Work and the Carceral State

Jon Burnett

Description

'Revolutionises our understanding of the carceral state' - Fidelis Chebe, Director of Migrant Action

During 2019-20 in England and Wales, over 17 million hours of labour were carried out by more than 12,500 people incarcerated in prisons, while many people in immigration removal centres also worked. In many cases, such workers constitute a sub-waged, captive workforce who are discarded by the state when done with.



Work and the Carceral State examines these forms of work as part of a broader exploration of the relationship between criminalisation, criminal justice, immigration policy and labour, tracing their lineage through the histories of transportation and banishment, of houses of correction and prisons, to the contemporary production of work.



Criminalisation has been used to enforce work and to discipline labour throughout the history of England and Wales. This book demands that we recognise the carceral state as operating at the frontier of labour control in the 21st century.

Tables and Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Labour Discipline and Reform

2. The Immigration Detention Estate

3. Carceral Haunting

4. Political Anatomies of Labour

5. Labour Control Regimes

Conclusion

Appendix: Methodological Note

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Criminal Law
• Social Science
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Reino Unido
• Immigration law
• Penology
• General officer
• United Kingdom
• Labour economics
• Great Britain
• World
• LAW
• General
• European
• Labor
• Labour
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786807878
• Langue: English

Extrait

Work and the Carceral State
This book is an illuminating interrogation into captive labour, disposable workforce and state harm. Grasping the intricacies of labour, immigration, capital and criminalisation, this thought-provoking work will revolutionise our understanding of the carceral state.
-Fidelis Chebe, Director, Migrant Action
A magnificent piece of scholarship. It is eloquently written, meticulously researched and filled with profound insights: an instant classic.
-Dr David Scott, The Open University and author of For Abolition
A brilliant study of carceral labour as a form of neoliberal statecraft with deep historical roots that haunt it today.
-Avery F. Gordon, Visiting Professor, Birkbeck School of Law and author of The Hawthorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins
Brilliant - shows how carceral labour shapes the world of work in ways that are more important than we have ever acknowledged, and adds an indispensable dimension to our understanding of capitalism. Read this book and learn how the strategies deployed in prisons and in immigration detention centres spread into labour markets in ways that discipline all of us.
-David Whyte, Professor of Socio-Legal Studies, University of Liverpool and co-editor of The Violence of Austerity
Compelling, compassionate and original. It highlights the hidden scandal of, and resistance to, carceral labour in the haunted environment of immigration removal centres.
-Professor Joe Sim, Liverpool John Moores University
Work and the Carceral State
Jon Burnett
First published 2022 by Pluto Press
New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Jon Burnett 2022
The right of Jon Burnett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4017 3 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4016 6 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 786807 86 1 PDF
ISBN 978 1 786807 87 8 EPUB
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
Tables and Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Labour Discipline and Reform
2. The Immigration Detention Estate
3. Carceral Haunting
4. Political Anatomies of Labour
5. Labour Control Regimes
Conclusion
Appendix: Methodological Note
Notes
Index
Tables and Figures
Table 4.1
Ministry of Justice contract for work in prisons, 2015-16 to 2019-20
Figure 0.1
Hours worked by incarcerated people in public sector and privately managed prisons (millions). Source: Data taken from Ministry of Justice, Reform , Ministry of Justice Prisons Data , 2021, https://data.justice.gov.uk/prisons/prison-reform/ prisoners-workin
Figure 5.1
HSE inspections of prisons, YOIs, IRCs and Secure Training Centres 2010-19. Source: FOI 202004115
Figure 5.2
HSE investigations of prisons, YOIs, IRCs and Secure Training Centres 2010-19. Source: FOI 202004115
Acknowledgements
So many people have given advice and help in the writing of this book to whom I am hugely grateful. At Pluto Press, David Castle has been encouraging and committed throughout, shaping the text, and I would like to thank Emily Orford, Elaine Ross, Robin Virgin, Robert Webb and all at Pluto for the support from the beginning.
Avery F. Gordon, Melissa Mendez, China Mills, Joe Sim and David Whyte read and commented on all or parts of the manuscript and gave invaluable, detailed guidance and comments. And I m also hugely grateful to Monish Bhatia, Fidelis Chebe, David Scott and Patrick Williams for their discussions, time, help and advice. Thank you, too, to the organisations, universities and groups that provided space to discuss ideas about the book as it was being written, not least the European Group for the Study of Deviancy and Social Control and at Plan C s Fast Forward Festival in 2019.
