Article

Punishment & Society

2018, Vol. 20(2) 174–191
When work is ! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474517690001

subjectivities in punitive journals.sagepub.com/home/pun

labor regimes
Erin Hatton
State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

Abstract
Scholars have persuasively argued that U.S. penal and welfare institutions comprise a
single policy regime that has taken a punitive turn with carceral expansion and welfare
contraction. Less recognized, however, is the centrality of labor to this regime. Not only
has labor been the lynchpin of welfare reform with the expansion of workfare, it has
also been an important yet overlooked dimension of mass incarceration, as most able-
bodied American prisoners are required to work. For prisoners and welfare recipients,
work is a punitive curtailment of citizenship rights, even as it is a foundation of such
rights for others. This article thus conceptualizes work as a form of punishment in the
penal-welfare regime. Drawing on 83 in-depth interviews with incarcerated and work-
fare workers, it examines these workers’ penal subjectivities—how they ideologically
navigate their labor qua punishment. Through this negotiation, it finds, incarcerated and
workfare workers deploy, contest, and reify the cultural narratives that justify their
relegation to punitive labor regimes.

Keywords
citizenship, penal subjectivities, prison labor, punishment, punitive labor, welfare, workfare

Introduction
Penal and welfare institutions in the U.S., scholars have persuasively argued, com-
prise a ‘‘single policy regime’’ (Beckett and Western, 2001: 44), which has taken a
‘‘resolutely punitive turn’’ (Wacquant, 2009: 11) in recent decades with carceral

Corresponding author:
Erin Hatton, Department of Sociology, State University of New York, Buffalo, 404 Park Hall, North Campus,
Buffalo, New York 14260, USA.
Email: eehatton@buffalo.edu
Hatton 175

expansion and social welfare contraction (also see Garland, 2002; Kohler-
Hausmann, 2015; Western and Beckett, 1999; but see Lynch, 2011). Less recog-
nized, however, is the centrality of labor to this policy regime. While the expansion
of work requirements for public assistance—i.e., workfare—has been examined as
the sine qua non of welfare retrenchment (e.g., Collins and Mayer, 2010; Goldberg,
2007; Krinsky, 2007; Peck, 2001; Soss et al., 2011), it has not been linked to prison
labor, which itself has largely been overlooked (but see Haney, 2010; Zatz, 2008,
2009). This lack of attention to prison labor is understandable, given the exigent
implications of mass incarceration and the broader the criminal justice system as
racialized (and gendered) institutions of social control and inequality (Alexander,
2012; Wakefield and Uggen, 2010; Western, 2006; Western and Pettit, 2010). Yet
the fact that the unprecedented numbers of American prisoners are also workers
should not be ignored, as most able-bodied prisoners are required to work.
Therefore, penal and welfare institutions are not only linked at the state level
through political discourse, legislation, and budgetary spending (or lack thereof)
(Beckett and Western, 2001); they are also linked at the ground level through the
dual expansion of punitive labor regimes, in whose day-to-day operations prisoners
and welfare recipients experience firsthand the punitive power of the ‘‘centaur
state’’ (Wacquant, 2009: 42).
This article thus conceptualizes work as a form of punishment in the American
penal-welfare regime. Indeed, even as labor may yield limited benefits for incar-
cerated and workfare workers—e.g., warding off isolation and boredom (e.g.,
Haney, 2010)—their labor is legally, socially, and institutionally constructed as
punitive. Prison labor, for example, is explicitly construed as punishment in the
U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment prohibition of forced labor ‘‘except as pun-
ishment for a crime’’ and, although the work requirements of the Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program are politically constructed as
‘‘opportunity’’ rather than punishment, the punitive nature of such policies has
been widely documented (Gilliom, 2001; Goldberg, 2007; Gustafson, 2011; Soss
et al., 2011; Wacquant, 2009). Not only does prisoners’ and workfare workers’
labor garner little or no pay, both groups are compelled to work—prisoners as a
punitive condition of their incarceration (Zatz, 2008), workfare participants as a
punitive condition of their access to the social safety net (Peck, 2001). Accordingly,
their ability to refuse work, as well as choose where and for whom they work, is
significantly limited. In short, these workers’ economic independence is con-
strained; as a result, they do not have access to the full rights and freedoms,
which constitute ‘‘substantive citizenship,’’ even as they generally possess
‘‘formal citizenship’’ by birth or naturalization (Brubaker, 1992). In this way,
incarcerated and workfare workers’ labor, which punitively constricts their citizen-
ship rights, is the inverse of free waged labor, which is a foundation of the rights,
freedoms, and obligations of American citizenship (Fraser and Gordon, 1994;
Kessler-Harris, 2001; Marshall, 1964 [1949]; Weeks, 2011).
This tension between work as punishment and work as prerogative—a discip-
linary curtailment of rights versus an underpinning of such rights—is the subject of
176 Punishment & Society 20(2)

