," fired, or reassigned at will. Not only do they have no right to organize or strike; they also have no means of filing a grievance or indeed of voicing any kind of complaint whatsoever: for example, they have no right to circulate an employee petition or newsletter, no right to call a meeting, and no access to the press. This is the ultimate flexible and disciplined workforce. (2003: 122)

Like their low-waged, disciplined counterparts in Third World sweatshops and "Free trade

zones," prisoners are subject to a series of punitive regulations that severely limit their

freedom and mobility during the labor process. They are forbidden from making eye

contact with other prisoners, from looking up from their work or attempting any form of verbal or non-verbal communication with other inmates or the guards, going to the

washroom and taking breaks. They are punished—at times violently—for failing to meet production quotas and for any movement that a guard deems to be a labor infraction

(Burton-Rose 1998; Grossman 2005; Guilbaud 2010; Featherstone 2000). The

contradiction here is that because jobs in the prison industries are considered by many

prisoners to be more desirable than facility maintenance jobs outside the industries, many prisoners are more than willing to submit to these punitive forms of discipline.

Importantly, however, that prisoners line up for industry jobs over the other forms of

290 required work does not necessarily prove that their labor is voluntary. Rather, it reveals that once prisoners have been thrust into the market and no longer have the option not to work, they are determined to get the most highly paid of the required assignments. As Herivel and Wright describe, "Like the maquiladora workers, the prisoner [working for private companies] are objectively exploited by subjectively paid quite well" in comparison to the majority of prisoners working towards facility maintenance (2003: 116). And like in maquiladoras, the insecurity and precariousness in cultivated in the prison workshops through these various forms of discipline is enormously profitable to capital.

Further, because prisoners are exempt from "virtually every form of labor protection enacted during the past hundred years" (Herivel and Wright 2003: 122), they are exposed to some of the most dangerous forms of labor and toxic chemicals, usually without the most basic forms of protection. In Franklin County Workhouse, for example, prisoners were paid less than $5.00 an hour to "separate metal with their bare hands from the ash stream at a trash burning power plant run by Shaneway in Columbus, Ohio," exposing them to highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals (Burton-Rose 1998: 112). Inmates in California's

Atwater Federal Penitentiary have been employed by the electronics recycling division of

FPI to "smash computer monitors with hammers, releasing dust that contains lead, cadmium, barium, and other toxic substances under conditions that pose serious hazards to prison staff and inmates" (Grossman 2005). With $10 million of revenue in 2004, seven prison facilities and about 1,000 inmate employees who in 2004 processed nearly 44 million pounds of electronic equipment, FPI is one of the country's largest electronics recyclers

291 (Grossman 2005). In late 2004, FPI's safety manager Leroy Smith filed a complaint with

the Occupational Safety and Health Administration noting that workers were routinely

exposed to dust from heavy metals at serious risk and impact to their bodies and overall

health (Grossman 2005). Because of the lack of protections in place to provide prisoners a

safe workplace, FPI/state industry inmate laborers face disproportionate amounts of work-

related injuries, accidents, and health problems (Dougherty 2008).102

Prison factories have also been widely documented to contain faulty and unsafe

machinery. As one recent study of FPI worksites describes:

On February 2, 1985, John Bibbs, a Missouri State Penitentiary inmate, lost part of two of his fingers when they were caught in the gears of a defective piece of machinery at the prison's license plate manufacturing facility. A year later, Walter Warren, another prisoner in Missouri, broke his wrist after a board "kicked back" on an industrial table saw in the prison's furniture factory. The saw was not equipped with "anti-kickback" safety features. On Feb 29, 1992, Chris Arnold, an inmate in a South Carolina prison, was injured after a twenty-five gallon steam pot tipped over and severely burned him. Prison officials had been repeatedly warned that the machine had been malfunctioning. (Dougherty 2008)

Just as in the 19th century prison contract system, because companies (both private and FPI) do not hire specific employees but rather contract for a certain number of inmates or for piecework, there is little incentive to invest in the machinery and equipment that would prevent injury, illness, or death among convicts. Rather, as states have a contractual obligation to replace any prison laborers who become sick, are injured, or violate work rules, prison workers are put to labor without regard for their welfare. That courts have upheld that state and federal prisoners injured, maimed, or killed by defective working equipment in prison factories are in no way unconstitutional, has only further blurred the line between

102 It is possible that PIECP inmates also face injuries and work-related health issues, however, this data is not readily available.

292 whether it is prisoners' labor power or their entire bodies which are being commodified

(Dougherty 2008: 1). While free workers, at least in theory, can walk away from an

employment site that is abusive or dangerous, prisoners generally can't. Simply refusing to participate in labor is scarcely an option since, as Chang and Thompkins describe,

"Prisoners who refuse to work, fail to meet production quotas, or complain about working

conditions are often denied privileges or benefits (e.g. better housing assignments or

extended visitation), or find themselves in solitary confinement" (2002: 61). Prisoners in

Oregon, for example, like virtually everywhere else in the US, serve longer sentences if they refuse work in the prison industries. Former federal prisoners have reported being compelled to work in FPI factories "by prison officials who coerced their labor under threat of punishment" while other prisoners and their advocates have complained that prison staff use work programs as a punitive device and that refusal to labor results in "threat of physical abuse, physical abuse, and solitary confinement" (Herivel and Wright 2007: 117).

Indicative of the extent to which prisoners' bodies have themselves become commodities is the fact that in many states, their organs can actually be sold off in exchange for sentence reduction. In South Carolina, for example, legislation allowing prisoners to donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for time off their sentences was passed in 2007.

Under the program, the state decides which inmates can donate, and money for medical procedures and any prison guard overtime is to be paid by the organ recipient and charitable group. An inmate's kidney is now worth exactly " 180 days" less in prison (Adcox

2007). It is precisely these kinds of total disregard for prisoners' bodily integrity and

293 autonomy that led Mike Davis to refer to the prison industries in California's Calipatria

State Prison as "hell factories in the field" (1995); a description which, when all of the evidence is considered, appears quite appropriate.

It is important to note, however, that in spite of prisoners' frequent lack of resources and the substantive regulatory barriers to their communication, prisoners have consistently found ways to resist and organize against their cruel and violent working conditions. As recently as December 9, 2010, for instance:

a diverse group of nonviolent protesters across Georgia stood up for their rights, calling for decent wages, better social services, and respect for their civil liberties' by refusing to leave their cells to report to work and other activities. Pointedly invoking the term "slave" to describe the circumstances under which they toiled, the strikers— located in at least six prisons across Georgia— demanded fair pay for their seven days of work a week, which currently goes completely unremunerated. The strike was called off after six days, following reports of violent crackdowns and rising fears the situation would escalate, but remains one of the largest prison protests in US history. (Chen 2010)

As well as being thwarted by violent intervention by guards, throughout the neoliberal wave of prison labor, prisoners' attempts to unionize have also been crushed by prison officials who repeatedly move labor leaders around from one prison to another across the country in order to sever their ties with their families and with their "conspirators" in former prisons, as well as by punishing them and placing them in solitary confinement for disobedience

(Featherstone 2000). One labor leader—Jerome White-Bey, founder of the Missouri

Prisoners Labor Union (MPLU)—organized his fellow inmates to file 1,383 grievances in a single week in January 2000, but then was placed in solitary confinement on suicide watch.

