Review of “Orange-Collar Labor: Work and Inequality in Prison”

Extract

In Orange-Collar Labor: Work and Inequality in Prison, Michael Gibson-Light provides a rich description of the inner workings of labor and life behind bars in one southwestern American prison. His insight stems from access to an American prison that is rare and valuable: he conducted eighteen months of ethnographic observation and eighty-two interviews with incarcerated workers and prison staff at “Sunbelt State Penitentiary.” As a result, this slim volume is full of fascinating detail.

Gibson-Light takes the reader into four prison worksites: a sign shop, an auto garage, a food factory, and a call center. Though all of these jobs pay well below the federal minimum wage and are an essential component of carceral discipline, Gibson-Light reveals incarcerated labor to be highly heterogenous, varying dramatically in rates of pay and access to much-needed “perks,” autonomy, and dignity. For instance, though the starting wage at many Sunbelt State Penitentiary jobs is just $.09 an hour, wages in the sign shop range from $.50 to $1 an hour. In the call center wages are even higher, ranging from $1 to $2.34 an hour. Sign shop and call center jobs not only offer higher wages than other prison jobs (some by a factor of 26), they also provide workers with opportunities for skill development, advancement, and mental engagement, as well as a partial reprieve from the prison’s punitive surveillance and degrading treatment. They are places where incarcerated workers might “feel normal” (p. 41). By contrast, work in the food factory is the quintessential “bad” job at Sunbelt State Penitentiary, characterized by low wages, high levels of surveillance, and fast-paced, mind-numbing “zombie work” (p.39). Food factory jobs do offer one key benefit, however: food. Access to food is essential for all people living behind bars, as prison fare is notoriously bad, lacking in nutrients, palatability, and quantity. For workers who earn such low wages that they cannot afford to purchase food at the prison commissary, as they do in the food factory, access to additional meals and the high-risk chance to pilfer food for sale in the informal economy are important benefits of this otherwise “bad” job.