Description
Abolition Labor chronicles the national movement to end forced labor, much of it unpaid, in American prisons. It draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated persons in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and New York to give a more holistic picture of these work conditions, and it covers the new prisoner rights movement that began with system-wide work strikes involving more than 50,000 people in the 2010s.
Incarcerated people work for penny wages (15 cents an hour is not unusual), and, in several states, for nothing at all, as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, garbage cans, athletic equipment, and uniforms. And they harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and labor in meat and poultry processing plants.
Abolition Labor provides a wealth of insights into what has become a vast underground economy. It draws connections between the risky trade forced on prisoners who hustle to survive on the inside and the precarious economy on the outside. And it argues that, far from being quarantined off from society, prisons and their forced work regime have a sizable impact on the economic and social lives of millions of American households.
Author: Andrew Ross, Tommaso Bardelli, Aiyuba Thomas
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 06/25/2024
Pages: 270
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.50w x 0.67d
ISBN13: 9781682193983
ISBN10: 1682193985
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Penology
- Business & Economics | Labor | Unions
- Social Science | Activism & Social Justice
About the Author
Andrew Ross is a social activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where he also directs the Prison Research Lab. A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books, including, most recently, Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality.
Tommaso Bardelli is currently the Director of Research and Popular Education at Worth Rises, an advocacy organization dedicated to dismantle the prison industry and protect and return the resources of those it touches. Before joining Worth Rises, Tommaso was a Senior Researcher at the NYU Prison Research Lab.
Aiyuba Thomas is a recent MA graduate from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and a justice impacted affiliate of the NYU Prison Research Lab. He is currently the project manager for "Movements Against Mass Incarceration," an archival oral history project at Columbia University.