This measure was taken not because he was suicidal, but so that prison administrators could film his every movement. He was transferred to four different prisons in the year 2000,

294 presumably to make it more difficult for him to keep in touch with his network

(Featherstone 2000). Two other inmates, Charles Ervin and Shearwood Flemming, spent

45 days in solitary confinement after attempting to rebel against what they call the

California prison industries' "sweatshop behind bars" by talking to reporters about an alleged label switching scheme in which they were forced to replace "made in Honduras" labels with "made in USA" tags (Light 1999). Because the Supreme Court decided in Jones v. North Carolina Prisoner's Labor Union in 1977 to remove court protection for prison union organizing, labor leaders and have little recourse against punishments of this kind.

In sum, exposed to some of the most dangerous conditions and forms of work and lacking the most basic forms of legal protection, neoliberal prison laborers face severe unfreedom in the realm of production. Subject to armed supervision during labor processes, and punished for failure to work, failure to meet production quotas, or for attempting to protest working conditions, prisoners have little ability to withhold their labor and absolutely no say over their schedule, employer, or remuneration. In addition to being habituated into the most unskilled and poorly paid forms of flexible production, prisoners have been subjected to racial terrorism as states have experimented with

"habituating" them into the forms of labor typical of highly degrading and injurious plantation slavery and the convict lease system.

295 "Slaves of the State": Prison Labor in the Realm of Circulation

In 1871, the Virginia Supreme Court remarked in Ruffin v. Commonwealth that prisoners were "slaves of the state" and confirmed that the state's practices of leasing and contracting out its slaves to private industry was perfectly legal (Wright 1998: 102). While private companies' use of prison labor has occurred on a relatively small scale in neoliberalism in comparison to earlier eras of US history, because it has reappeared in an era in which the US has facilitated the globalization of capitalist social property relations— heralded as a means of achieving global moral and economic progress—and because convict labor has been utilized by major corporations in an era of declining profitability, prison labor cannot be understood as occurring somehow outside of capitalist expansion. Rather, insofar as prison labor has become a direct and indirect economic resource for employers in labor intensive sectors of global competition, the state's eagerness to open prison doors to industry must be understood in the context of state strategies to restore capital accumulation and valorization by providing a more disciplined—in this case, literally captive—work force that has yielded higher levels of productivity while being forced to accept lower wages. This implies that, rather than imagining that prison labor exists somehow outside of capitalist modernity based on the presence of coercion or its legal status as involuntary servitude, there is a need to understand prison labor as a distinct modality of unfree labor that has facilitated the deepening and expansion of capitalist social relations in the neoliberal period.

The neoliberal prison labor system originated and became widespread in the US through complex and sometimes contradictory synergy between capitalist social forces and

296 state level and the federal government. On the one hand, strong demand from employers

during the 1990s for a cheaper labor force in the face of a competitive squeeze on wages fed

into and reinforced states' laws designed to punish and reform the newly incarcerated able-

bodied idle through labor. On the other hand, by leasing and contracting convicts to

private companies rather than using them exclusively to fill gaps in state budgets, states have

made prison labor politically viable by arguing that they are providing "meaningful work

experiences" for prisoners, instilling labor discipline into convicts while simultaneously

legitimating and helping to coercively impose a neoliberal social order characterized by

economic disenfranchisement, and economic and social immobility.

There is relative consensus among scholars that initially, the need to cut surging

carceral costs created the conditions internal to the state that gave rise to the neoliberal

resurgence of prison labor (Wacquant 2002; Parenti 2008; Rice 2006). Putting prisoners

to work allowed states and the federal government to recover some of the costs associated with incarceration by appropriating prisoners' labor power, and in doing so, cutting other

forms of public spending while shedding a large number of public sector employees. As carceral expansion continued, using prisoners to build and run new prisons facilitated the project of mass incarceration at reduced cost to the government. The expansion of FPI in

the 1980s marked the beginning of a state strategy to expand cost-saving beyond the penitentiary and to lower public spending in general by putting prisoners to work making products that the government would have otherwise needed to purchase on the free market

(e.g. office furniture, dormitory furniture, hospital furniture and equipment, textiles,

297 electronics). Central here, in Tanya Herivel and Paul Wright's account, for example, is the role that FPI's 106 prison factories have come to play in producing electronic and textile items for the US military (such as body armor, navigational equipment, radios, etc). In

2002, as the US launched an imperial war in Afghanistan, FPI sold $678.8 million worth of goods to the US government, over $400 million of which went to the Department of

Defense, supplying them with prisoner-made weapons and equipment for a fraction of the free market cost. In their words:

US soldiers are equipped with guns to fire, clothes to wear, vehicles to drive, radios to call, and maps to help them navigate, thanks in large measure to the 21,000 prisoners working for Federal Prison Industries (FPI) ... Were it not for this captive labor force, the military could hardly meet needs ranging from weapons production and apparel manufacture to transportation servicing and communications infrastructure. (2007:110)

Many accounts of the initial rise of neoliberal prison labor also emphasize that in addition to providing revenue, state decision makers also recognized the contribution that prison labor would make to the project of cutting-off non-market forms of social reproduction (welfare, the selling of drugs, etc) which they feared could be seen as more desirable than submission to the increasingly precarious, low-paid, wage labor market

(Parenti 2008; Burton-Rose 1998; Weiss 2001). As workfare replaced welfare, and city ordinances and by-laws enclosed public spaces and criminalized particular "disorderly" activities associated with the rebellious, deviant, and poor, in order to compel dependence on wage labor for survival, authors have claimed, it was politically and ideologically necessary to impose workfare in the prison itself. Indeed, corresponding to the neoliberal individualization of poverty, policies requiring people to work while in prison were

298 consistent with the state's general treatment of poor people as lazy and irresponsible individuals whose condition is enabled through their dependence on the state.