Among the many people whose ideas, discussions and work has informed this book, thank you to Daniel Attenborough, Ignasi Bernat, Kevin Boateng, Bree Carlton, Becky Clarke, Vickie Cooper, Vicky Canning, Roy Coleman, Ryan Erfani-Ghettani, Craig Fletcher, Elias Gizaw, John Grayson, Sam Hanks, Emily Hart, Joe Janes, Christine Majid, Rehan Majid, Gloria Morrison, Ida Nafstad, Jasbinder Nijjar, Vicki Sentas, Steve Tombs, Waqas Tufail, Prav Uppal, Lisa White, Connor Woodman and Aaron Winter. Thank you, also, to Liz Fekete, Jenny Bourne, Hazel Waters, Frances Webber, Sophia Siddiqui, Anya Edmond-Pettitt, Jessica Perera and Liam Shrivastava, and all at the Institute of Race Relations.
I am indebted to the people who gave up their time and shared their expertise about experiences of incarcerated work - thank you.
Finally, to Paresha and Millen, thank you, always.
Introduction
Darren was arrested in an immigration raid whilst working in a restaurant in Northern England as an undocumented worker. Carried out in the quieter hours before the evening business, there were just a few customers in, he says, and immigration officers just walked in, blocking the exits and getting details from the workers before arresting some of them . 1 And as a result, he spent around the next year of his life incarcerated. Over this period, Darren spent various points in solitary confinement for speaking out against the treatment of other people detained. He was moved between different Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) several times, which he explains was an attempt to try and eradicate solidarity between detained people. On-and-off, he worked, mainly as a cleaner in corridors and visiting rooms, and in doing so, he made up one part of a labour force of incarcerated people in prisons and IRCs, which is situated variously at the intersections of criminalisation and punishment, immigration policy and penal strategy, expulsion and control and the meanings of work itself. This book is about this work. It is about work and the carceral state.
As this book goes to press, the current government has been in power in various iterations for over a decade, and when it first returned to power it made clear its commitment to the expansion and reshaping of one aspect of this work in particular: specifically, that which is carried out within prisons. In 2010, such was the extent of this ambition that the then Prisons Minster Crispin Blunt spoke bombastically of transforming Britain into a global leader in encouraging businesses to make use of effectively free labour . 2 In turn, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke argued two years later that prisoners were simply a wasted resource - thousands of hours of manpower sitting idle . 3 And suggesting that he had always been liberal on economics and liberal on social policy , this was to be at the centre of a credo of free market economics combined with enlightened social reform , he had claimed earlier, of which his party was driven to both . 4 Indeed, despite a party leadership which has since gone from David Cameron to Theresa May to Boris Johnson, at the time of writing, from a coalition to a majority government, and from a confidence and supply arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) back to a majority government, in various iterations such assumptions have in various ways remained. In fact, despite the different priorities emphasised by different forms of leadership, the commitment to transforming prisons into what the Ministry of Justice describes as places of hard work and industry has churned away, quietly and consistently, in the background. 5
That this is the case may well be related to the malleability of prison labour itself. For those driving it, its appeal resides in the way it can be imbued with different meanings, at different times and in different contexts. Those who have demanded a form of hard labour , for example, might be appeased by the intensified focus on work and the discipline it connotes, bound together with punishment in an authoritarian, punitive package. 6 For those championing prisons as engines of rehabilitation, meanwhile, prison labour is articulated as a key mechanism through which this is said to be realised. Indeed, in certain contexts at least, its attraction in policy terms resides in its ability to marry the two notions, and more, together, with some such as Conservative home s chief executive Mark Wallace claiming that prison rehabilitation, in particular, is a field ripe for a truly radical, conservative revolution . For doing so involves smashing the old, false choice between punishment or rehabilitation, and making the pro-taxpayer and pro-victim case for reducing reoffending . 7 Whatever the logics driving it, and whatever the drives it coheres, its appeal resides in its ability to hold together and reconcile different interests and broader contradictions in the idea of punishment itself.
What follows in this book is a critical examination of such forms of work within the context of a complex interplay of criminalisation, punishment, economic and labour market restructuring, as well as shifting assumptions underpinning them and ultimately the carceral state itself. Over the last few decades, an influential body of work has demonstrated how the relationships between criminal justice and social policy have shifted under conditions of neoliberalism, to the extent that some have heralded the advent of a new government of social insecurity . 8 In such accounts, it is frequently suggested that there has been a kind of international policy transfer - uneven and context-specific, certainly - but with the United States as its vanguard the upsizing of the penal sector is casually and func