this article. This tension is not academic. As my analysis of in-depth interviews with
83 incarcerated and workfare workers in New York State reveals, it is actively
negotiated by both of these groups of workers, often in remarkably similar ways.
It is this negotiation, I argue, which shapes their penal subjectivities, for these
workers are not negotiating labor relations based on uneven power relations, as
are most employees. They are negotiating labor relations predicated on punish-
ment, imbued not only with routine economic coercion but, as I argue elsewhere
(Hatton, 2016), with the more severe institutional coercion and, in prison, physical
coercion (Hatton, 2016).
In this article, I examine incarcerated and workfare workers’ penal subjectivities
in two analytical steps. First, I identify what they believe to be the three most
punitive aspects of their labor, namely: minimal remuneration, lack of autonomy,
and mistreatment on the job. Though they do not always use the language of
‘‘punishment’’ to describe them, in their view, these are what make their labor
unjust; these are what transform their work into ‘‘slavery,’’ making their labor
punishment rather than employment, even as they do not uniformly agree whether
these axes of punishment are undeserved. Second, I analyze how incarcerated and
workfare workers interpret each of these punitive dimensions of their labor.
Whether they are opposing or affirming them, I find, these workers draw on the
same two cultural narratives: the Protestant work ethic and citizenship rights’
claims. In so doing, most of these workers (though not all) contest the cultural
narratives that justify their relegation to punitive labor regimes, arguing instead
that they are entitled to substantive citizenship because of their labor and/or will-
ingness to work. Yet their use of these cultural narratives inadvertently reifies
them—and the workers’ relegation to punitive labor regimes in turn—thereby
limiting the oppositional potential of their challenge. Thus this analysis of penal
subjectivities is perhaps more accurately described as one of penal consciousness, as
it not only documents these workers’ ideational perspectives but also how such
perspectives resist and reify ideological hegemony and the institutions that
sustain it.
This article contributes to scholarship on penality and work in multiple ways.
Foremost, it expands the study of penality and the ‘‘definitional boundaries of the
category of ‘punishment,’’’ as called for by Hannah-Moffat and Lynch (2012: 119),
by examining work as punishment both in and out of prison. It also offers a much-
needed complement to top-down analyses of the penal-welfare regime by
focusing on the perspectives of those whose lives are shaped by it. In so doing, it
links studies of agency, ideology, and subjectivity in prison (e.g., Bosworth and
Carrabine, 2001; Grabosky, 1978; Sexton, 2015; Sykes, 1958) with such studies in
labor and employment (e.g., Burawoy, 1979; Salzinger, 2003), thereby pushing
against the respective siloing of these disciplines and enriching each in turn.
Finally, it further develops the concept of ‘‘penal consciousness’’ (Sexton, 2015)
by pushing it toward an engagement with social structures and ideological hegem-
ony, as urged by Silbey (2005) in her analysis of the related concept of ‘‘legal
consciousness.’’
Hatton 177

Labor in the U.S. penal-welfare regime

There is a rich literature on the history of prison labor (e.g., Lichtenstein, 1996;
Oshinsky, 1997), yet there are few studies of prison labor in the contemporary era
despite its prevalence (but see Haney, 2010; Zatz, 2008, 2009). In New York State
alone, all able-bodied individuals of its approximate 54,000 prison population are
required to work (Department of Corrections and Community Supervision
[DOCCS], 2013) and, although such data at the national level are not available,
it is estimated that the same is true of America’s roughly 2 million inmates in state,
federal, and private prisons (Benns, 2015). In New York, prisoners often work in
facility maintenance and utilities—cleaning, cooking, and upkeep—earning $0.12–
$0.25 per hour. Less often, they work in the State’s prison industries (‘‘Corcraft’’)
where they make products for sale to government agencies and nonprofit organ-
izations, earning about $1.25 an hour (DOCCS, 2014). Thus, Davis (2000) argues
that, in this era in which African American men are disproportionately incarcer-
ated and required to perform prison labor, the criminal justice system should be
conceptualized as a racialized and gendered system of coercive labor recruitment
and control, as it was in the post-Civil War era.
Although contemporary prison labor has largely escaped scholarly attention, work-
fare has not. Scholars have examined how this institution has been deployed to deter
welfare claims and reinforce labor discipline, while also highlighting resistance to it
(e.g., Gilliom, 2001; Goldberg, 2007; Gustafson, 2011; Krinsky, 2007; Peck, 2001;
Piven and Cloward, 1971; Soss et al., 2011; Wacquant, 2009). Reliable numbers of
such workers remain difficult to calculate, however, due to the transience of the welfare
population, the challenges of tracking state-level data across state and federal programs
(e.g., heads of households receiving TANF-funded grants vs. those without children
who, in New York State, receive Safety Net Assistance), the significant number of
recipients sanctioned or not working enough hours to be counted in federal data,
and the multitude of ‘‘work activities’’ they are required to perform, of which ‘‘work
experience’’—most commonly identified as workfare—is only one (Administration for
Children and Families [ACF], 2015; Office of Family Assistance [OFA], 2016; Office of
Temporary and Disability Assistance [OTDA], 2015). Overall it is estimated that, in
2013, more than 42,000 people nationwide and 6,000 in New York participated in
workfare each month out of the more than 497,000 Americans and 107,000 New
Yorkers who engaged in ‘‘work activities’’ broadly construed (OFA, 2016). Yet it is
also worth noting that, among only those heads of households receiving TANF grants,
more than 77,000 people in the U.S.—and over 7,000 in New York—were sanctioned
from public assistance for work-related reasons for some part of that year (ACF, 2015).
In New York, those workfare participants who were not sanctioned labored 25–35
hours per week, often performing janitorial or administrative work at government offices,
nonprofit agencies, public parks, and subway stations. The benefits they received in
exchange for this labor were generally meager—some combination of cash benefits,
rental and/or utility assistance, childcare support, and food stamps (now
SNAP)—though many of the workers in this study did not receive any cash benefits
at all and only received childcare assistance for their workfare hours. Although these
178 Punishment & Society 20(2)

