The Disciplined Worker In and Out of Prison

Abstract

Scholars of mass incarceration have tended to understand the prison as a labor market institution mostly in the negative sense: as a warehouse for those otherwise likely to be unemployed and as a site of status degradation that further reduces people's ability to find employment after release. In this article, we review recent work that has focused attention on the prison as a labor market institution in a more productive sense: as an organization that shapes the work activity of the many workers incarcerated within it, facilitates formerly incarcerated people's subordination in the labor market upon release, and may play a more active role than previously imagined in shaping the distribution of jobs available in the US labor market as a whole. We also introduce new evidence that the tightness of the labor market structures how a criminal record shapes people's labor market experiences after incarceration.