While the state never departed from these original aims, throughout the 1990s, the political infeasibility of putting soaring numbers of prisoners to productive work led to shifts in the form of prison labor. Protest and push-back from organized labor and manufacturers in response to the mass expansion of prison labor through the late 1980s and early 1990s led to a number of congressional hearings on FPI and state prison industries" use of prison labor to produce commodity goods. While little came of the legislation tabled by representatives, or various union initiatives, to limit the scale of FPI (Lafer 2003: 122), the mounting public pressure nevertheless prompted shifts in the government's organization, marketing, and concentrations of prison labor. To diminish concerns that they constitute unfair competition against US industry, for example, FPI now claims to be

"repatriating" production to the US by creating conditions similar to the sweatshops of the

Global South inside of its workshops. In a 2007 report, the FPI board of directors noted:

As part of our strategic plan, FPI's 'commercial services' team is focusing on opportunities outside of the United States. We believe that repatriating products currently made outside of the United States, for sale to commercial customers, is a potential growth opportunity for FPI. Working towards such an authority would provide the FPI program new opportunities for increasing inmate employment without negative impact on American workers. (FPI 2007)

In other words, FPI is seeking to shift manufacturing work currently being performed in the global South back to the US, presumably by offering capitalists benefits (such as low wages) comparable to those available in export processing zones and other areas of exemption from labor regulations that might potentially reduce profitability. In this sense,

299 as class-based, racialized, and gendered patterns of incarceration in the era of neoliberalism are removing the un/underemployed from the labor market (not to mention from unemployment statistics), they are simultaneously serving to reintegrate them into the global labor market under conditions that are even more highly controlled and exploitative than those that presently characterize the highly precarious labor market in industrialized countries.

The late 1990s also saw a shift in the use of prison labor at the sub-national level, as states deflected criticism from business by shifting their prison workers into public sector services in an effort to close budget gaps. As carceral spending accounted for 1 out of every

15 general fund dollars during the late 1990s (The Pew Center 2011: 2), states avoided hiring (and indeed, have likely even fired a high number of) public sector employees by putting prisoners to work in an increasingly diverse range of capacities. Prisoners in

Oregon, for example, are now responsible for all data entry and record keeping in the

Secretary of State's corporation division, along with answering the phones when members of the public call with questions about corporate records. And "across the state, public agencies are now using prisoners for desktop publishing, digital mapping, and computer- aided design work" (Herivel and Wright 2003: 122). California uses wet-suit-clad inmates to repair leaky public water tanks, while in Hunterdon County, , nonprofit organizations and government agencies can view prisoners' work schedules online and reserve them for specific tasks that would have otherwise been completed by public employees or government contractors (Brown and Severson 2011).

300 At the same time, as competitive-sector firms struggled in the face of increasing competition throughout the mid- to late- 1990s, and in the face of relatively low unemployment, municipalities began to open their prison industries to private businesses as an opportunity to "even the playing field" by offering similarly low labor costs, tax incentives, and flexibility to those that firms would find overseas. The PIECP program took off in the mid-1990s as states began marketing their prison workforces as a convenient alternative to off-shoring. Washington Correctional Industries, for example, ran one ad that questioned: Are you experiencing high employee turnover? Worried about the costs of your employee benefits? Getting hit by overseas competition? Having trouble motivating your workforce? Thinking about expansion space? Then the Washington State Department of

Corrections Private Sector Partnerships is for you! (Light 1999). Wisconsin's Department of

Corrections sent out a brochure that similarly tried to sell prison labor to corporate executive across the country: Can't Find Workers? No problem! A willing workforce waits... conveniently incarcerated for you in Wisconsin (quoted in Hightower 2000). The Ohio government has unveiled the Ohio Offshore Industries Project (OSSI)—a marketing campaign offers companies a vast pool of cheap prison labor as an attractive alternative to foreign-based production (Burton-Rose 1998: 109). Oregon State Rep. Kevin Mannix went so far as to publicly solicit Nike (which is based in Beaverton, Oregon) to take a closer look at convict labor as an alternative to outsourcing through subcontractors in Indonesia.

He said, "We propose that Nike take a look at their transportation costs and their labor

301 costs; we could offer competitive prison inmate labor."103 Thus, as global competition intensified and low-wage work proliferated during neoliberalism, in criminologist Robert

Weiss' words, "the same social forces that funneled millions of young men of color into US prisons and jails [then increased] their utility as prison labor for capital accumulation

(2001:255).

A number of companies—over 250 to date—have contracted with states for the labor power of a set number of their prisoners. While the PIE act does require firms to pay

"prevailing wage" to their prisoners (of which 80% can be deducted towards victim restitution and other causes), because prisoners are employed by a DOC-owned company, this is essentially an accounting exercise where the prisoners' real wages are between $1.20 and $1.80 an hour (Burton-Rose 1998: 105). Further, it should come as no surprise that, according to union officials, many private companies have in fact quietly circumvented the requirement that prisoners be paid minimum wage, lowering their labor costs even further

(Garvey 1998: 374). At the Unibase workshop in Lebanon Correctional Institute, one prisoner reported that the base pay was $0.47 an hour, with an "incentive pay rate" linked to such an impossible speed that no one earned more than the base rate (Burton-Rose

1998a: 22). In Ohio, a Honda supplier paid auto workers $2.00 per hour for the same work that the United Auto Workers had fought for decades to win $20.00-30.00 per hour for, while inmates working in Ohio's industrial facilities are paid about $1.00 in total for a six-

103 To clarify, while the goods produced through FPI and state corporations are still limited by the Sumners- Ashurst Act of 1940 which criminalized the interstate transportation and sale of inmate-made goods, the PIECP program allows exemption from the Sumners-Ashurst Act, allowing the sale, interstate commerce, and international export of goods made by prison labor.

302 hour work day. California prisoners making clothes for export are paid between $0.35 and

$1.00 an hour, and in Oregon, private companies can "lease" prisoners for $3.00 per day

(Herivel and Wright 2003: 121). Remuneration in private prisons is reported to be even lower: in the highest paying private prison (owned by CCA in Tennessee), prisoners receive

$0.50 per hour for "highly skilled positions" (Paeleaz 2008). Since the law allows for payment and compensation in state and FPI-run prison industries, but does not mandate it, court cases have continuously upheld the legality of not paying convicts laboring for FPI and the state prison industries at all. Courts have also consistently ruled that prisoners are not covered by minimum wage laws (Cowen 1993).104 Importantly, the racial and gender stratification of labor markets stretches into the prison industries, where racial and gender disparities figure heavily in prison job assignments: while white male prisoners are under- represented in prisons, they tend to receive better and more highly paid work assignments

(Kang 2009: 148). And, calling into question the claim that such programs are intended to provide meaningful job skills, one study has demonstrated that prison industries prefer to hire people serving life terms to avoid the retraining and slow production associated with prisoner/turnover (Herivel and Wright 2003: 116).

As has been widely documented by prisoner activist and advocacy groups, as global competitiveness increased throughout the late 1990s, the PIECP program attracted some

104 Importantly, in Vanskike v. Peters, the Seventh Circuit decided that prison inmates working outside of the prison industries could not demand the minimum wage for their work as janitors, kitchen aides, and garment workers in an Illinois prison. As Noah Zatz describes, "The penal context of their labor rendered it nonmarket work; this nonmarket character rendered the relationship noneconomic; and absent an economic relationship to the prison, inmates could not be employees, bearers of labor rights" (2008. 861).