welfare benefits are not legally construed as ‘‘wages’’ (but see, Matter of Walter Carver v.
State, 2015), the sum of an individual’s cash benefits and food stamps divided by the
number of hours worked is required to comply with the federal minimum wage (Stone v.
McGowan, 2004; also see, NY Social Services Law, Section 336-c(2)(b)).

Punishment and penal subjectivities

It is not possible to provide a comprehensive review of the broad literature on the
nature of punishment; indeed, entire volumes have been dedicated to this task. As
Garland (1990: 16) observes, ‘‘the phenomenon which we refer to, too simply, as
‘punishment’, is in fact a complex set of interlinked processes and institutions,
rather than a uniform object or event.’’ In recent years, however, this literature
has tended to focus on punishment more narrowly-construed as incarceration and
other corollaries of the criminal justice system (e.g., Phelps, 2016; Western,
2006)—with good reason, to be sure, given their contemporary significance.
Within the prison context, studies have also identified a range of phenomena,
which are experienced as punishment, including uncertainty, loneliness, and sev-
ered ties with children (Bloom and Chesney-Lind, 2000; Crewe, 2011; Johnson and
McGunigall-Smith, 2008). While other studies have analyzed the punitive effects of
institutions and practices not overtly construed as punishment—e.g., civil law
(Beckett and Murakawa, 2012) and alternative policing practices (Lynch,
2012)—they, too, usually remain within the ambit of the criminal justice system.
This article thus extends this literature by expanding the study of penality beyond
the criminal justice system, as well as by identifying labor as an axis of punishment.
From within this literature has emerged a focus on penal subjectivities, which
seeks to understand how punishment is understood by the punished (Sexton, 2015;
also see Bosworth and Carrabine, 2001; Grabosky, 1978; Sykes, 1958). Linking
penal subjectivities to the sociolegal concept of ‘‘legal consciousness’’ (Ewick and
Silbey, 1998), Sexton (2015) develops the notion of ‘‘penal consciousness’’ to char-
acterize the interaction between penal institutions, practices, and subjectivities.
This is an important development, for the legal consciousness framework as estab-
lished by Ewick and Silbey (1998) is intended to examine not only the ways in
which individuals think about law, but also how such modes of thought maintain
and/or challenge law’s legitimacy (Silbey, 2005). Therefore, the analytical shift
from penal subjectivities to penal consciousness must entail a similar shift from
documenting individual perspectives to analyzing how such perspectives shape
institutions and ideologies. The present study undertakes this task by examining
how prison and workfare workers’ views of their punishment both challenge and
reify hegemonic beliefs about penality in the context of punitive labor regimes.

Data and methods

I did not set out to study punitive labor regimes. Instead, I was interested in
workers who were not fully protected by labor and employment laws. In-depth
Hatton 179

interviews with incarcerated and workfare workers, however, highlighted their

understanding of their labor as punitive. To analyze their perspectives, I compare
incarcerated and workfare workers in a single state, New York, to control for state-
level variation in prison, welfare, and labor policies—even as these punitive labor
regimes extend well beyond state and national borders and, almost certainly,
beyond these two groups of workers.
Although I originally intended to interview current prisoners, the New York
State DOCCS denied access to the state’s prisons. I then recruited and interviewed
41 ex-prisoners—recently released from facilities across the state—at organizations
which coordinate housing and employment services for ex-prisoners in Buffalo and
Rochester, N.Y. This was ultimately advantageous, as the respondents were more
forthright, heterogeneous, and less coerced and surveilled than they would have
been if interviewed in prison. I also recruited and interviewed 42 current and
former workfare workers—not through welfare officials, who declined to support
this research, but directly from workfare sites and, less often, advocacy organiza-
tions in Buffalo, Rochester, and New York City, N.Y. Though workfare workers
from advocacy organizations were more likely to use the politicized language of
labor rights, they represent a relatively small portion of the workers in this study
(12%) and their perspectives are presented proportionately. (In fact, all of the
‘‘rights talk’’ in this article does not come from such workers.) In general, I only
present data with high levels of saturation across respondents.
As shown in Table 1, there are both similarities and differences in the demo-
graphic characteristics of these two groups of workers. While the incarcerated
workers in this study are more likely to be male and younger than the workfare
workers, the race/ethnic profiles of the two groups are broadly similar, with a
significant majority of each identifying as African American. Their demographic
characteristics also generally reflect the populations from which they are drawn,
though they are somewhat skewed by their recruitment sites. As Table 1 shows,
both sets of workers are more likely to be African American and less likely to be
Hispanic and White than their respective populations, though this may be some-
what distorted by the idiosyncrasies of institutional record-keeping (e.g., DOCCS
does not report a multiracial category) and this study’s use of self-reported race/
ethnicity.
In interviews with these 83 workers, I asked open-ended questions about the
nature of their labor and their ontological understandings of work and punish-
ment, including what they considered to be the positive and negative aspects of
their jobs, what (if anything) they considered unjust about their labor, and how
they identified themselves at work (e.g., ‘‘workers’’ vs. prisoners or welfare recipi-
ents). Interviews lasted 30–90 minutes; respondents were given $10 in compensa-
tion (one declined). Interviews were digitally recorded, transcribed, and analyzed
using Atlas.ti, which identified numerous themes across respondents and categories
of work, including what they consider to be the most punitive dimensions of their
labor and the cultural narratives they use to describe them. In order to accurately
represent their voices, worker quotations are only lightly edited for readability and
180 Punishment & Society 20(2)

