RETHINKING PRISON LABOR: SOCIAL DISCIPLINE AND THE STATE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article assesses prison labor regimes' role in anchoring and reinforcing market discipline during three eras of U.S. capitalism: the industrializing North, the post‐emancipation South, and neoliberalism. Synthesizing evidence from revisionist historian and political economy literatures, this article analyzes the ways in which, in addition to being a feature of particular social and economic orders, prison labor has also been deeply imbricated in the very production of those orders, particularly their racialized and class‐based social relations. It argues that although critical political economy has generally failed to incorporate prisons and prison labor into theorizations of contemporary capitalism, these have been and are increasingly vital to the functioning and reproduction of capital in the U.S. context. As such, prison labor regimes should be understood as part of a range of state strategies to aggressively impose the forms of labor and social discipline central to specific regimes of governance and accumulation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".