The 1970s saw incarcerated laborers engage in an unprecedented battle to secure recognition, rights, and protections. This article traces the rise of the Prisoners Union, the largest and most prominent organization of its sort, as it endeavored to elevate the standing of captive labor. Through qualitative analysis of archival materials, this work unpacks penal laborers’ classification struggles aimed at advancing status in the penal field and rejoining the ranks of the working class. Investigating this movement's successes and failures enhances empirical knowledge of prison organizing as well as theoretical understandings of classification struggles, and helps contextualize historic penological developments.
BergerD. (2014). Captive nation: Black prison organizing in the civil rights era. University of North Carolina Press.
3.
BergerD.LosierT. (2017). Rethinking the American prison movement. Routledge.
4.
BourdieuP. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
5.
BourdieuP. (1987). What makes a social class? On the theoretical and practical existence of groups. Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 32, 1–17.
6.
BourdieuP. (1993). The field of cultural production. Columbia University Press.
7.
CampbellM. C.SchoenfeldH. (2013). The transformation of America’s penal order: A historicized political sociology of punishment. American Journal of Sociology, 118(5), 1375–1423. https://doi.org/10.1086/669506
8.
CumminsE. (1994). The rise and fall of California’s radical prison movement. Stanford University Press.
9.
Del RossoJ. (2018). Researching the U.S. politics of torture using qualitative content analysis. In SAGE research methods cases in sociology. Sage Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526436795
10.
DowieM. (1973). Unionizing prison labor. Social Policy, 4(1), 56–60.
11.
Gibson-LightM. (2017). Classification struggles in semi-formal and precarious work: Lessons from inmate labor and cultural production. Research in the Sociology of Work, 31, 61–89. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0277-283320170000031002
12.
GottschalkM. (2006). The prison and the gallows: The politics of mass incarceration in America. Cambridge University Press.
13.
HattonE. (ed) (2021). Labor and punishment: Work in and out of prison. University of California Press.
14.
HodsonR. (2001). Dignity at work. Cambridge University Press.
IrwinJ. (1980). Prisons in turmoil. Little, Brown and Company.
17.
ItzigsohnJ. (2010). Developing poverty: The state, labor market deregulation, and the informal economy in Costa Rica and the Dominican republic. Penn State Press.
Kohler-HausmannJ. (2017). Getting tough: Welfare and imprisonment in 1970s America. Princeton University Press.
20.
McLennanR. (2008). The crisis of imprisonment: Protest, politics, and the making of the American penal state, 1776–1941. Cambridge University Press.
21.
MintonR. J.Jr (ed) (1971). Inside: Prison American style. Random House.
22.
PageJ. (2011). The toughest beat: Politics, punishment, and the prison officers union in California. Oxford University Press.
23.
PellE. (ed) (1972). Maximum security: Letters from California’s prisons. Dutton.
24.
PlattT. (2019). Beyond these walls: Rethinking crime and punishment in the United States. St. Martin’s Press.
25.
RossJ. I. (2010). Resisting the carceral state: Prisoner resistance from the bottom up. Social Justice, 36(3), 28–45. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1719255
26.
RuscheG.KirchheimerO. (1968). Punishment and social structure. Russell and Russell.
27.
SallazJ. J. (2013). Labor, economy, and society. Polity.
28.
SimonJ. (2007). Governing through crime: How the war on crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear. Oxford University Press.
ThompsonH. A. (2011). Rethinking working-class struggle through the Lens of the carceral state: Toward a labor history of inmates and guards. Labor, 8(3), 15–45. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-1275226
31.
ThompsonH. A. (2012). The prison industrial complex: A growth industry in a shrinking economy. New Labor Forum, 21(3), 39–47. https://doi.org/10.4179/NLF.213.0000006
32.
ThompsonH. A. (2016). Blood in the water: The Attica prison uprising of 1971 and its legacy. Vintage.
33.
TibbsD. (2012). From black power to prison power: The making of Jones V. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union. Palgrave Macmillan.
34.
ZatzN. D. (2008). Working at the boundaries of markets: Prison labor and the economic dimension of employment relationships. Vanderbilt Law Review, 61(3), 857–958.