Table 1. Descriptive statistics.

Demographic Incarcerated NYS prison Workfare NYS TANF

characteristics workers populationa workers populationb

Sex
Male 88% (n ¼ 36) 96% 26% (n ¼ 11) 12.3%
Female 12% (n ¼ 5) 4% 74% (n ¼ 31) 87.7%
Age
Average 33 yrs. 37.7 yrs. 40 yrs. 48% ¼ 20–29 yrs.
Median 27 yrs. 36 yrs.
Race/ethnicity
African American 80.4% (n ¼ 33) 49.6% 80.9% (n ¼ 34) 39.8%
Hispanic 2.4% (n ¼ 1) 24.1% 4.7% (n ¼ 2) 33.5%
White 9.7% (n ¼ 4) 23.6% 9.5% (n ¼ 4) 21.1%
Multiracial 7.3% (n ¼ 3)c – 2.3% (n ¼ 1)d 1.4%
Asian 0% – 0% 3.4%
Native American 0% – 2.3% (n ¼ 1) 0.7%
Total 100% 53,928 (prison) 100% 69,253 (adult)
(n ¼ 41) 54,865 (total) (n ¼ 42) 272,180 (total)
a
DOCCS, 2013.
b
ACF, 2015.
c
Two workers identify as ‘‘Hispanic and Black’’ and one as ‘‘Black and White.’’.
d
This worker identifies as ‘‘Black and Hispanic.’’.

all linguistic emphases noted in the text are their own. Moreover, so that they may
identify themselves in this writing, their pseudonyms are self-selected, though occa-
sionally modified slightly to ensure anonymity.

Findings: When work is punishment

Incarcerated and workfare workers broadly conceptualize their labor as punitive
and identify three primary characteristics that render their labor punishment: their
lack of remuneration, their lack of autonomy in choosing whether to work and in
negotiating the terms of their labor, and their mistreatment and degradation on the
job. Although these dimensions are analyzed separately below, they are usually
experienced as mutually constitutive and reinforcing—their minimal pay is not
entirely distinct from their subjugation, for example—though individual workers
often point to one of these axes as more punitive than the others. In each case, as
the sections below reveal, while some affirm the cultural narratives that legitimize
these dimensions of their punishment, a majority contests such narratives. Yet
whether they are reframing themselves as worker-citizens or accepting their desig-
nation as criminal-dependents, incarcerated and workfare workers draw on the
same two cultural frames: the Protestant work ethic and citizenship rights.
Hatton 181

Remuneration: ‘‘At least minimum wage’’ vs. ‘‘Ethiopia pay’’

Ninety-five percent of the incarcerated workers (n ¼ 39) and 64% of the workfare
workers (n ¼ 27) in this study contest their minimal remuneration. For example,
K.H., a 47-year-old African American man, says that incarcerated workers’ low
pay makes prison labor ‘‘more like modern-day slavery’’ than ‘‘work.’’ ‘‘Are you
serious?’’ he asks rhetorically.

$0.23 an hour is not a pay. You can’t even figure that as pay. And then with the prices
in the commissary constantly going up, you can’t even buy a peanut butter and jelly
with the salary that I made as a porter. You can buy the peanut butter or the jelly, but
you couldn’t buy both. And then, if you bought either one, that was all you bought.

Likewise, J. Robinson, a 56-year-old Black woman, argues that her minimal wel-
fare benefits make workfare ‘‘slave labor.’’ Workfare workers should earn ‘‘at least
minimum wage,’’ she maintains.

Because, at this point, 35 hours a week for $155 a month is – What is that?1 $2, $1.75
[an hour] maybe? I think the minimum wage would at least leave us with our dignity.
Come on, man. Don’t do that. To me it’s slave labor, I’m sorry.

Like K.H. and J. Robinson, incarcerated and workfare workers often invoke slav-
ery to argue against their pay and the other punitive dimensions of their labor.
Because the rhetoric of slavery is fundamentally about citizenship, these workers
deploy it to contest their exclusion from substantive citizenship. By asserting that
they are not ‘‘slave labor,’’ they are claiming rights as citizens from which they are
excluded by virtue of their relegation to punitive labor regimes.
Less often, incarcerated and workfare workers use the language of rights to
contest their pay. For instance, as 24-year-old Sal Winter says, ‘‘The whole scen-
ario is just twisted. You’re working for nothing. You’re working hard for nothing.
That violates your constitutional rights,’’ this white ex-prisoner contends, ‘‘because
you’re working for pennies.’’ Twenty-eight-year-old D.D.G. agrees, intertwining
the rhetoric of rights and slavery to do so. In prison, he says, ‘‘I thought of myself
as a slave because of the pay.’’

