In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

| 53 2 Work in the Walled City Labor and Discipline in California’s Prisons After new arrivals found their cells and met their cellmates, they negotiated bunk space and where to put any belongings they might have. They did not have long to do it, though. Soon enough they would be expected to make their way to their job assignment. Work mattered. From the San Quentin jute mill to the Folsom mess hall, from the bookkeepers’ department to honor road camps outside the walls, work was a crucial part of prisoners’ lives. It had always been. Behind bars as on the outside, work contained a range of meanings and practices that went beyond the tasks accomplished or shirked. It affected prisoners’ health, their opportunities to get good food, and their chances for social interaction, prestige, or even early release. Prisoners’ labor, moreover, allowed the institutions that held them to function. “The Walled City” contained a city’s worth of work. Prisoners cooked the food and served it, sewed the clothes they wore and washed it when it got dirty, swept the halls, wrote and printed the prison newspaper, and ran the library. They also built furniture, assembled shoes, wove jute sacks, and pressed license plates—all of these could help the institutions recoup the costs of warehousing so many. As budgets tightened and the prison population grew, officials looked for any cost-saving measure. Prisoners ’ sweat cost nothing at all and, if properly managed, might even earn something for the state. For this reason and others, a great many interests converged in prisoners ’ labor. In the 1930s, when as much as a quarter of the outside workforce felt the pain of unemployment, many on the outside wondered why convicts should have jobs while they had to scrape and bow to get anything at all. Workers in the Depression were hardly the first to despise competition with unfree workers; their sentiment contained elements that dated back to the Free Soil movement in the mid-nineteenth century and anti-immigrant movements in the late nineteenth century.1 But when the stock market 54 | Work in the Walled City crashed in 1929, for the first time free workers had the benefit of federal legislation on their side. The Hawes-Cooper Act, passed in 1929, and the AshurstSumners Act, passed in 1934, brought the power of the national government into the regulation of prisoners’ labor. Following generations of organized labor’s protests against competition with prisoners and the companies who could exploit them, Hawes-Cooper and Ashurst-Sumners restricted forprofit inmate labor and drove most prisons into a system of “state-use” only. It was a huge and symbolic victory for free workers, but prison officials predicted that their institutions would descend into bedlam if they could no longer rely on labor, that bedrock of penal discipline, and set prisoners to work however they wished. Nevertheless, by the 1930s prison labor no longer played the role in regional economies that it had during the northern private-contract period or the southern convict lease period.2 Instead, labor comprised part of an internal disciplinary economy based in behavioral control and racial differentiation. It was, nevertheless, beset by corruption and pierced by inmates’ and officials’ varying definitions of manhood. Labor assignment in California prisons involved a range of controls, from physical punishment and the risk of injury in the worst tasks to the payment of wages and the extension of credit in the very best. California’s labor systems in the 1930s modified existing progressive penological models. Prison labor held disciplinary as well as financial appeals. A tired inmate was a docile inmate, officials hoped, but it went deeper than this. California’s prison officials, firmly wedded to a modernist project of progressive penology , believed in the redemptive power of labor. A 1930 “Report on Prison Labor,” authored by the California Taxpayer Association, succinctly voiced the ideology guiding prison labor since the Civil War: “Constructive employment is probably the most valuable means of leading a man away from criminal tendencies. To teach a man habits of industry and to impress upon him the dignity of labor will do much to restore him to useful citizenship.”3 The authors further described work’s pedagogical and reformative aspects: “To the hardened criminal, the thought of work is repulsive. No doubt, this attitude has much to do with the fact that he has chosen a life of crime.”4 Young prisoners, they reasoned, could be reformed by learning the...

Share