HITCHED TO THE POST: PRISON LABOR, CHOICE AND CITIZENSHIP

• Published date: 09 December 2003
• Date: 09 December 2003
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(03)30005-5
• Pages: 107-124
• Author: Keally McBride

HITCHED TO THE POST: PRISON

LABOR, CHOICE AND CITIZENSHIP

Keally McBride

ABSTRACT

The current neo-liberal trend in the United States insists that citizens must

be self-supporting and are free to choose how theywill involve themselves in

the labor market. However, with the hardening of poverty in the inner cities,

it is difficult to maintain the idea that everyone can choose to work. The

collision between neo-liberal ideologies and economic crisis is evidenced by

contemporary prison labor. The incarceration boom and use of prison labor

suggests that work and unemployment is a matter of character, thus helping

to maintain the idealization of labor as a marker of rationality, disciplined

free will, and hence citizenship.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain,

whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that

there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

LABOR AND CITIZENSHIP

The problem of how to make people embrace wage labor has been with us since

industrialization. In order to produce surplus value, work must be separated from

mere survival and valorized on its own terms. John Locke made an early attempt

Punishment, Politics, and Culture

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society,Volume 30, 107–124

Copyright © 2004 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(03)30005-5

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108 KEALLY McBRIDE

to specify how labor serves as the foundation of citizenship within the Social

Contract in The Second Treatiseof Government. Here he specified that “Labor put

a distinction between them and common” – the act of labor takes nature’s bounty,

which is shared by all, and turns it into individual property. Because every man

“has a property in his own person” – his labor – every man who labors is thereby

eligible, and motivated, to participate in the Social Contract which establishes a

government.1

In a recent article, Nancy Hirshmann explored Locke’s “An Essay on the Poor

Law” to see how his theories were developed in relation to the laboring classes of

his time. He advocated cutting public relief to paupers, since it was through work

that people developed reason and the capacity for liberal citizenship. Failure to

work or poverty “was evidence of a failure to use their God-given rationality”

(Hirschmann, 2002, p. 33). Thus, at the time Locke was developing his theory of

the Social Contract he perceived that linking citizenship to labor was the way to

ensure the stability of liberal forms of government. Founding the Social Contract

on labor solves several problems. First, labor becomes a proof of a person’s will-

ingness to exercise rationality as well as self-discipline, both characteristics that

are sorely needed in a liberal polity. Second, according to Locke’s schema, labor

creates property, which provides the impetus to consent to and uphold the Social

Contract. This answers the question why we would ever choose to trade natural

freedoms for political ones. Finally, whether intentional or not, the connection

between work and citizenship also served to support industrialization in England.

In Locke’s version of citizenship based upon labor, there is one exception to

his rule, slaves.

But there is another sort of servants, which by a peculiar name we call slaves, who being

captives taken in a just war, are by the right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and

arbitrary power of their masters. These men having, as I say, forfeited their lives,and with it

their liberties, and lost their estates; and being the state of slavery,not capable of any property,

cannot in that state be considered as any part of civil society; the chief end whereof is the

preservation of property (Locke, 1980, p. 45).

Here, Locke provides the philosophical basis which later helped to justify the

exclusion of slaves from citizenship in the United States. Labor is the crucial step

in making one fit to join the Social Contract – it establishes your individual stake

in and claim upon the world which was previously held in common. Because as a

slave you do not evenown your own labor and cannot create property, you become

ineligible for citizenship. Interestingly, Locke also explains that indigenous

populations do not mix their labor with the soil in the same way as Europeans

and therefore do not create private property for themselves either. Locke’s Social

Contract prefigured the racially exclusive form of American citizenship through

his linkage of work, reason and the mythological foundation of the Social Contract.