The Moral Economy of the Penal Crowd: The Microhistory of a Pre-War Prison Strike
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Historical discussions regarding labour organizing within American prisons tend to focus on the period stretching from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, framing those years as both the origin and apex of nationalized and organized inmate-led strikes behind bars. This focus is partly due to a counter-historical assumption that the rebellions of previous eras were primarily focused on “good housekeeping” and were not political in nature. This article challenges ongoing scholarly assumptions that incarcerated Americans were ever pre-political, providing a microhistorical account of the first significant labour unrest at New York’s Attica State Prison in 1932. Through an analysis of the strike’s leadership structure, this paper claims that there is no reason to believe that incarcerated Americans lacked political identities prior to their contact with conscientious objectors, Marxist revolutionaries, and other educated ideologues. Rather, this article contends that the Depression-era Jewish and Italian inmates who led the 1932 Attica strike carried into the prison their own form of political pragmatism, drawn from their experiences operating within interwar-era organized crime syndicates. While this was not a universal experience among incarcerated people, it is indicative of the notion that interwar-era strikes throughout the country surely drew from their own local, informal political norms. This paper concludes that it is unlikely any penal rebellion could exist outside of politics and that historians of prison rebellions must be more willing to look for indirect indicators of political identities that naturally emerge from the struggles of everyday life.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".