303 multi-national corporations, notoriously including Microsoft, Starbucks, and Dell, who experimented with prison workforces as a cost-cutting strategy. While many of these large corporations backed away after prison labor arrangements were exposed, some major corporations still use suppliers that employ prisoners. Starbucks has gone so far as to acknowledge its employment of prisoners and to claim that this practice is consistent with their mission statement (Barnett 2002). Federal and state governments have demonstrated a preference for these types of large companies because of the legitimating impact that they have on prison labor (Herivel and Wright 2003). Today, Escod Industries, a Fortune 500 conglomerate based in Columbus, Ohio is the largest PIECP employer with over 400 inmate workers. Because Escod's use of prison labor has been highly documented by the company (who champions its use of prison labor as a form of social responsibility), as well as by the Correctional Industries Association, Escod provides the clearest example of the ways in which prison labor has been used as a flexible production strategy under post-Fordist principles.

Beginning in 1995, through a state contract with South Carolina, "several hundred prisoners at Escod worked to shifts assembling $16 million worth of wire harnesses on electronic cables for export to several Eastern European countries" (Weiss 2001: 275). As added incentive, the state prison provided, free of charge, "quality industrial space tailored to meet the company's production needs [and] capitalization of equipment ... while correctional industries staff handled all work related to personnel and payroll" (Sexton

1995: 7). Pat Timms, Escod's Vice President of Operations, sums up a number of

304 advantageous features that their prison contract system at Evans Correctional Facility presents:

Strategically, Evans is very important to us, and it will probably grow in importance because the prison gives us access to a cost-effective work force that meets our customers' needs. IBM managers like the arrangement because it enables them to meet their domestic content requirements. Northern telecom likes it because it meets its just-in-time delivery schedules. And we like the setup because it helps our regular plant avoid cycles of hiring and laying off extra workers to handle the unpredictable upswings and downturns in demand for this particular product. (Sexton 1995: 7)

The Escod plant manager reports that prisoner-workers are highly motivated, with productivity and quality often superior to free workers (Sexton 1995: 6). Prisoners, further,

"are often better qualified than free labor in the area," observes one rural southern employer and have "higher test scores and more extensive work experiences than many individuals applying for jobs at the company's main plant" (Sexton 1995). Because employee turnover, however, continues to be "a nagging problem," company and correctional management are exploring the possibility of opening a second feeder plant in a new minimum-security prison under construction near one of the company's principal plants. "This new facility," they have noted, "would enable Escod workers at Evans to continue to work for the company after they receive lower custody status and are transferred out of Evans" (Sexton

1995). As Weiss has eloquently noted:

In the realization of this scheme, Escod would be the ultimate exemplar of post-Fordist penology: its reach on the continuum of surveillance and control would extend over the prison walls through postrelease. At its softest pole, the normal incentives of wage relation would be discipline; at the hard end, the wage relation is backed up by ever-present threat of reincarnation, providing the ultimate in worker insecurity and contingency. (2001: 277)

As states have become increasingly willing to assume the of companies' prison ventures (Escod's was ameliorated through a $250,000 equipment subsidy from the

305 state), increasing numbers of firms have come regard prison labor as a modality that is in many senses superior to waged labor. David Lewis, vice president and general manager of

Joint Venture Electronics in California state prisons, for example, described the advantages of "leasing" prison labor in comparison to hiring free workers: "They get no holiday pay.

They get no vacation pay. There's no medical, dental: all that's paid for by the state...

What's more, if the company has to downsize, as it did recently, laid-off prison workers have few other places to look for work. When business picks up again, employees who on the outside would have found other jobs, are still in prison just waiting to be rehired" (as quoted in Schwatzapfel 2009). In short, while moving production into prison is not without its challenges (including public relations disasters, delays for prisoner strip searches and counts), in the context of global competition and the rise of the post-Fordist production regime, and lured by heavy subsidies from the state, businesses have found the discipline and flexibility of prison labor to be enough of an incentive to be willing to overcome the associated pitfalls.

Viewed in this light, there is an important parallel between the South's late nineteenth-century participation in the growing "international market economy" through convict leasing—which helped spark the first phase of America's globalization—and the use of convict labor in today's efforts to compete in the global economy. Reflecting on this parallel, Weiss argued:

During very tight labor markets, the threat of imprisonment serves as an important labor market ancillary. Together with welfare reform turned "workfare"...they form pinchers on the able-bodied idle. There is no real labor "shortage" today, any more than there was after the Civil War. With the competitive squeeze on wages, employers simply do not offer

306 enough to attract all of the jobless. There is a substantial resistance to low-wage work, an unwillingness of many to accept employment at low wages. (2001: 273)

Companies have been able to avoid raising wages, however, and therefore to continue to compete, through the use of convict labor. Far from being held hostage by an all powerful capitalist class desperate to exploit convicts (as many portraits of contemporary prison labor suggest), the American state has proactively facilitated the expansion of unfree labor into the supply chains of mainstream companies in order to subject "idle" prisoners to productive work, with, as we will see, the added bonus of increasing insecurity among the lower stratums of the free labor market.

Finally, it is important to note that since following the 2008 , and in the face of declining federal contributions to state budgets, there has been a renewed effort by states to use prison labor to close growing budget gaps. As The New York Times Reports,

"officials are expanding the practice [of prison labor] to combat cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue, using prisoners to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites, and perform other services before the recession by private contractors or government employees" (Brown and Severson 2011). At the grossest financial level, remarked Michael Jacobson, director of the Vera Institute of Justice, "it's just savings. You can cut the government worker, save the salary, and still maintain the service" (quoted in

Brown and Severson 2011). While there has yet to be a study on the scale of the expansion in the states' use of prison labor since 2008, all of the evidence suggests that it has been significant and is poised to continue to expand in the context of the "global slump" and states' ongoing fiscal crisis.

307 Carceral Power, Labor Discipline, and The Continuities of Actually Existing Unfreedom

The neoliberal prison labor regime did not develop in isolation of broader social,

economic, and political transformations, but rather emerged as part of these

transformations, and rather than being anomalous, is an extreme in a range of modalities of labor unfreedom that have proliferated in the neoliberal US. As an expansive body of research demonstrates, neoliberalism has been characterized by a sustained and significant rise in the rate of exploitation and a persistent decline in real wages, as well as the rise of precarious forms of work (e.g. temporary foreign migrant work, temp agency work) among which women are heavily concentrated (Vosko 2010; Peck 2000). In the context of these shifts, and in the face of the unwillingness or inability of large segments of the laboring population to submit to these highly precarious forms of wage labor, the revitalization of prison labor has been part of a broader strategy to aggressively impose the forms of labor and social discipline required by neoliberal order. It has been used both directly (to break strikes, replace free workers, and drive down the wages and leverage of working populations), and indirectly (as it has forcefully habituated the bodies of the deviant poor into the most flexible and low-skilled forms of free market labor) as part of a continuum of neoliberal strategies to undermine the collective power of working populations in ways that compel them to depend on an increasingly precarious labor market for their survival rather than non-market forms of social provisioning. Prison labor then, has both acted as a coercive ancillary to increasingly volatile labor markets in neoliberalism, and has worked to anchor accelerated labor exploitation and discipline in the free market.

