Prisoner work in the Americas: An introduction

In the introduction to Orange Collar Labor: Work and Inequality in Prison, sociologist Michael Gibson-Light notes: “From the start of white European settlement in North America, labor has been central to social control and conceptions of justice” (2023: 11). Of course, as the papers included in this themed issue make clear, that is especially true for prisons and jails, and certainly is not limited to North America. Indeed, it appears to be a more or less global phenomenon. From the very birth of the prison in the 18th and 19th centuries, the practice of prisoners performing some kind of work within these places of confinement has been remarkably prevalent in the projects of reformers and administrators alike, even though the degree of effective implementation has tended to vary markedly across time and space.

In this introductory essay, we aim for three goals. First, we write briefly about the genesis of the project that eventually became this themed issue, both to give context for the important papers herein, and to make a point about the value of global exchange in terms of southernizing and decolonizing punishment and society studies, specifically related to the North and South of the Americas. Second, we offer a few overarching comments regarding the nature of prisoner work in the Americas, with an eye toward those readers who might like to use the papers contained herein to conduct further research and theorizing on the topic. Third, and finally, we close with a few comments about each paper, again with the goal of highlighting accomplishments and areas for future inquiry which we, ultimately, hope this themed issue inspires.

Exploring prison labour locally, understanding it globally

In an important 2019 article exploring the contributions and possibilities of southern criminologies to deepening and improving the subfield of critical criminology, Kerry Carrington and colleagues argue that southern criminology:

expands the repertoire of criminology (including critical criminology) beyond its heavily laden northern gaze. As a project, it seeks to harness and cultivate knowledge of and from the Global South that has been relatively overlooked or neglected in the Global North. The southernizing of criminology pursues an open-ended endeavor to include multiple voices (e.g., feminist, Indigenous, peripheral, subaltern). Southern criminology also resonates well beyond any geographic divide, attracting interest as an intellectual project that seeks diversity, inclusivity, and innovation from scholars of the Global North. One of the positive outcomes of this endeavor thus far has involved the emergence of new collaborations between scholars of the Global South and those of the Global North—scholars who share a vision for democratizing the theoretical toolbox of criminology. (Carrington et al., 2019: 164)

Another lesson is that the task of advancing southernising and decolonizing punishment and society studies need not always be particularly complicated. Certainly, to develop and disseminate new worldviews, theoretical frameworks, and ways of understanding variation across regions of the world and periods of time can be intense, ambitious, work. But there are simultaneously more modest ways of making contributions, too. That is what we sought to accomplish with this project and the themed issue: to simply bring together diverse voices spanning certain regions of the Global North and South in order to learn from and with one another.

To this end, the guest editors of this themed issue hosted a two-day workshop or mini conference in December of 2023. We strategically held the event in Santa Fe, Argentina where one of us is appointed, namely at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, which has one of the region's largest and most vibrant programmes in criminology. Holding the conference there had the positive effect on logistics such that scholars based in countries in Latin America were able to travel more easily than they might if we had hosted in the United States or Canada, especially those who might be on a constrained budget or juggling the many demands of their jobs as professors and graduate students. We invited a number of scholars from the Global North to attend; while we suspect the location in Santa Fe had the opposite effect (namely discouraging some attendance), we are pleased that the themed issue includes some representation from the United States and Canada. In any event, the broader point is that when trying to understand better something like prisoner work – something that occurs in many places at many times, and which is arguably better researched outside the dominant gaze of those working in the Global North – it is beneficial to bring people together from many different countries, and, when possible, do it closer to where those scholars live and work (i.e., in the Global South).

North and South of the Americas

Traditionally, when researchers working on punishment and society in North America have taken a comparative approach, it has frequently been directed towards other contexts in the Global North. For instance, in the case of studies on Canada, the main focus has been on comparing it with the United States, particularly to highlight persistent differences in penal trends, institutions, and practices (e.g., Meyer and O’Malley, 2005; Moore and Hannah-Moffat, 2005; Webster and Doob, 2015). Likewise, the United Kingdom and some other countries in Central and Northern Europe (e.g., Germany, the Scandinavian countries, France, and the Netherlands) have generally played an important role in these more or less explicitly comparative studies (see, for example, Cavadino and Dignan, 2006; Garland, 2001, 2025; Lacey, 2008; Lacey et al., 2018; Lappi-Seppälä, 2017; Miller, 2016; Savelsberg, 1994, 1999; Sutton, 2000, 2004; Wacquant, 2000, 2009).

