4 - Disciplining the State, Civilizing the Market: The Campaign to Abolish Contract Prison Labor

Summary

Sour bread, sour bread; no work, no work.

Convicts' mess hall chant, Sing Sing Prison, 1870s

In the Gilded Age, contractors and their agents exercised power far more effectively than did the great mass of unfree, dependent prisoners in their charge; but they did not exercise it just as they pleased. Rewriting the prison rulebooks, ordering speed-ups in production, and prescribing new ways of organizing and disciplining convict workers were easy enough; but actually implementing the rules and successfully subjecting the convicts (and the state's keepers) to the disciplinary rigors of the new regime posed a far more difficult set of challenges. In the early stages of restructuring (c. 1872–78), prisoners in every region of the country rebelled and struck against the reforms with an intensity and confidence unseen since the days of the early republican penitentiary and its feisty, rights-conscious inmates. Once the authorities put down these rebellions and submitted their prisoners to the discipline of large-scale industrial labor, they soon discovered that the very structure of the new, large-scale contract industries afforded new opportunities – and new means – of individual and collective acts of defiance. Indeed, the very success of the consolidated contract system was to have some deeply contradictory effects, including the destabilization of the system itself.

Nor were these the only difficulties with which large-scale contractors and the state authorities had to contend in the Gilded Age.