"This article assesses prison labor regimes' role in anchoring and reinforcing market discipline during three eras of U.S. capitalism: the industrializing North, the post-emancipation South, and neoliberalism. Synthesizing evidence from revisionist historian and political economy literatures, this article analyzes the ways in which, in addition to being a feature of particular social and economic orders, prison labor has also been deeply imbricated in the very production of those orders, particularly their racialized and class-based social relations. It argues that although critical political economy has generally failed to incorporate prisons and prison labor into theorizations of contemporary capitalism, these have been and are increasingly vital to the functioning and reproduction of capital in the U.S. context. As such, prison labor regimes should be understood as part of a range of state strategies to aggressively impose the forms of labor and social discipline central to specific regimes of governance and accumulation."

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