Abstract
I first stepped into an Immigration Removal Centre in 2017. I showed my ID, shoved my stuff into a locker, entered through one of many locked gates, was searched and then waited for a security officer to take me through to the visiting room. So began a few years of visiting incarcerated folks who had asked for emotional support. I learned about this brutal system though people’s stories, the piles of dog-eared Home Office letters that they shared with me, the anxiety they carried in their bodies, the fear in their eyes. At the same time, I was doing and continue to do research on welfare state violence, whose systemic brutality is partly enacted through pushing people into paid work as if that matters more than dignity, health and life itself. So, reading Jon Burnett’s landmark Work and the Carceral State felt deeply personal and incredibly relevant. Yet I have struggled to write this review – full of an anxiety that I can’t do justice to the depth and breadth of analysis, and tempted to write just a single line – ‘read this book and read it soon’.
This book challenges two ideas foundational to state formation and its long colonial histories – the necessity of paid work and incarceration. These foundations are hard to shake – as Angela Davis reminds us, 1 we hold them dear as we do the state’s work in and through our interior lives, making it hard to imagine life without them. Charting a breath-taking history – both long and near – Work and the Carceral State leaves little doubt that the crafting of suffering has always been central to work, and carcerality, in different guises over different times, is part of and a response to this suffering. This is to understand carcerality not as an unfortunate by-product of labour, but as social policy itself, and as a form of statecraft. This is hauntingly evoked in the analysis of an interviewee (cited in the book) who has lived experience of prison and immigration detention, and who says: ‘I am not just talking about the conditions here. I am talking about the condition’ (p. 126).
Teasing out through genealogy the intricately entwined histories of work and carcerality, Burnett shows how the present is shaped by the past, but not simply a repetition of it. However, this past – a past that has never fully passed – has ‘chilling resonances’ (p. 147) with the present ‘management’ of people deemed surplus in the wake of colonialism and enslavement – reminding me of Christina Sharpe’s analysis of survival in the afterlives of slavery. 2
The book begins by exploring, in Chapter 1, ‘Labour discipline and reform’ – a renewed commitment to expanding prison labour from 2010 and how this was rationalised as a distinct form of ‘carceral social policy’ (p. 16) – bringing together liberal reformists with blunt criminalisation. Charting the same period but shifting focus to immigration detention, Chapter 2 – ‘The immigration detention estate’ – analyses the use of detainee labour in the maintenance of carceral institutions. This threads together with Chapter 1 to show how state discourse of carceral labour evidences both assimilation and expulsion. Chapter 3, ‘Carceral haunting’, charts a counter history of carceral labour – a ‘haunting’ marked by simultaneous practices of punishment in the metropole and violent colonial expansion and extraction – sometimes innocuously referred to as ‘policy transfer’. This story develops throughout Chapters 4 (‘Political anatomies of labour’) and 5 (‘Labour control regimes’), which draw on twenty-nine interviews conducted between 2019 and 2020 with people who have experienced incarceration and with two prison officers, alongside data accessed through the Freedom of Information Act, to show ‘how work is cohered within the reproduction of order’ through both the absorption of people deemed ‘surplus’ and the ‘organised abandonment’ of others (pp. 17–18).
An immense strength of the book, and something that called out to me as someone who works on welfare state violence and the way it kills people, was the foregrounding of the welfare system as produced through and reproductive of carceral statecraft. By detailing the role of carcerality in the management of poverty, Burnett powerfully illustrates this ‘penal-welfare nexus’ (p. 9) – perfectly encapsulated in the condition of ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ which prohibits access to means-tested benefits for those subject to immigration control. That carcerality is a connective tissue across immigration control and welfare, or national and social security systems, and recognising this is a powerful way to connect different struggles and mobilise cross-movement solidarities. Similarly, much can also be learned about the carceral state, and about abolition, through paying attention to the long histories and contemporary incarceration of those deemed Mad and Disabled. These linkages are made within the book but left me wanting more, especially as they powerfully illustrate how carceral institutions enact both ‘abandonment and incapacitation’ (p. 13).
Constantly reiterating how the tentacles of the carceral state reach out into and sustain broader systems of power and state violence, this book is radical and abolitionist. Radical in its meaning of understanding roots – the roots and routes by which carcerality came to be framed as a common-sense solution to inequality and oppressions of all kinds. Abolitionist because it’s impossible to read it and make a case for reforms and tweaks. Instead, struggles against ‘carceral labour must be bound more broadly to demystifying, delegitimising, disrupting and ultimately dismantling the logics of the carceral state itself’ (p. 157).
Perhaps I should simply have stuck with my one-line review – ‘read this book and read it soon’.
City University and Healing Justice, London