In the first case, just as prison labor has historically been central to the social

308 relations through which more deeply unfree forms of capitalist life and labor have come

into being, alongside crucial shifts in the neoliberal relations of production and social

reproduction, the revitalization of prison labor has acted as a coercive ancillary to the lower end of the labor market. As social and economic policies have been redesigned to facilitate dependence on the increasingly precarious wage labor market for survival rather than non- market forms of social reproduction, laws and penal policies have also been redesigned to criminalize a series of "disorderly" behaviors (e.g. panhandling, sleeping on park benches, loitering), as well as to subject to greater penalty behaviors associated with securing a livelihood outside of the marketplace (especially the sale of illegal drugs) (Gordon 2006).

Far from being race or gender neutral laws, as the state has sought to "mould, classify, and control the population deemed deviant, dependent, and dangerous living on its territory"

(Wacquant 2009: 16), these laws have targeted and have been differentially enforced in relation to poor racialized and gendered populations, and particularly the able-bodied youth among them. Of all race and gender groups, for example, African American women are the most likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses (23%) and in New York state, Black and

Latino women comprise 91% of the women sentenced to prison for drug possession or sales even though they are only 23% of the population (Smith 2008: 2). Similarly, there are currently more young men (age 20-34) without a high school diploma behind bars than are employed (The Pew Center 2011: 4) and African Americans comprise nearly two-thirds of the male prison population, yet they make up just 13% of the US male population (Smith

2008: 2). Considering inmates' employment history (the majority of US inmates were

309 unemployed immediately prior to their incarceration, and most of those who were employed belonged to the most insecure and poorly paid strata of the laboring population

(Smith 2008: 3)), it becomes clear that the neoliberal penal regime has specifically targeted the able-bodied poor persons who have refused to or have been unable to (by virtue of not finding a buyer for their labor power) submit to the discipline of neoliberal waged labor.

Due to the prevalence of "three strikes" and mandatory sentencing laws, prisoners often confront sentences that are completely disproportionate to the severity of criminalized behaviors committed (Sassen 2002). Further, as prisons have been increasingly run as profitable enterprises, there have been numerous cases of corruption in sentencing where judges have essentially been paid to sentence undeserving people to private prison, such as was the case in Pennsylvania's 2009 dramatic "jailing kids for cash" scandal.105

Entrance into the prison system, then, has been coerced along racialized, gendered, and class-based lines as the state's carceral apparatus has raked in the "millions of prime working-age blacks, Latinos, and poor whites who have been unable or unwilling to adjust to the New Economy shift in the structure of the US labor market" (Weiss 2001: 264).

Subjecting this segment of the population to prison labor has sent a strong message that attempting to secure one's livelihood outside of the increasingly precarious labor market will result in an even more punitive and coercive forms of waged labor. Further institutionalizing the compulsion to work, many states' probation and parole regulations stipulate that former prisoners without steady employment can be re-incarcerated. Just as

105 In this kickback scandal, two elected judges essentially jailed kids for cash—totaling over $2.6 million over five years— affecting more than 5,000 juveniles. See Chen (2009).

310 the convict lease system violently entrenched a social order based on white supremacy into the post-emancipation money economy, and the industrial prison contract system disciplined human bodies into the forms of factory labor that were fundamental for the new industrial capitalist system, alongside crucial shifts in the organization of labor during neoliberalism and the closing off of alternatives to wage labor, the state has again opened its prisons to industry as part of a strategy to coercively impose the forms of labor discipline necessary to the neoliberal order.

Significantly, while prison labor has been justified as a mechanism to increase the market value of inmates' labor power, evidence indicates that incarceration has actually worked to reintegrate this segment of the population back into the labor market on even more highly unfree and unequal terms. Former prisoners are among those who face some of the harshest discrimination in the labor market, receiving lower wages on average than others with similar backgrounds, (Western and Beckett 1999; Western 2006). A 2011 Pew

Center report found that "former inmates work fewer weeks each year, earn less money, and have limited upward mobility. These costs are borne by offenders' families and communities and they reverberate across generations" (2011: 3). By age 48, the study found, the typical inmate will have earned $179,000 less than if they had never been incarcerated (2011: 4). In addition, a number of policies restrict those convicted of certain offenses—including, in many instances, drug felonies under the three-strikes law (which require courts to impose mandatory sentences on individuals convicted of three serious offenses)—from accessing education grants, student loans, welfare benefits, food stamps,

311 veteran benefits, Medicaid, and public housing (Wacquant 2001: 119-20; Bohrman and

Murakawa 2005: 119-21). Debts incurred in prison have also become increasingly common, with some incarcerated parents leaving prison owning more than $20,000, mostly in child support areas (McLean and Thompson 2007: 2). Thus, in addition to forcefully subjecting the poor to the disciplines of unskilled labor, mass incarceration in neoliberalism has also worked to exacerbate and reproduce inequality and social and economic immobility in the free market.

In the second, and highly related case, the neoliberal resurgence of prison labor has worked to anchor accelerated labor exploitation and discipline in the free market as a whole. As part of the range of tactics through which capital has "pushed down real wages, shed labor, broke shop floor organization of workers, introduced computerized production systems, and other new technologies, and sped up and intensified the work process"

(McNally 2011: 48), prison labor has been used both to replace free workers and to break strikes. Among the numerous examples here, in the first case, in 1993, Lockhart

Technologies closed the Austin, Texas plant where it paid about 130 workers $10 an hour to assemble circuit boards and moved the whole manufacturing operation to the prison about 30 miles away (Herivel and Wright 2003: 117). In another example, a struggling

South Carolina Recycling plant fired workers hired off welfare to sort trash for $5.25 an hour and replaced them with unpaid convict labor, who now work at the plant eight hours a day, five days a week (Cook 1999). On the Columbia River Gorge, up to 100 construction workers locked out when the Umatilla prison used prisoners to expand its

312 facility, taking away work that had previously been performed by unionized trades people

(Lafer 2003: 122-3). While 130 workers here and 100 workers there might not seem like enough to have a sustained impact on the economy, a conservative economists' estimate is that every 100 prison laborers crowds out 20 unskilled private jobs nationally, while other scholars have argued the real ratio is likely much closer to 1:1 (Lafer 2003: 122). With over

1 million inmates working in the prison industries, and many more providing state services that would have formerly been provided by free workers, however you calculate it, thousands of public and private sector employees have been taken over by prisoners (Lafer

2003: 122).

