Red Emma’s

Drawing on interviews with formerly incarcerated persons in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and New York, Abolition Labor covers the new prisoner rights movement that began with system-wide work strikes involving more than 50,000 people in the 2010s.

Incarcerated people work for penny wages (15 cents an hour is not unusual), and, in several states, for nothing at all, as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, garbage cans, athletic equipment, and uniforms. And they harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and labor in meat and poultry processing plants.

Abolition Labor provides a wealth of insights into what has become a vast underground economy. It draws connections between the risky trade forced on prisoners who hustle to survive on the inside and the precarious economy on the outside. And it argues that, far from being quarantined off from society, prisons and their forced work regime have a sizable impact on the economic and social lives of millions of American households.

“This is a startling—and often inspiring—account of the pernicious persistence of prison slavery. It is that rare book which will galvanize a reform movement and, therefore, make for a better world.” —Gerald Horne

Tommaso Bardelli is a Research Fellow at the NYU Prison Education Program Research Lab, where he conducts research on mass incarceration, financial debt, and their intersections. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Yale University.

Andrew Ross is a social activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where he also directs the Prison Education Program Research Lab . A contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, The Nation, and Al Jazeera, he is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books, including, most recently, Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality.

Aiyuba Thomas is a recent MA graduate from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and a justice-impacted affiliate of the NYU Prison Education Program Research Lab. He is currently the project manager for “Movements Against Mass Incarceration,” an archival oral history project at Columbia University.