In the last 25 or so years, only a handful of studies have attempted to direct the comparative gaze towards South America (see, for example, Beckett and Godoy Snodgrass, 2008; Birkbeck, 2011; Chevigny, 2003; Miller, 2020). There are obvious and profound differences between these regions. Yet important similarities also exist that need to be identified and evaluated, such as the history of early colonialism and its legacies; deep hierarchies of race, class and gender; and high levels of state and non-state violence. These sorts of alternative comparative perspectives that simultaneously take seriously both differences and similarities may improve our understanding of the penal landscape in both the North and South of the Americas (Brandariz and Sozzo, 2025; Sozzo, 2022a).

A challenge lies in promoting this approach while avoiding the reproduction of traditional forms of hierarchy and dependence in the production and circulation of knowledge about punishment (Sozzo, 2023). We especially need to avoid comparisons that uncritically assume northern knowledges – and northern penal practices – are inherently more advanced and/or progressive than what is known about, and happening, in the Global South. Knowledge exchange and theory building (including the present endeavour) should be the product of a dialogue between multiple voices rooted in different scenarios in the Americas, within a balanced and equitable framework. This is what this themed issue – and the academic event that inspired it – sought to promote and develop. Crucially, this implies abandoning any normative orientation that assumes what happens in the North of the Americas is a model to be followed in the South. While this imperative may seem obvious, one-dimensional and problematic notions have a way of rearing themselves in this type of conversation, if organizers authors, and readers are not careful. Being alert to this is therefore a constant challenge, particularly in relation to prisons, which have themselves been the product of a long process of export/import from the Global North to the Global South based on neo/colonial dynamics (Sozzo, 2022b; 2023).

Prisoner work as ambiguous and multidimensional

Applying now these more general comments about southernizing and decolonizing punishment and society knowledge production and exchanges across the Americas to the specific topic of penal labour, it becomes apparent that our knowledge regarding the work performed by people who are incarcerated is arguably impoverished for at least two reasons, both of which we as authors aim to make some headway against in this themed issue. First, as we already noted above, too often those scholars living and working in the Global North are not reading and learning from the scholarship on and about other parts of the world. (And, more generally, are hampered by the colonial legacies and power imbalances that drive that ignorance.)

Second, we too often talk and think about prisoner work as if it is one homogenous thing, with the same concerns and possibilities across time and space. This has led academics, policy makers, and others to sometimes make somewhat polemical (perhaps even oversimplified) arguments about penal labour as either modern day slavery/deeply exploitative or a laudable and socially beneficial way to rehabilitate people and teach them the value of a good day's work (cf. Goodman, 2012). The papers included herein suggest, in contrast, that the work done by incarcerated people across the Americas is variegated. Specifically, what it looks like varies enormously from place to place, and over time, despite coexisting with important similarities. This includes conditions and types of work, as well as how the incarcerated persons themselves engaging in the labour approach it. Likewise the goals, approaches, and management of this work is variable across the authorities, guards and others involved in its execution.

Embracing heterogeneity and complexity, prisoner work appears in this collection of essays in all its ambivalence and its multiple dimensions; access to work, and the labour itself, can be thought of myriad ways. First, there is the pragmatic approach in which work is seen as useful for what it gains access to, beyond the work itself. In the papers in this themed issue, this includes myriad benefits such as remuneration as well as other benefits that are obtained as a consequence of working (e.g., reductions in the length of imprisonment, freedom of movement, increased autonomy, easier access to contraband or grey markets, etc.).

Second, work – precisely because it is a commodity desired by some prisoners – is useful to prisons and penal administrators both for what it produces and as a technique of governance. For instance, prisoners’ work can produce tangibly positive results for the prison, effectively ensuring its basic functioning through the performance of key tasks (cooking, cleaning, etc.) or generating economic returns through the production of goods and services, which in some contexts may involve private companies, giving rise to dynamics of exploitation linked to the pursuit of profit. Access to work for prisoners is, seen in this light and in this conceptualization, often used by authorities and guards as a technique of governance.

Third, the authors herein sometimes conceptualize the work performed by prisoners as necessary for subsistence. In turn, prisoner work can, in certain scenarios, be a crucial means of subsistence for them and even their families, given the dramatic levels of abandonment and impoverishment they face. On other occasions, linked to the search for subsistence, prisoners may generate their own work activities to produce income, with varying degrees of autonomy from the authorities and guards (in some cases in relation to an official promotion of entrepreneurship, but in others even in violation of formal prison rules).

These varied forms of labour relations (and how we as researchers frame and understand them) matter because they shape, in turn, one's conclusions about the work, its appropriateness, and whether (in pragmatic terms) we ought to advocate for more, less, or none of it. For example, if the work is seen as useful and/or a commodity, it is tempting to view the benefits – even if they can be weaponized by guards and administrators alike as techniques of control and governance – as important for incarcerated persons’ rehabilitation and/or as likely to have a real impact on their future lives outside the prison walls. Likewise, when and where it is experienced and/or conceptualized as subsistence, we might be tempted argue for more, not less, penal labour.

