Abstract
<jats:p>Sing Sing prison, which opened in 1826, became a model for a new form of punishment known as contract penal servitude. At Sing Sing and Auburn Penitentiary farther upstate, incarcerated people would learn discipline through coerced labor. The prison, meanwhile, would sell the labor power of incarcerated people to private contractors, thereby reducing the costs of incarceration. By the 1830s, this “Auburn system” had become the predominant model of prison organization throughout the industrializing states of the Northeast. This book traces the relationship between prison work and the labor market over the course of two hundred years of US history, from the emergence of the Auburn system in the third decade of the nineteenth century to our unsettled present. The author argues that it is often within the context of prison work that employers, reformers, political elites, and labor advocates, not to mention incarcerated people themselves, have thought through, fought over, and worked out the relationship between coercion and a “free” market for labor.</jats:p>