Revisiting the Democratic Promise of Prisoners’ Labor Unions

• Published date: 15 December 2005
• Pages: 241-269
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37010-4
• Date: 15 December 2005
• Author: Susan Blankenship

REVISITING THE DEMOCRATIC

PROMISE OF PRISONERS’ LABOR

UNIONS

Susan Blankenship

ABSTRACT

Despite the volumes that have been written on America’s correctional

crisis – the peerless incarceration rate, disproportionate confinement of

minority group members and democratically untenable policies of disen-

franchisement of people with felony convictions – criminal justice policy

has changed little within the past decade or more. An important voice has

been left out of these correctional policy formulations – that of prisoners.

This paper proposes convict labor unions as one way to address this issue.

It utilizes the United States Supreme Court majority’s arguments in Jones

v. North Carolina to assess the feasibility of inmate labor unions in light

of current federal, state and local institutional operations; and provides a

very tentative outline of how a prisoners’ labor union could be structured

and function – exploring the potential democratic ramifications of such

unions for corrections and in broader social policy.

Crime and Punishment: Perspectives from the Humanities

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 37, 241–269

Copyright r2005 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37010-4

241

INTRODUCTION

In 1971 Americans were given a violent, horrifying wake-up call about the

conditions in prisons that they, as citizens, had tacitly approved (Brooks,

1996). Attica brought into stark relief the contradictions that existed be-

tween the use of imprisonment with its closed, often brutal and controlling

hierarchical system and democratic ideals like egalitarianism, liberty and

transparency that supposedly informed American government. A relatively

circumspect period followed the Attica prison riot, as corrections’ officials,

politicians, academics and others pondered what could be done to avoid

such a gruesome event in the future. Along with a brief period where the

United States Supreme Court expanded prisoners’ rights, efforts were made

across the United States to improve prison conditions and incorporate

democratic processes within correctional institutions (The Yale Law Jour-

nal, 1972;United States Supreme Court, 1977).

While there have been prison riots since Attica, they have not sparked

such a widespread examination of the U.S. prison system, much less calls for

reform (Brooks, 1996). Even faced with the horrors of Abu Ghraib and

attempts to call attention to its similarity with the plight of prisoners in U.S.

prisons and jails, Americans, their political representatives and the courts

have appeared content to accept systematic degradation and brutality as

costs of imprisonment with the noted exception of the Prison Rape Elim-

ination Act (Butterfield, 2004;Herbert, 2004;Jacobs, 2004;The New York

Times, 2004;Whitman, 2004). These ‘‘costs of imprisonment,’’ however, are

also costs to democracy.

Despite the volumes that have been written on America’s correctional

crisis – the peerless incarceration rate, disproportionate confinement of mi-

nority group members, and democratically untenable policies of disenfran-

chisement of people with felony convictions – criminal justice policy has

changed little within the past decade or more. An important voice has been

left out of these policy formulations – that of inmates. In his outline of a

policy sciences of democracy, John Dryzek (1990) asserts that achieving

rational public policy requires the genuine discursive participation of those

affected by it. Dryzek argues that rationality must be conceived not as a

technocratic, expert-driven process, but one that is discursive – encompassing

and involving citizens of a democracy. Public policy, in order to be rational,

requires discursive democracy. Dryzek’s formulation of rationality indicates

that unless inmates are given a voice in the democracy of which they

are citizens, expectations for achieving successful outcomes through

correctional programs (e.g., rehabilitation and reintegration) will remain

SUSAN BLANKENSHIP242