Nobody else in the state of New York is getting paid that . . . That’s what made me feel
like a slave, because I’m the only person in America that’s getting paid X amount—
maybe $0.50 for doing all this. The same thing that people is getting $6 or $7, $8 an
hour for, I’m getting $3 every week. Let’s be serious. That’s where the concept of a
slave is at. Yes, that’s some slave stuff . . . Nobody else around the country is making
that. We’re in America . . . I’m buying American things, I’m buying American food
products, I’m spending American money, but now I get some foreign pay like I was in
Ethiopia. I’m getting Ethiopia pay for my work. That doesn’t make sense. That just
contradicts the whole scenario.
182 Punishment & Society 20(2)

‘‘I don’t believe that inmates and convicts mind working,’’ this Black man allows,
‘‘it’s just what they’re working for.’’ Thus D.D.G. not only invokes (racialized)
rights of citizenship—arguing against ‘‘Ethiopia pay’’ for ‘‘American’’ work—he
also calls upon the Protestant work ethic: prisoners do not mind working. Their
work ethic is strong which, he believes, should yield the full rights of substantive
citizenship.
Likewise, Chandrea Jackson draws upon her own ethic of work to dispute
workfare workers’ wages. ‘‘I’m cool with everything I got to do,’’ this 32-year-
old African American woman says.

I know it’s a responsibility [to work] to collect your benefits . . . I don’t have no prob-
lem with doing this. But I feel like we shouldn’t have to get out there for our food
stamps and Medicaid benefits. If we were getting over $1000, then that’s something to
work for. But the little petty cash we get, it’s not enough to go out there and work for.

Jackie Lewis also believes that she has a responsibility to work in order to receive
public assistance, yet this 57-year-old Black woman argues that she should be paid
minimum wage for her labor. ‘‘They should just pay ‘em,’’ Jackie says of workfare
workers.

Send them to a job, and that way they would get minimum wage, and they can work
overtime if they want to. I mean, I don’t think anyone should just sit on their butts.
[But] if they’re sending them out to jobs, I figure they should get minimum wage.

Thus, in emphasizing her own ethic of work, Jackie—like many workfare work-
ers—draws a symbolic boundary between herself and the mythical welfare popu-
lation who just wants to ‘‘sit on their butts.’’
Incarcerated workers similarly invoke the work ethic to challenge this punitive
dimension of their labor but, instead of underscoring their responsibility to work,
they argue that their already-considerable work responsibilities justify their need
for higher wages. As 27-year-old Garcia says, prisoners should get ‘‘at least the
minimum wage. I mean, I don’t see why we should be getting any less than any-
body else,’’ this Black and Hispanic man maintains, ‘‘because we do all the same
work and have all the same responsibilities.’’
Yet, even as a majority of the incarcerated and workfare workers in this study
contest their minimal pay, some of them affirm this punitive dimension of their
labor. For example, though 34-year-old Apache concedes that prison work is,
indeed, ‘‘slave labor,’’ he says,

I really couldn’t say that you should get more. I mean, I think the best thing is to stay
out of prison. I couldn’t really conjure somebody getting a lot of money working in
prison. It wouldn’t really make sense to me . . . I mean, you’re in prison, people are
paying taxes and you’re not doing nothing. I mean, like, even my wife and my moms,
they’re out there working and they were sending me money, and that didn’t make me
Hatton 183

feel good. And, if you really look at the grand scheme of things, you were out there
working for me, to take care of me. I mean, the tax they took out of your check, they
put it somewhere, and somewhere down the line it came in [the prison]. So, my best
advice—even though I am an advocate [for prisoners] and I don’t want to sound like a
hater, but—just don’t go. If you don’t want to be put in that position, then don’t go.

Thus Apache, too, draws on the cultural narratives of work and rights, but to
justify prisoners’ wages rather than challenge them. Though it is true that prisoners
earn ‘‘slave’’ wages, this Black American man contends, they do not deserve more.
Despite their labor, they are exempt from the rights and obligations of American
citizenship by not ‘‘paying taxes’’ and being economically dependent (‘‘my wife and
my moms . . . out there working and . . . sending me money’’). The purpose of prison
labor, Apache maintains, is punishment not work. ‘‘It’s not supposed to be a camp.
It’s not supposed to be a happy place . . . We’re in prison. We’re not supposed to
come in and kick our feet up.’’ For prisoners, Apache argues, ‘‘slave labor’’ is
legitimate punishment.

