Prison Labor and Industry

Abstract

Work has been one of the defining characteristics of incarceration throughout the history of American prisons. “Work was in fact the core of the penal experience both at the Eastern Penitentiary, the first such institution in the United States, and at Auburn in New York” (Schaller, 1982: 3). The celebrated debate between the designers of the Pennsylvania “solitary” system and the Auburn “congregate” system of prison organization was largely a controversy about the most efficient way to organize production within the confines of maximum security.

The most desirable system for employing convicts is one which provides primarily for the punishment and reformation of the prisoners and the least competition with free labor, and, secondarily, for the revenue of the state.

U.S. House of Representatives Industrial Commission, 1900

The modern concept of prisons as institutions for treatment does not contemplate the “busy prison factory” or the self-supporting prison as a goal. Nevertheless, in any well-rounded program directed toward the needs of those confined, some employment projects have their place.

F. Flynn, 1950

We can continue to have largely human “warehouses,” with little or no education and training, or we can have prisons that are factories with fences around them ... [to] accomplish the dual objective of training inmates in gainful occupations and lightening the enormous load of maintaining the prison system of this country.

Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, 1982