At times, prison labor has also been used directly as a strike breaking workforce, directly undermining free market workers' leverage against their employers, and according to many experts, ultimately contributing to downward pressure on real wages. Trans World

Airlines' prisoner-run reservations system, for example, was set up during a flight attendant strike and according to the union involved, the prisoner program was a significant part of the company's strategy to undermine the strike (Lafer 2003: 121). In other cases, prisoners have allowed employers to avoid unions even in well-organized industries, such as when

"the owners of an Arizona slaughterhouse shut down their unionized operation only to reopen in a joint venture with the state's Department of Corrections" (Lafer 2003: 121). In addition to raising corporate profit margins—Boeing's 1995 profits rose 66% to $856 million during the years that they replaced 12,000 workers with highly productive prison labor (Herivel and Wright 2007: 118)—the strategic use of prison labor has also anchored

313 some of the most highly precarious forms of labor in neoliberal capitalism. A good example here is that, as the insecurity of migrant workers has been exacerbated by some state's increasingly punitive penal and immigration laws (designed to curtail migrant workers' ability to exert rights), state departments of corrections have begun to lease state prisoners to farmers as a substitute for the customary agricultural workforce of undocumented migrant workers from the global South. Colorado, for example, has recently begun leasing supervised teams of low-risk state inmates to farmers to harvest crops in exchange for a fee.

Inmates are paid $0.60 a day, a fraction of the already meager day rate afforded to migrant workers (Frosch 2007). As undocumented workers have been scapegoated for the country's high unemployment rate, putting prisoners to work has exacerbated the insecurity of migrants, and has become, in the eyes of many conservative decision-makers, a doubly exciting strategy to get rid of "foreigners" while finding yet another way to punish and exploit those in prison. In Representative Dana Rohrabacher's words, "Let the prisoners pick the fruits. We can do it without bringing in millions of foreigners" (quoted in Hulse and Swarns 2006). As prison labor has become an increasingly mobile workforce in neoliberalism, vis-a-vis the immobility of migrant workers and other workforces, it has instantiated employers' demands for higher productivity in exchange for lower amounts of wages, anchoring greater immobility and unfreedom among the most vulnerable and insecure strata of free workers. Like the expansion of other forms of unfree labor, the neoliberal growth of prison labor has thus comprised a form of labor discipline insofar as it has curbed the mobility and overall leverage of working populations.

314 As we have seen, the strategic use of prison labor to undermine free workers has

been facilitated through state initiatives to market prison labor to businesses. When taken

as a whole, it is clear that the expansion of prison labor has been one of many state strategies

geared towards enabling capitalists to overcome the barriers to capital valorization by

providing a more disciplined work force that has yielded higher levels of productivity while

accepting lower wages. Just as prison labor has historically been central to the social

relations through which more deeply unfree forms of capitalist life and labor have come

into being, in neoliberalism, it has been used to anchor exacerbated forms of insecurity and

substantive shifts in the form and organization of labor, publicly and violently closing off

alternatives to wage labor and instantiating the market as the sole means of securing the

means of life.

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that since the onset of neoliberal policies in the late 1970s,

in response to circumstances through which the overaccumulation of capital and declining profits induced a great seizing up of the capitalist economy, neoliberalism has been

characterized by an intensification and deepening of market discipline backed by a

bolstering of coercion in and through the state. This extension of carceral power to foster

social and labor discipline has been geared towards permitting capitalists to overcome the

barriers to capital valorization and accumulation by providing a more disciplined work

force that has yielded higher levels of productivity while accepting lower wages. The

expansion of prison labor programs has been integral to this end both because it has

315 comprised as a disciplinary component of this stratagem, and also since it has been crucial to the financing of it.

In the first case, as neoliberalism intensified the forms of market discipline that deprive people of access to the means of life except through money and markets, the re- institutionalization of forced prison labor has sent a strong message that attempting to secure one's livelihood outside of the increasingly precarious labor market will result in an even more punitive and coercive forms of waged labor. Prison labor has been used both directly (to break strikes, replace free workers, and drive down the wages and leverage of working populations), and indirectly (as it has forcefully habituated the bodies of the deviant poor into the most flexible and low-skilled forms of free market labor) as part of a continuum of neoliberal strategies to undermine the collective power of working populations in ways that compel them to depend on an increasingly precarious labor market for their survival rather than non-market forms of social provisioning. And far from being simply directed towards profits, the violence and brutality characterizing the most recent wave of prison labor has been a targeted attempt to re-instill fear and social discipline into poor and racialized segments of the population who, with little to gain from market participation, have been the most likely to rebel. Prison labor is best understood, then, as part of a continuum of carceral institutions and relations (from the sweatshop to the penitentiary to the lock-down school) designed to impose market discipline by force onto working populations. It also needs to be understood as an institution that has figured centrally in the exacerbated political, economic, and social disenfranchisement of poor,

316 racialized, and gendered communities, insofar as prisons have helped to (re)integrate people into unequal and unfree capitalist relations of production and social reproduction that are themselves hierarchical, coercive, and filled with gendered and other meanings. Just as prisons have become increasingly vital to the functioning and reproduction of capitalism in the US as they instantiate and secure the marketplace in ways that reproduce and intensify class-based, gendered, racialized and other inequalities and insecurities, so too has prison labor.

In the second case, as neoliberalism's logic of fiscal austerity has involved an ideological commitment to prison self-sufficiency and excess production for profit in ways that are reminiscent of the nineteenth century, prison labor has been revitalized as a strategy to cut the costs of incarceration through the appropriation of inmates' labor power. In the context of fiscal crisis, after legislation limiting the scale of the prison industries was overturned in 1979 as part of ruling elites' offensive against unions and working populations around the world, the state reinvigorated its corporate entity, the Federal

Prison Industries (FPI) and put prisoners to work making products that the government would have otherwise needed to purchase on the free market (e.g. office furniture, military uniforms and equipment, textiles, electronics). In a similar vein, prisoners have come to provide a number of municipal services—ranging from data entry and digital mapping to street cleaning to underwater welding—as states have cut costs by shedding public sector employees. Once the contradiction of competing with capital became clear, and as prison labor's political viability was called into questions, states opened their prisons to private

317 industry, and an extensive list of companies have also cut costs and restored profitability by exploiting state-subsidized, lean, flexible, prison work teams.

Rather than occurring in isolation from one another, the dual purposes of prison labor are overlapping and deeply interrelated. As I have attempted to show, rather than affecting abstracted individuals, prisons and the war against the poor have disproportionately affected and attempt to manage particular groups: poor, racialized, and gendered individuals whose daily lives are increasingly organized by both the carcerality of market relations as well as the carceral power of the state. That is to say, as states and market forces have created a carceral matrix that contains and manages the tensions and contradictions of neoliberalism, it is increasingly the same individuals who are drawn into prisons as well as the precarious wage labor market, and who are also affected by prison labor (either directly or through its disciplinary effects on the wage labor market).

