A Strike Against the New Jim Crow

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

“…In the 1910s, the American Federation of Labor explored a partnership with New York's Sing Sing prison that would have extended union membership to incarcerated workers (McLennan 2008). Recent prison strikes have been organized cooperatively through incarcerationfocused organizations like the Free Alabama Movement and the contemporary incarnation of the Industrial Workers of the World (Bonsu 2017). Compared to conventional prison labor, carceral labor beyond the prison features a much larger potential scale, greater integration into "free" workplaces, and reduced applicability of "less eligibility" concepts; these workers either have not been convicted at all or are designated as reentering.…”

“…Recent decades have laid the groundwork for a resurgence in prison labor (Thompson 2011;Weiss 2001). Simultaneously, movements against contemporary racialized mass incarceration, including those led by incarcerated people claiming the mantle and tactics of striking workers (Bonsu 2017), have treated prison labor as symptomatic of the "New Jim Crow" (Alexander 2012), a broader betrayal of freedom's promise.…”