On a different but related tack, the forms and conceptualizations impact whether we as scholars view the work as a right vs. a potentially exploitative and extractive obligation. Prisoner work in some scenarios could be thought as a right, that has the same nature as in the outside world and should not be suppressed by deprivation of liberty as a penal measure. However, in other times and places, its character as an obligation for prisoners is highlighted, as part and parcel of punishment itself. Finally, work can be a space for building collective resistance and struggle on the part of incarcerated persons – and their external allies – aimed at improving its conditions and dynamics, including the use of the language of law.

All in all, therefore, how we think about penal labour is (or ought to be) ambiguous, contextual, fluid, and multidimensional. Or, more precisely, recognizing the inherent ambiguity and multidimensionality in prisoner work would go far in helping us move out of narrow binaries and into more nuanced analyses not of it as good or bad, exploitative or rehabilitative, but, rather, as jobs that vary in their quality, lived experience, and conditions – variation that we as social scientists have the tools and inclinations to be able to understand well.

The papers

This collection includes six essays, five on Latin America and one on North America. In all, those six papers are authored or co-authored by a total of four researchers currently based in North America and nine researchers currently based in South America. Each of the papers is built out of some form of fieldwork done by their authors, particularly inside the prison walls; in many instances, the research was conducted via direct contact with people who are/were incarcerated.

Claus, Navarro, Taboga and Zuzulich's paper shows how prisoner work in Argentina is affected and shaped by the goals of provincial prison administrators (from both men's and women's prisons) – while these correctional programmes matter, they are poorly implemented. Many incarcerated persons do not have access to work and paid renumeration; of those prisoners who do have access to work, many are put to work to maintain the prison, and these maintenance tasks have little to no impact on their future working trajectories outside the prison walls. Although remuneration is usually very low, prison authorities nonetheless use access to work as an instrument of governance. In turn, incarcerated persons approach it as a means of survival. Within the complexity and layered nature of this reality, the authors also identify the initial emergence of informal self-entrepreneurship practices among prisoners that are tolerated or even encouraged by some prison authorities.

Gual and Sozzo's paper – related to the same Argentinean context, but focused on the federal jurisdiction – describes the emergence, consolidation, and crisis of the first incarcerated workers’ union. The scholars identify the conditions that impacted that union throughout its history, both inside and outside the prison walls, paying special attention to the union's high level of porosity. The authors define this experience as an instance of collective resistance and struggle – struggle that uses the language of law and rights and thus embodies a peculiar and constraining form of “censorship.” At the same time, the authors point out the obstacles for the union's persistence and replication.

Fernandes, Godoy and Matos, in their paper, illustrate the manner in which work and education in the context of Brazilian prisons plays a significant role in legal and administrative rhetoric, especially in terms of the rehabilitative ideal. On the one hand, examining the national context, the authors discover significant benefits to prisoners in working inside prisons, especially in terms of the reduction of the length of imprisonment. On the other hand, incarcerated persons confront several obstacles in the judicial and administrative fields, including procedural delays and bureaucratic opacity. The authors conclude that when one looks beyond rhetoric promoting prisoner work and education, these obstacles effectively disincentivize incarcerated persons from work and education (although many still struggle to do it).

Avila presents a case study of a prison experiment in Uruguay in which prisoner work has been completely central, and in a particularly innovative and interesting way. In particular, in that Uruguayan prison, authorities promoted the creation of businesses by the prisoners themselves, who in turn could hire other incarcerated persons as employees, with a high degree of autonomy. This gave rise to a variegated and extensive labour market within the prison, with high levels of responsibilization. At the same time, Avila argues, this way of organizing work and labour brought with it a significant degree of state supervision and control. While the prison that was the site of the experiment cannot be characterized as state neglect (as occurs at other prisons in the region), it remains true that the jobs available for prisoners often mirrored the precarious and low-skill occupations available in the marginalized sectors of contemporary economic life. As such, even here, work reproduces many of the main traits of neoliberal ethos (individualism, competition, etc.). Despite these realities and constraints, the author finds some traces of collectivist and mutual aid also present in this prison experiment – particularly as a funding scheme for business initiatives by prisoners themselves.

