Inside Jobs: Prison Work in the American Labor Market by ADAM REICH
From the stone quarries of Sing Sing that supplied marble for early New York City landmarks to twenty-first-century construction projects staffed by formerly incarcerated workers, Inside Jobs traces the relationship between prison work and the labor market over the past two hundred years. Sociologist Adam Reich demonstrates how prison labor has repeatedly been used to solve economic problems—disciplining workers, lowering labor costs, managing unemployment—revealing unexpected connections that challenge our assumptions about freedom, coercion, and labor itself.
Reich examines the history of work in prisons to understand how it has related to the free labor market. He finds that the organization of prison work, and debates over it, have changed dramatically over time. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, prisons helped shape the emerging factory system as the apprentice-based labor market gave way to industrial production. Labor unions opposed prison labor as immoral, and in the early to mid-twentieth century, the moral character of the workforce became central to economic life within the prison and without. Therapeutic professionals worked in prisons to rehabilitate the incarcerated and determine what motivated them to work. Following prison uprisings in the late twentieth century, prison work became a tool of population control. Yet, paradoxically, work programs were remodeled to mirror the free labor market, requiring applications and hiring processes.
Blending archival research, political economy, and sociological theory, Inside Jobs offers a powerful new framework for understanding mass incarceration and reentry today. Reich examines how the dynamics of mass incarceration have begun to shift. He explores how the “mark of a criminal record”—the stigma traditionally associated with felony convictions—has given way to a “market” for criminal records, as employers discover advantages in hiring disadvantaged, dependent, and disciplined workers recently released from prison. Looking toward the future, Reich focuses on promising efforts to transform this system.
Inside Jobs is an illuminating examination of prison work’s history, its relationship to work outside prison walls, and how the criminal justice system disempowers workers both behind bars and beyond.
About the Author
Adam Reich, Chair and Professor of Sociology, specializes in economic and cultural sociology. He is the author of five books, the most recent of which is Inside Jobs: Prison Work in the American Labor Market (Russell Sage Foundation, 2026). Reich is the co-director of the Columbia Labor Lab.
About the Speakers
Anthony Cooper is the lead instructor for Pathways to Apprenticeship (P2A), a pre-apprenticeship program that connects people from low-income communities–over 60% of whom have been formerly incarcerated–with union Building Trades apprenticeship programs in NYC. Cooper, himself a graduate of the P2A program, worked as a journeyman for Local 79 before returning to P2A to guide others into stable union labor jobs.
Geraldine Downey, Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in Psychology, is interested in the study of personal and status based rejection. In her current work, she is exploring people's expectations of rejection and their impact on the perception of other people's behavior, in anticipation of and following social encounters. Her work has focused on the personality disposition of rejection sensitivity (RS) and on its association with responses to rejection as well as efforts made to prevent it. This line of work has led her to study sensitivity to rejection based on personal, unique characteristics, as well as sensitivity to rejection based on group characteristics such as race and gender. She has sought to investigate the effect of rejection sensitivity on people's behavior by utilizing various techniques including established social cognition paradigms, experimental studies, physiological recordings, brain-imaging and diary studies.
Barbara Kiviat, Assistant Professor of Sociology, is an economic sociologist who studies how moral beliefs and other cultural understandings shape markets and justify the inequalities they produce. She is particularly interested in how normative ideas influence the pricing and allocation of socially important resources, such as insurance, credit, housing, and jobs. Her current project considers how these dynamics play out when corporations use massive amounts of personal data to decide what to offer to individual consumers. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Socio-Economic Review, Sociological Science, and other journals.
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