Research highlights the prison's contributions to habituating marginalized individuals into labor productivity or compliance. Minoritized communities are disproportionately exposed to such discipline. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within a medium security prison for men, this study uncovers ground-level processes through which labor discipline is enacted unequally on the inside, reifying racial structures and amplifying disparities among working prisoners. To explain this, I advance the concept of racializing labor discipline, through which the prison conditions the incarcerated not only for precarious positions in outside markets, but into unequal roles in an ethnoracial labor order. Bridging work, punishment, and racialization scholarship, I identify four key mechanisms through which this unfolds within the hierarchical carceral employment system.
Michael Gibson-Light (Mon,) studied this question.