While the degree of violence and coercion against prisoners' bodies appears to be less severe in neoliberalism than earlier modalities of prison labor, and the scale of prison labor has certainly decreased (limited by its lack of political viability, not by humanitarian concerns), neoliberal prison labor must be placed within the historic continuum of state strategies to coercively impose neoliberal order. A historically distinct modality of unfree labor, neoliberal prison labor has mirrored the nineteenth century's coordinated attempts to use the criminal justice system to instill labor and social discipline among marginalized populations. While the neoliberal prison workforce is relatively small, the role that it has played in the promotion of capitalist accumulation and valorization through efforts to

318 produce a more disciplined, flexible, productive, and poorly paid workforce cannot be underemphasized. And importantly, departing from the geographically distinct modalities of prison labor during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, with the advent of neoliberalism, the chain gang, prison factory, prison farm, and convict leasing have overlapped and bled into one another, fusing elements of the variant brutal and coercive forms of exploitation, labor discipline, and racialized terrorism that historically characterized prison labor. Neoliberal prison labor has thus integrated some of the most appalling features of two of the most unfree modalities of labor characterizing US history directly into the relations of contemporary US capitalism.

319 Conclusion

The resurgence of unfree labor in neoliberalism has not been an anomalous phenomenon

but rather has been rooted in fundamental shifts in power, production and social

reproduction that have tilted the entire labor spectrum towards greater unfreedom.

Neoliberalism's sharp intensification of the market regulation of social life has meant, on

the one hand, an intensification of market discipline as avenues to avoid the worst forms of wage labor have been systematically and forcefully closed off through punitive shifts in

social, economic, and penal policies and relations. On the other hand, it has meant a systemic rise in a variety of forms of unfree labor, which have become an increasingly prominent feature of global capitalism. As the US and other states have restructured in ways that privilege capital and the wealthy at the expense of the majority of the population—exploding the of the top one percent of the population (Treanor

2011) while aggressively thrusting millions around the globe into poverty, hunger, and insecurity—people's dependence on market relations and money have been reinforced by the radical reduction of alternatives to them. At its extreme, the heightened commodification of life and labor, exacerbated by the contradictory mobility of capital and immobility of poor human beings, has meant that human beings have been sold—or, in a desperate effort to survive, have sold themselves—as commodities, rather than alienated and sold their commodified labor power. The growth of unfree labor has clearly been driven by the desperate pursuit of money and markets which have become the sole means of securing the necessities of survival.

320 It follows that commonly advanced explanations for the rise of unfree labor are

seriously limited in their insights. To suggest that it has merely been underpinned by population growth, for instance, or by human beings' natural propensity for corruption and

immoral behavior, is to miss the deeper dynamics at play, including the central constitutive role that states have played in intensifying inequality and insecurity in global capitalism

today. As we have seen, moreover, unfree labor does not occur only on an individuated level, but rather has proliferated systematically during neoliberalism, and unfree labor regimes have even been strategically institutionalized by the US and other states as they have attempted to buttress social and market discipline.

But to draw out some of these key dynamics of unfree labor as we have done—its role, at moments of incredible ferment in the conditions of life and remuneration of labor—is really, in one important respect, to situate unfree labor properly within the broad historical role that it has played in anchoring, expanding, and reproducing capitalist development. This is worth emphasizing since there is so much mythology—perpetuated by both Marxists and liberals—on the supposed tendency of capitalism to exclusively foster free waged labor when, as our nuanced investigation of the social relations through which capitalism has been sustained and reproduced has revealed, a number of modalities of labor exploitation have figured centrally in the development of capitalism. For instance, as we have seen, while many imagine that the 1865 passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the

US Constitution provided a dramatic, clear cut, historical rupture that suddenly and universally ended slavery, in historical reality, the slow erosion of plantation slavery was not

321 characterized by the rise of universal freedom and mobility. Rather, even after the formal abolition of slavery, various modalities of unfree labor were retained and re-enforced through racialized violence and legal mechanisms to limit the physical and social mobility of various segments of the population. Furthermore, new modalities of unfree labor proliferated in the wake of those that had become illegal since rather than banning all forms of slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment institutionalized and expanded certain modalities of unfree labor, such as the convict lease and industrial contract systems. Far from being incidental to the form that capitalist social relations have taken in historically distinct eras, the presence and strategic expansion of unfree labor has been crucial to fostering the kind of orderly and disciplined classes of workers—ready to enter the market to sell their labor power for a wage—that are completely fundamental to capitalism.

This dissertation's case study of prison labor has provided us with a consistent and socially rich lens to investigate the ways in which unfree labor has shaped and underpinned the specific forms that free labor has taken in historically specific moments. As we saw in

Chapter Three, the convict lease system was used to "amass the cheap, docile, negro labor force" that made capitalist development possible in the US South, comprising a central component of the region's modernization. At the same time, anchored in, and in turn reproducing, a racialized demarcation between free and unfree labor, the convict lease system was key in the formation of a racially bifurcated free working class, denying wage- earning status to former slaves and anchoring the racialized and gendered forms of unfree labor that were fundamental to the region's industrialization. Similarly, as we saw in

322 Chapter Four, through the prison industrial contract system, as "the whip made men living

machines", the system fulfilled Northern capitalists' need for a cheap, disciplined labor

force in the context of the labor scarcities and rebellions that characterized the early stages of industrialization. At the same time, as prison factories became "penal-social laboratories" where capitalist managers experimented with various violent forms of labor discipline and divisions of labor, the prison contract system was central in coercing the submission of the most marginalized segments of the Northern working class (particularly women and immigrants) into highly disciplined forms of factory work. This, in turn, facilitated the rise of a permanent, reliable, and relatively immobile wage-laboring class in the industrialized

North. Finally, as we saw in Chapter Five, through the neoliberal system of prison labor, capitalists have been able to secure "the ultimate disciplined and flexible workforce" required by the post-Fordist paradigm, allowing capital to remain competitive in the context of heightened global competition. At the same time, habituating the lowest sectors of the laboring populations into the disciplines of flexible production, the re- institutionalization of racialized forms of forced prison labor has reinforced the increasingly precarious labor market as the only pathway to securing the necessities of life for various sectors of the population. Anchoring accelerated labor exploitation and discipline, and acting as a coercive ancillary to the increasingly precarious labor market, prison labor has once again been used as a state strategy to coercively impose the forms of labor discipline necessary to a historically specific form of capitalist order.

323 As we have seen, facilitating the rise and expansion of unfree labor at each historical moment has been the redesigning of social, economic, and carceral policies in ways that have penalized and criminalized marginalized sectors of the laboring population. These policies have then coincided with, and at times underpinned, the intensification of forms of market discipline that have deprived people of access to the means of life except through money and markets. Importantly, then, in addition to providing insights into the rise of unfree labor, this study of prison labor has also provided a unique lens into the interplay between the carceral dimensions of market discipline and the state's heightened exertion of carceral power. As we have seen in each of the historical moments brought into focus in this study, as people have been forcefully integrated into capitalist relations of production and reproduction on unequal, insecure, and in many senses unfree terms (through various forms of coercion and dispossession), the state's use of the law, the criminal justice system, and other forms of carceral power directed at instantiating capitalist order have curtailed their mobility and freedom within these relations. Two important insights emerge in relation to this dynamic. In the first instance, in contrast to liberal narratives that describe the transition to and expansions of capitalism as a spontaneous and relatively peaceful process, the study of prison labor has revealed that these historic shifts have been intricately tied up with relations of force and social struggle. Just as Marx noted, in his time, that rather than occurring naturally, capital is predicated on relations of violence and brutality

(1990: 874), in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, too, the reproduction and extension of capitalism has continued to involve relations of violence, coercion, and

324 constraint. This study thus confirms and adds a new lens to the insight that

"notwithstanding the force of economic coercion imposed by market dependence,

capitalism has always required an intricate web of social, political, and legal coercion

organized in and through the state" (McNally 2011: 116) by centralizing the key the ways

in which the violent disciplining of people's bodies have crucially upheld, underpinned, and

facilitated capitalist social relations in various moments of US history.

