Agricultural work reflects a history and ongoing practice of forced labor that often produces economic benefits for state and private interests. It also signals through racialized and classed logics supposed behavioral deficiencies to correct through work. This disciplinary racial capitalism operates through a range of exploitative and rehabilitative discourses to justify prisoners’ engaging in the reproduction of their civil death to maintain the bare minimum of biological life.
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Growing Chains: Prison Agriculture and Racial Capitalism in the United States