Autonomy: ‘‘Choice’’ vs. ‘‘forced to work’’

Nearly two-thirds of each group—63% and 64% of incarcerated and workfare
workers, respectively—object to their lack of autonomy in choosing whether to
work and in negotiating the terms of their employment. As 31-year-old Dominique
Pettway says, in prison ‘‘you’re going to do it or you’re going to get locked up.
What type of choices are those?’’ Likewise, 51-year-old Kierra Ross says that, in
workfare, ‘‘You don’t have a choice, unless you want the benefits cut off.’’
Like K.H. and J. Robinson above, many workers (particularly in prison) use the
rhetoric of slavery to challenge this punitive dimension of their labor. For instance, as
21-year-old F.E. says, in prison ‘‘I felt like a slave. I was only working because they’re
making me work. They’re making you work, and they’re underpaying you to the
highest extent . . . You’re a legalized slave.’’ O.T.I. similarly compares prison labor to
unfree labor. Outside of prison, this 27-year-old African American man says,

I can quit my job or a random person on the street can’t say, ‘‘Hey, you’re going to
put up all this trash today and I’m going to give you $2.50.’’ I’m going to say, ‘‘No,
that’s too much. I think I’m worth more than that.’’ But in prison, really, you don’t
have that option. So when you take that option away, you kind of become a
slave . . . Even in Attica, you got Corcraft that is a multimillion dollar company, but
all their products are made by inmates who don’t have the right standard laws or right
grade of pay. It’s just like kids in India making Nikes and volleyballs—you know what
I’m saying?—and then not receiving the right wages. I’m not saying we were the
underage kids, but it’s the same aspect. Sometimes they’re forced to work just like
we are; they don’t get the right grade of pay, just like we do. Sometimes, in their
situation, they don’t have the choice, just like we do. And if they buck or stand up or
say ‘‘no,’’ they get penalties, just like we do.
184 Punishment & Society 20(2)

Thus, like D.D.G., O.T.I. deploys rights talk to compare prison labor to two
racialized forms of unfree labor—slavery and child labor in the Global
South—though his emphasis is lack of autonomy rather than pay. Yet O.T.I.’s
analogy is even more pointed. Not only are prisoners earning third-world wages, he
argues, they are laboring for the profit of American companies without access to
American citizenship rights.
Yet not all incarcerated and workfare workers believe that their constrained
autonomy is unwarranted. A number of workers, especially in workfare, argue
that they should be required to work because work is an obligation of citizenship.
‘‘I don’t disagree’’ that welfare recipients should have to work, 23-year-old Tasha
Love says.

I feel like, if you didn’t have to work, then it’d be a lot more people that’s being lazy,
and not really understanding the facts of working . . . I really don’t mind it, because it’s
like, if you’re not doing something, you’re just doing nothing. You know what I
mean? I’d rather do something than nothing.

Thus, Tasha does not mind being forced to work—and condemns laziness to
underscore the point—as her participation in workfare allows her to embody pro-
ductive worker-citizenship.
Twenty-five-year-old Kim Hunky agrees that welfare recipients should have to
work but, contra Tasha, she argues that workfare is not ‘‘work.’’ ‘‘I’d rather go
punch a clock,’’ Kim says with disdain.

My sister’s been here for a couple of years and she’ll rather pick up the garbage from
the parks because she will call it her ‘‘job.’’ This is not a job. You’re working for some
assistance, when you could be working for a paycheck every week.

For Kim, it is not the mandate to work that is punishment; it is the lack of a ‘‘real’’
job. Thus she uses her embrace of work to argue for better jobs for workfare
workers. ‘‘I feel like a slave because it’s not a job,’’ she continues. ‘‘Make me get
out here and work. Don’t make me get out here and slave. I’m not a slave. Those
days are over.’’
Whereas, Tasha and Kim justify the compulsion to work because they are (or
want to be) productive worker-citizens, others do so by arguing the inverse: that
they are not citizens. For instance, 41-year-old Rodney Williams maintains that
mandatory prison labor is ‘‘just part of my punishment for the crime I committed.
I have to be here, and they’re going to want you to do something here. You can’t
just sit around all day and lay around.’’ Thus, unlike Tasha and Jackie, Rodney
impugns laziness without emphasizing his own work ethic. He is not a worker, he
says, he is prisoner. Like Apache, he argues that the legitimate purpose of prison
labor is punishment. Forty-seven-year-old Glenn agrees. ‘‘We went ahead and
really got ourselves in trouble. If you get in trouble, you got to do what you got
to do.’’
Hatton 185

Mistreatment: ‘‘Human decency’’ vs. ‘‘humiliation’’

Seventy-three percent of incarcerated workers (n ¼ 30) and 64% of workfare work-
ers (n ¼ 27) in this study argue against their degradation and mistreatment on the
job. As 23-year-old ex-prisoner Bruce says,

It’s the human decency they don’t really have. No human respect for you. They figure,
if you got the state greens on, then you are below them. You are a peasant. They are
upper class, you are lower class. You’re poverty. You are nothing. So, they talk to you
in any kind of way. Sometimes, they put hands on you, they put feet on you.