In the second, and deeply related, instance, taken as a whole, we have seen that

market confinement and the carceral power and policies of states have operated to lock

people's current and future life choices and possibilities into unfree and unequal capitalist

social relations, as well as to limit their social and physical mobility within these relations.

This highlights, contra liberal assertions that capitalism has promoted universal social and

economic mobility, that people's integration into capitalist social relations has often

occurred on unequal and unfree terms, and that their movement within the market has

been curtailed by state policies and forms of power that have increased the mobility and

freedom of capital and capitalists while seeking to limit the mobility and freedom of the

majority of the populations. Today, just as during the nineteenth century, as capitalism

increasingly involves both the penalization of poverty as well as the long-term confinement within it, the carceral relations of the capitalist market are thrown into sharp relief.

While this study has used prison labor as a lens into the constituent role that unfree labor has played in capitalist development, it has also attempted to stress that it is a very unique modality of labor exploitation, differentiated by the special role it has played in

325 disciplining and coercing human bodies into capitalist ways of life and labor since the originary moments of the capitalist mode of production. In Chapter Four, when we paused to consider what has underpinned, and what is at stake in, the use of labor as a form of punishment, it became clear that the rise of the modern penitentiary signaled the advent of a mode of discipline "designed to reform and correct offenders, not merely to inflict punishment on them" (McNally 1993: 40). Unlike corporal punishments, labor works on the body over time, habituating human beings into the cadence, rhythm, and norms of specific forms of capitalist labor relations, inscribing their faculties and limbs with social practices and meanings. Just as the London Bridewell was created to "drain the filthy puddle of idleness through the discipline of hard labor," US prison labor regimes have worked to slowly, over time, transform the body and its nature in ways that instill into it the discipline of capitalist forms of labor, and in so doing, deepen and extend the social practices upon which capitalist markets depend.

The ways in which capitalist forms of governance foster and depend on the transformation and control of laboring bodies is a subject that has been largely abandoned within political economy. While, in Capital Volume 1, Marx was eager to draw our attention to the ways in which power inscribes human bodies and permeates everyday relations, with the exception of feminist historical materialist accounts, the body has all but disappeared from attempts to explain contemporary relations of power, production, and social reproduction. This is true even in Foucauldian streams of thought, which have tended to emphasize, in relation to contemporary punishment, for instance, the ways that

326 this is focused on the mind and soul, building on Foucault's observation in Discipline and

Punish that "the expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations" (1977:

16). However, whereas Foucault himself recognized that the body continued to define punishment in the early penitentiary (only it was not the body in pain, but the body at work) laboring bodies seem conspicuously absent from contemporary Foucauldian accounts of capitalist governance. Deciphering the ways in which prison labor has been made manifest through the coercion and disciplining of human bodies, this dissertation has sought to recentralize the body and the ways in which its practices extend beyond individual experience. Tracing continuities in the unfreedom and violence that characterizes capitalist forms of labor, and documenting a clear intensification of those forms during neoliberalism, the study has hinted at fact that today, as has been true throughout the longue duree of capitalism, attempts to transform and control the laboring body remain at the heart of capitalist relations of governance and power. This insight needs to be built upon and complicated in future political economy work if we are to achieve a genuinely dialectic conception of neoliberal social relations of power, production, and social reproduction.

Taken as a whole, these insights have serious implications for the ways that labor and unfreedom should be studied in capitalist society, as well as the measures that will be required to overcome unfree labor. In the first case, this study has broken from the formal abstractionism generally employed in Marxist studies of unfree labor, as well as the lack of

327 historicism typical of liberal studies of unfree labor. Building on feminist historical materialist methods that conceive of the material foundation of social life as the productive and reproductive activities of daily life, and emphasizing the ways that the conditions and organization of these activities are transformed by social struggle, the approach taken here has sought to understand the various configurations of labor and unfreedom characterizing capitalist development in relation to the actual embodied labor in the real world. As such, it has sought to accommodate, and begin to account for, the complexity of the social relations and practices through which capitalism has been reproduced, contested, and changed over time. As we saw in Chapter One, where these elements of the picture have been obscured—in the Marxists' formal and economistic quest for a once-and-for-all applicable definition of unfree labor, or in the liberal paradigm's examination of unfree labor as an anomalous phenomenon divorced from the totality of social relations in a given mode of production—it has seriously limited the depth of understanding regarding the actual historical and contemporary reality of unfree labor.

As we have seen, the serious limitations of liberal and many Marxist evaluations of unfree labor have meant that the strategies these paradigms have advocated to eliminate it have been severely limited in their insights. While among Marxists, the first issue is that they have not paid enough attention to unfree labor today to bother delineating a specific strategies to eradicate it, the second issue is that because they have failed to fully understand the ways that racialization, gender orders, and unfreedom have been historically intertwined in specific contexts and relations of power, their insights about eliminating labor

328 unfreedom in general have been seriously limited. The flaws of liberal strategies are even deeper, and in one sense are more urgent, given the profound influence that they have on state policies and international organizations and the massive human and financial resources and efforts that are currently being channeled into a "modern-day abolitionist" movement. In essence, the difficulty is that the optimistic assumption that unfree labor can be eliminated within the coming decades without any major economic, political, or social transformation reveals a profound failure to understand the ways in which the "free market" has been built on the unfreedom of, and continuously gives rise to unfreedom for, millions of the world's poor. Liberating people from "modern-day slavery" will ultimately fall short if the market compulsions that have systematically given rise to unfree labor, and labor unfreedom in general, are not eliminated.

In this sense, while current efforts to pass international treaties designed to curtail human trafficking, for instance, are urgent and welcome, the issues involved in eliminating unfree labor go to the core of capitalist social relations. Modest reform of labor regulations and trafficking laws are one place to start, but it is necessary to contemplate more seriously the social organization of the society in which we live, which necessitates the aggressive reordering of peoples' lives as elites consistently struggle to impose unequal, exploitative, and indeed racist and sexist forms of labor exploitation and organization onto them. Only by considering the implication of the depth of unfreedom inherently contained in the commodification of labor itself, and focusing our critical attention on the social relations at

329 the heart of this form of commodification, can we begin to develop a meaningful challenge that extends beyond necessary but insufficient reforms.

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