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.
Recenzijas
"This is an essential guide for those who want to abolish the last vestiges of legal slavery in the US and build a world without prisons." Alex Vitale
Through the voices and analyses of imprisoned workers themselves . . . makes a powerful case that abolition is a labor question. Robin D.G. Kelley
This is a startlingand often inspiringaccount of the pernicious persistence of prison slavery. It is that rare book which will galvanize a reform movement and, therefore, make for a better world. Gerald Horne
"Its a story that needs to be shared widely." Labour Hub
Papildus informācija
Pitch op-eds, excerpts, and reviews to publications including Boston Review, Bookforum, Dissent, New Republic, The Nation, NYT, NYRB, LRB, LARB, Harpers, Jacobin, N+1, New Inquiry, Essence, The Atlantic , Labor Notes, New Labor Forum, American Prospect, In These Times, Mother Jones, Counterpunch, The Baffler, Rolling Stone, Alternet, Slate, Salon, The Marshall Project, The Appeal, Inquest, Vox (Marin Cogan), Justice Trends, The Prison Journal, Incarceration, Prison Policy Initiative, Al Jazeera, Indymedia, HuffPost, Truthout, Truthdig, Common Dreams, Guernica, Transfers, Public Books, The Root, United States of Anxiety (WNYC), Justice in America (podcast), Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Il Manifesto, Domani. Leverage authors' academic connections at Columbia, New York University, Princeton, Cornell, Rochester, Yale, Illinois and Shanghai universities. Leverage coverage from previous publications by the authors. Coverage includes The New York Times, The Guardian, Vox, Public Books, N+1, and others.
Andrew Rossis a social activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where he also directs the Prison Research Lab. A contributor to theGuardian, theNew York Times,The Nation, andAl 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 a Research Fellow at the NYU Prison Education Program Research Lab, where he conducts research on mass incarceration, financial debt, and their intersections. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Yale University.
Aiyuba Thomas is a recent MA graduate from NYUs 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.