Peirce explores the context of prison reforms in the Dominican Republic. Here she finds that work – and also education and cultural activities – has been incorporated into discourses on the rehabilitation of prisoners. Authorities and officials refer in their discourse to ideas developed in the Global North about ‘evidence-based’ rehabilitation, with a strong psychological tone and references to cognitive factors. Nonetheless, Peirce finds, the weight of their orientation appears to be more realistic, recognizing the importance of economic and social marginalization in the commission of crimes in this context. At the same time, discourses are interlaced with and appeal toward an idea of moral transformation that has a religious background. All in all, this way of thinking about rehabilitation and the place of prisoners’ work within its framework presents a series of innovations with respect to the rhetorics of the Global North and even opens up a series of progressive possibilities, in the author's conclusions.

Finally, Gibson-Light and Goodman conducted an ‘interpretive revisit’ of some of each of their own previous empirical scholarship, namely Gibson-Light's ethnography of multiple worksites within a large prison in the south-west United States, and Goodman's interviews and field work in California's prison fire camps. They develop a Gramscian theory of punishment in which special attention is paid to the manufacture and creation of consent at the micro, meso, and macro-levels. They find that prisoners often work not only because they need money for basic necessities (which they certainly do), but also because social structures and forces at multiple levels create hierarchies, inequalities, and interpersonal relations in which people who are incarcerated opt into various kinds of work, with many of the same goals, beliefs, and worldviews as their non-incarcerated compatriots. The author's goals are thus to both offer insights into what prisoner work looks like in several contexts within the United States, and to encourage scholars of punishment and society to consider using theoretical work by Gramsci to further understand punishment and how it impacts those it enmeshes.

Final thoughts

Zooming back out from the particulars of the specific papers, several themes cut across them that we can connect, in turn, to our earlier comments about (a) southernizing and decolonizing criminology and the importance of global exchange; (b) the pragmatic and conceptual gains of directing our attention to, among other places, Latin America; and (c) thinking critically about how our foundational assumptions and frameworks regarding the work performed by prisoners impacts, in turn, how we understand that labour and what we might advocate for, moving forward.

Regarding the value of southernizing and decolonizing punishment and society scholarship, readers of this themed issue will learn about the contexts, rhetorics, implementation details, and conflicts and promises inherent in penal labour in, among other countries, Argentina, Uruguay, the United States, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. In thinking across these contexts, one finds both remarkable similarities and stark differences. Some examples of the former are the ways in which prisoners’ labour is almost universally a proxy for larger, exogenous struggles, both within the criminal justice field and beyond. Whether we study formal prisoner labour organization or informal agreements at exceptional prisons, the result is the same: There is nothing value-neutral or uncontentious about what happens when prisoners are put to work. While we might, following Gramsci (cf. Gibson-Light and Goodman, this issue), think about the production of consent and how there are spaces in which conflict is subverted by the power of elites and the social structures that support them, even then such consent must, by definition, be produced. And its production is virtually always conflictual, in one form or another.

In terms of differences, it is not just what types of work are performed that varies. Certainly, the experience of an incarcerated person working for another prisoner at an exceptional prison in Uruguay in some entrepreneurial endeavour is very different than mopping floors under the watchful eye of a guard (who has enormous power to punish) in a prison in the United States. But even more than that, each of the papers herein teach us that we cannot understand the meanings, framings, and instantiations of prisoner work without understanding the local, regional, and national contexts that give rise to those labour arrangements and shape the manner in which the work is always a container or vehicle for larger debates and conflicts.

Related, then, are the gains of directing our attention when comparing – or even just thinking about and beyond one place – to Latin America. On this front, we will have less to say here, because we hope that the papers largely speak for themselves. As we argued earlier, even when punishment and society scholars have engaged in comparative work, they have not – until recently, anyway – spent much time thinking about, and studying, the South of the Americas. We hope simply that the papers included herein on contexts and places unfamiliar to readers in English-speaking contexts are useful. If they are, we further hope they join a small but growing collection of such work, which will, in turn, inspire more.

Finally, we believe the papers demonstrate empirically the importance of thinking critically and carefully about rhetoric, politics, and framing. Similar to what we wrote just above regarding the differences in prisoner work from country to country (and place to place), we believe these papers make very clear that penal labour is not one homogenous thing. What we think of it, what we advocate for, and what we believe it achieves, constrains, and makes possible is about the details of the work performed, certainly, but equally about the ways in which prisoners, prison staff, prison administrators, politicians, advocates, organizers, and scores of other actors frame the work. To reduce penal labour to one-dimensionally “good” or “bad,” “exploitative” or a positive “entitlement” may make for good copy when advocating for more or less of it, but empirically, it arguably obscures more than it reveals. These papers, we believe, suggest we can, and probably should, embrace complexity and nuance.

Taken as a whole, then, this collection of essays sheds light on these different facets and possibilities of prisoner work. It is our hope that it can serve as a platform from which to launch new research that will fuel dialogue on the subject across the North and South of the Americas in all its ambivalence and multidimensionality.