ABOLITION LABOR | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
Date and Time
Sep 19, 2024 6:00 pm
Location
14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
Sep 19, 2024 6:00 pm
14th & V
ABOLITION LABOR chronicles the national movement to end forced labor, much of it unpaid, in American prisons. It draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated persons in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and New York to give a more holistic picture of these work conditions, and it 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.
This book 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.
Authors Andrew Ross, Aiyuba Thomas, and Tommaso Bardelli are joining us on the Busboys stage to share more about the legalization of slavery through the U.S. prison system, the work being done to abolish it, and what you can do to join the fight. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and the authors will be signing following the program.
This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of ABOLITION LABOR will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will not be livestreamed.
We ask that guests RSVP in order to receive direct updates about the event from Busboys and Poets Books
Andrew Ross is asocial activist and Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where he also directs the Prison 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 Research Lab. He is currently the project manager for “Movements Against Mass Incarceration,” an archival oral history project at Columbia University.
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.