For Bruce and others, talking in ‘‘any kind of way’’ and putting ‘‘hands’’ and ‘‘feet
on you’’ are euphemisms for (sometimes extreme) verbal and physical abuse, which
many of these workers cite as the most punitive aspect of their work.
For Sal Winter, for example, verbal abuse is the worst part of prison labor. ‘‘It’s
being told what to do in a disrespectful way. Like, all you got to do is tell me once,’’
he says. ‘‘You don’t got to yell it to me in a degrading manner.’’ Sal does not need
to be asked twice to work; this young White man’s work ethic is sound which, in his
mind, justifies his critique of incarcerated workers’ degradation. In fact, when
asked what he might change about prison labor, though his first response is pris-
oners’ pay ‘‘because it would’ve made it a little easier to take the disrespect,’’ he
changes his answer to prisoners’ mistreatment. ‘‘Honestly,’’ he says, ‘‘I’d rather be
treated like a man instead of getting paid good.’’
Like Sal, 57-year-old Pauline Wilson uses her own embrace of work to contest
the verbal abuse workfare workers face. ‘‘Okay, yeah, I have an obligation to do
something for my [public assistance],’’ this African American woman avows, ‘‘but I
don’t have to take the disrespect. I don’t have to take the abuse that they give you.’’

Some people didn’t make it after the first week because they couldn’t take it. They
said, ‘‘You let them talk to you like that?’’ And then some people, they would cry,
‘‘Well, I need this money.’’ But if you’re not cut out for that kind of stuff—that kind
of humiliation—it’s not going to work. And there’s nobody cut out for that.

For Pauline, the obligation to work is acceptable—it is a responsibility of product-

ive citizenship—but workers’ ‘‘humiliation’’ is not.
Incarcerated and workfare workers also identify other less extreme but none-
theless pernicious technologies of degradation which make them feel like ‘‘the scum
of the earth.’’ Some cite the types of jobs they are required to perform, such as
cleaning toilets or feces (Bruce, Ron D., John S., and O.T.I. in prison, Jennifer
Rose, Clevelanda, Kierra Ross, Tashia Green, and Kim Hunky in workfare),
cleaning the messes of their supervisors (Bruce and Apache in prison), and, in
the case of incarcerated worker D.Q., being asked to scrub the floor with a tooth-
brush (‘‘I’m not scrubbing no floor with no toothbrush’’). Others cite the requirement
to perform unnecessarily arduous work, often when labor-saving tools seem to be
186 Punishment & Society 20(2)

readily available but are not supplied to them. For instance, 20-year-old incarcer-
ated worker Jarome W. says that prisoners were required to use weed whackers to
cut facility’s extensive lawns. ‘‘They had lawnmowers and a truck, [but] they make
us use the manual weed whackers, like it’s slavery.’’ Thirty-year-old April Smith
makes a similar complaint about workfare. ‘‘A lot of things they shouldn’t have us
doing,’’ she says. ‘‘A lot of things is too much.’’

My thing is, I don’t have a problem with gardening. I do gardening on my own. They’ll
have us out there with gloves, [but] they’ll have a right-hand glove and no left-hand
glove. Like, downstairs at the basement—I kid you not—it’s stocked with supplies.
Stocked. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have the things we need. Gloves,
that’s all we ask. Gloves. We picking weeds; they got the little trowels but, no, we
have to pick them by hand. There are pricklies [and] we have to pick them by hand.

Thus, like Sal and Pauline above, April draws on her own ethic of work—‘‘I don’t
have a problem with gardening’’—to justify her opposition against workfare work-
ers’ mistreatment. Because she believes in the value of work, she argues, she should
not be degraded by unnecessarily difficult labor.
Only one worker in this set of 83 explicitly justifies their ill-treatment. Paul D., a
White Italian 22-year-old man, argues that correctional officers only degrade incar-
cerated workers—by calling them names, screaming at them, and punishing them
with physical activity—‘‘if [they] deserved it’’ by being ‘‘lazy’’ or acting like a
‘‘knucklehead,’’ which he describes as ‘‘someone who doesn’t want to do anything.’’
‘‘But it’s all for the better,’’ he maintains, ‘‘They wanted to see you succeed.’’ Thus,
in Paul’s view, prisoners’ apparent lack of work ethic justifies their degradation.

Discussion: Penal subjectivities in punitive labor regimes

As these findings show, incarcerated and workfare workers deploy the cultural
narratives of work and rights to contest and affirm what they see as the most
punitive dimensions of their labor—a discursive process which both reflects and
reifies these narratives in turn. In particular, their repeated affirmation of the
importance of work and their identities as ‘‘workers’’—they want to ‘‘punch a
clock,’’ they do not ‘‘mind working’’—buttresses the centrality of work and the
Protestant work ethic in American culture, as does their critique of laziness and
dependence. (‘‘I don’t think anyone should just sit on their butts,’’ Jackie Lewis
says. ‘‘If you didn’t have to work,’’ Tasha Love argues, ‘‘then it’d be a lot more
people that’s being lazy.’’) Likewise, incarcerated and workfare workers’ rights talk
underscores the significance (and inequality) of individual rights and law ‘‘on the
books’’ in the U.S. For instance, D.D.G. argues that it is unjust for American
citizens—even if prisoners—to earn ‘‘Ethiopia pay’’ while, conversely, Apache
argues that prisoners do not qualify for citizenship rights when others are ‘‘out
there working.’’ In both cases, the emphasis on the rights of only some workers
(American vs. Ethiopian, those in the free world vs. those in prison) buttresses the
Hatton 187

