Adam Reich, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, will give a talk as part of the Sociology Colloquium spring series.

TALK TITLE: 

Inside Jobs: Prison Work in the American Labor Market

Abstract:  

It is easy to think of prison work as the opposite of work on the free market: The prisoner working without pay in the mess hall, or making license plates for $0.40 an hour, seems more comparable to an enslaved person than to someone working a job on the outside, however bad that job may be. Such a distinction is baked into our common sense and into our jurisprudence, and it has played an important symbolic role in American political and social life, from the earliest campaigns of the American labor movement to the modern-day prison reform movement.  But it obscures as much as it clarifies. It masks the coercion underlying systems of “free” labor, as well as the different forms of freedom that incarcerated people have occasionally exercised in relationship to their work inside. Rather than view prison work as the opposite of “free” labor, then, Inside Jobs considers the prison as an important site in which ideas and practices about the relationship between work, coercion, and freedom have been developed and contested across different periods of American economic history.