A New Function of Prison Industry and Private Prisons in Developed Countries, and the Possibility of Their Implementation in the Republic of Serbia (original) (raw)

Correctional labor as an alternative to imprisonment in modern problems of punishment assignment

SHS Web of Conferences, 2021

The global practice has shown many times that the primary means of struggling with criminality over the entire history of the civilized society is punishment. The modern legislator is constantly striving to improve its types by following global trends in its regulation, assignment and use. Efficiency of labor influence over the convict makes us pay a special attention to punishments suggesting mandatory labor nurturing. One of such punishments is correctional labor whose relevance of research is caused by the interest of the international society to use measures alternative to imprisonment. Despite the fact that legal systems of some foreign countries envisage and widely use punishments whose various characteristics are similar to domestic correctional labor, the Russian experience of their regulation and use can be useful, due to their specific nature, and interesting to any modern state, because the issue of implementing a rich potential of penology is especially relevant these da...

Penal Labor and Productive Incarceration

2016

French research on colonial imprisonment in Africa is significantly lagging behind (1). For instance, it has particularly overlooked the economic dimension of imprisonment in the colonies – i.e., penal labor, considering it marginal or not characteristic of the situation in the colonies (2). Yet, the institution, functioning, and evolution of penal labor in the colonies provide a relevant analysis framework as regards the realities of a colonial system primarily based on coercion and compulsory labor. In Senegal, for instance, the creation of mobile prison camps has actively contributed to the construction and renovation of the Senegalese road network.

The Political Economy of Prison Labour: From Penal Welfarism to the Penal State

Global Labour Journal, 2017

The article traces the return of prison labour for commercial purposes in the United States. In the age of Fordism, work for commercial purposes was prohibited in prisons; the emphasis was on rehabilitation. This "penal welfarism" gave way to a "penal state" of extremely high incarceration rates and exploitative prison labour. While this shift mirrors the turn to neo-liberalism, it is also the result of specific labour market conditions and racial discrimination. KEYWORDS prison labour; racism; disciplining of the superfluous labour force; United States Prisoners are rarely visible in everyday life. This holds true all the more so for their labour behind iron bars. They also seem to be quite invisible in the field of labour studies. While an increasing number of inmates around the world are forced to work, their working conditions have received scant attention. The relationship between incarceration rates, prison labour, profit interests and the labour market is also understudied. This article addresses both areas of neglect. We want to call attention to the miserable remuneration of prison labour and we want to contribute to a better theoretical understanding of the drivers of prison labour. We have chosen the United States of America as our empirical example. It is the country with the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, and where inmates are not only working to maintain overall prison operations but also for profitable industries. But most important for theoretical considerations, the high incarceration rates and prison labour for commercial purposes have not been a permanent feature of the American penal system. In fact, in the Fordist period (1940s to 1970s) the level of the prison population was low, work for commercial purposes was prohibited, and emphasis was, at least rhetorically, placed on the reintegration of felons into society. This period, perhaps a bit euphemistically called "penal welfarism", gave way to the current situation of a "penal state". It mirrors the shift from Fordism, the period of a social compromise between capital and labour, to today's neo-liberalism, a period characterised by the hegemony of private property holders. The analysis of this shift will shed light on the relationship between modes of production, the labour market and criminalisation. The parallels between these two shifts, however, should be treated with caution. Just as neoliberalism is not without contradictions, resistance and manifold manifestations across time and nations

Captive Labour and the Free Market: Prisoners and Production In the USA

Capital & Class, 2008

This article documents the resurgence of US prison work programmes under neoliberalism, investigating the dynamics through which state and private corporations have erected factories inside public prisons, moving manufacturing jobs behind bars. It contends that the corporate use of inmate labour has not resulted from an autonomous capital's quest for profit, but rather that it is a strategy that has developed through and cannot be abstracted from the US state as it has restructured in order to author processes of globalisation, and as it has adopted the neoliberal domestic policy of mass incarceration.

The Prison-Industrial Complex and Organized Labor: Union Complicity in the Corrections Industry

"The Prison-Industrial Complex and Organized Labor: Union Complicity in the Corrections Industry" I'd like to begin my presentation today with what I find to be an illuminating anecdote. I recently traveled to Moundsville, West Virginia to take a tour of the former state penitentiary there. Our tour guide had retired last year from working as a prison guard. As he told us about the hellacious history of the institution, he also discussed what it was like to work there, how the work had changed him. He didn't start out working as a guard-he was thirty when he took the job, having worked at two different local mills only to see them shut down. He didn't want to work for another failed shop or mill, and figured that a prison would never close its doors, as there will always be prisoners that need guarding. So he took a job at Moundsville and worked there for nine years before it, too, was closed, in 1995. Like many of the institutions' inmates and administration, he would be shuttled to other prisons across the state after the closing.

Punishment Without Crime? Prison as a Worker-Discipline Device

2007

Abstract: An'efficiency wage'model developed for Western economies is reinterpreted for Soviet Russia assuming that it was the Gulag not unemployment that acted as a'worker-discipline device'. Archival data now available allows for a basic account of the dynamics of the Gulag to be estimated. When this is combined with a dictatorship wishing to maximise the'investible surplus' subject to an efficiency wage incentive constraint, what does it imply?