stratification inherent in law and individualized rights, rather than what might be
understood as universal ‘‘human’’ rights.
As these quotes suggest—and as scholars have argued—the American narratives
of work and rights accentuate the individual rather than the collective and the
structural. ‘‘As an individualizing discourse,’’ Weeks (2011: 53) observes, ‘‘the
work ethic eschews institutional support for what is supposed to be an individual
responsibility and obscures the structural processes that limit his or her field of
opportunity.’’ This individualized obligation to work has only intensified since
industrialization, so that any form of dependency—i.e., any perceived deficiency
in one’s work ethic—is considered a moral failing (Fraser and Gordon, 1994;
McDonald and Marston, 2005; Weeks, 2011). Likewise, Glendon (1991: 63)
argues, the American focus on rights is individualistic, simplistic, and depoliticiz-
ing, highlighting personal claims while overlooking ‘‘social costs and the rights of
others’’ (also see Rosenberg, 2009; Scheingold, 1974; but see McCann, 1994).
Because these individualizing narratives are predominantly deployed to legitim-
ize workfare and incarcerated workers’ punitive labor, their use inadvertently rei-
fies it. This is most clearly evidenced in these workers’ oft-cited distinction between
themselves and the shirking ‘‘other,’’ as these cultural logics broadly construct
these groups not as rights-bearing productive citizens but as criminalized and
pathologized dependents on the state (Neubeck and Cazenave, 2001; Piven and
Cloward, 1971; Wacquant, 2009). As a consequence, even when the ethics of work
and rights are used to challenge punitive labor and second-class citizenship, they
inadvertently reinforce their underlying logics by bolstering the cultural construc-
tion of these workers as not deserving of decent pay, autonomy, and treatment
(recalling a similar dynamic in Willis’s Learning to Labour and Gustafson’s
Cheating Welfare).
Yet even in this limited way, a majority of these workers—aside from those such
as Apache and Paul D.—contests their relegation to punitive labor regimes and
their exclusion from substantive citizenship. They do so in two ways. First, workers
such as Garcia, Tasha Love, and Sal Winter argue that their labor fulfills the
American obligation to work and should therefore be reconstructed as ‘‘work’’
rather than ‘‘punishment’’ by eliminating its punitive dimensions. As Garcia main-
tains, ‘‘I don’t see why we should be getting any less than anybody else . . . because
we do all the same work and have all the same responsibilities.’’ Second, although
workers such as Kim Hunky and Jackie Lewis affirm hegemonic constructions of
their labor as not ‘‘real’’ work—‘‘This is not a job,’’ Kim avows—they do so in
order to make claims for rights-bearing employment. Rather than being punished
with punitive second-class labor, they argue, they should have access to waged
employment and the rights it yields. (‘‘Send them to a job,’’ Jackie says, ‘‘that
way they would get minimum wage.’’)
In this way, incarcerated and workfare workers negotiate the tension between
their work as a punitive curtailment of rights and the broader cultural construction
of work as a foundation of citizenship rights. This negotiation informs their penal
subjectivities for, as theorists have observed, work regimes not only produce goods
188 Punishment & Society 20(2)

and services, they also produce worker subjectivities (Foucault, 1977; Marx, 1992
[1906]; Weber, 1958; Weeks, 2011). In the case of punitive labor regimes, then, such
negotiations produce penal subjectivities even when they are located outside of
prison, for these workers are negotiating labor as a condition of their punishment.
Analysis of their subjectivities reveals not only how such labor regimes ‘‘deliver
workers to their exploitation’’ (Weeks, 2011: 53) but also how such workers resist
their exploitation. Incarcerated and workfare workers are not ‘‘cultural dupes,’’
passively exploited by punitive labor regimes. They are active agents, interrogating
these regimes and the ideological structures that sustain them.

Conclusion
This study identifies these punitive labor regimes as a key dimension of the modern-
day ‘‘carceral archipelago’’ (Foucault, 1977: 297). In so doing, it highlights the
importance of the literature on punishment to other veins of scholarship, particu-
larly work and employment. For while the latter has largely focused on the rise of
neoliberalized precarious work, it has overlooked other forms of substandard
labor, particularly the punitive labor examined here. At the same time, this study
reveals the importance of other literatures to penal and punishment scholarship, as
a focus on labor expands the analytical category of punishment while also iden-
tifying additional sites in which punishment occurs. As a result, this study sheds
light on new modes of ideological resistance among the punished, as well as ways in
which penal hegemony is produced and maintained. It is hoped that this study will
provide a springboard for further research on punitive labor and punishment
broadly construed, as well as the lived experience of the penal-welfare state and
the role of penal subjectivities in shaping social structures and inequality.

Acknowledgment
I benefitted from the labor of many friends and colleagues in writing this article, particularly
David Herzberg. Thank you. In addition, I am thankful for the generosity of Erik Seeman
and the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo for the time and funding complete
this research, as well as to Kari Winter and the Gender Institute, Errol Meidinger and the
Baldy Center for Law & Social Policy, and Laura Mangan and the Civic Engagement and
Public Policy Center at the University at Buffalo.

Note
1. As this calculation suggests, J. Robinson does not consider food stamps as part of
her compensation, though New York State does.

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Erin Hatton is Associate Professor of Sociology at State University of New York at

Buffalo.