NY’s Prison Guard Strike Has Roots in Decades of Racialized Deindustrialization

A strike wave has spread throughout New York State prisons. Since February 17, 14,000 guards in 40 of the state’s 42 facilities have joined wildcat walkouts, neglecting and endangering incarcerated people throughout the state. Since February 19, National Guard troops have been deployed to replace striking guards. These actions are illegal under New York State’s Taylor Law, which prohibits public sector workers from striking. Nonetheless, state correctional officials have negotiated with the guards — and have agreed to suspend compliance with a recent law limiting the amount of a time a prisoner can spend in solitary confinement, among other concessions. One of the first prisons to join the strike wave was Elmira Correctional Facility in Elmira, New York. To make sense of this movement, I sat down with Andrea R. Morrell, author of the forthcoming book Prison Town: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York. Morrell is an associate professor of anthropology at Guttman Community College, City University of New York.

Jarrod Shanahan: What context do readers need in order to understand the nature of this strike wave?

Andrea R. Morrell: In 2021, New York State passed the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act, which limits the use of solitary confinement to 15 consecutive days and 20 days in a 60-day period, and outlaws it altogether for people under 21 and over 55, people with disabilities and pregnant people. The New York State prison system has largely failed to enforce the law since it came into effect in March 2022. Solitary was widespread in the New York State system. Until two years ago, when they closed because of political pressure, there were two all SHU [Special Housing Unit] facilities in New York State, where every person in the jail was in solitary. This was a win of the Black Lives Matter movement, of abolitionism and a general set of social movements focused on the lives of incarcerated people. And if you look at the guards’ wildcat strike right now, a lot of the signs that guards are holding are against the HALT Act. This is guards reacting to the state trying to actually fulfill some of the push of this legislation.

What is the guards’ interest in opposing limits on solitary confinement?

When your job is to physically control other humans, it is difficult, impossible work. It’s always an incomplete project. And if your job is to physically control other people, then solitary is where you cage the radicals, people who ask for more than you want to give them, people you don’t like, people who treat you with disrespect. Since we do not have a proper system of mental health care in this country, solitary is used to house people who need mental health care and aren’t getting it, the people that guards have been known to call “the bugs.”

So, for the guards, it’s just an easier job. And that’s really the problem. We can’t rely on a system of punishment that puts the needs of jailers ahead of everyone else.

Are there any other grievances?

Some of it is about overtime. During the current strike, the New York Post’s version of the story has been that there was a riot, and so the guards had to pull back because they were scared.

The guards also say this in New York City; it allows them to frame the problems of the jail as a matter of understaffing, which can be fixed with more money for the prisons, which means more guards, more members in their union, more political power… all leading toward more control over the prisons by the guards themselves, and more freedom for them to dole out violence and neglect as they see fit.

Exactly. And part of the striking guards’ line, and the Post’s line, has been: “New York state is getting too soft. They don’t want to allow us to use the tools at our disposal. Sometimes these people are such bad people that we need the most intense tools. And, segregating people, the worst of the worst, is necessary to maintain a safe jail.”

That’s their line. And all of this is just a racialized way of saying these people are not people; making incarcerated people seem like animals and the guards seem like victims. And at the root of this is the stubborn fact that jails and prisons are not safe places. They cannot be safe.

They are great concentrations of violence.

That’s right. Imagining a safe place from the perspective of a guard would mean having every tool at your advantage to physically control and maim people’s psyches and bodies. Think about solitary; we know what it does to people.

Charles Dickens observed this during his visit to Eastern State Penitentiary in the 1840s! He said it was nothing but torture, with long lasting psychological damage.

That’s right; it’s a torture chamber. And it’s been well known for many years. But for the guards, it makes their job easier. But what does that mean for the incarcerated person? The basic act of being able to share a meal with somebody, or talk to somebody, or go and do some work, all of those things that give you an ounce of life, are taken away.

Shifting gears, tell us a little bit about why you have been studying the New York State prison system.

I have been studying and writing about Elmira, New York, as a prison town for probably 15 years. Elmira is a small city in a rural part of central New York State. And it is my hometown.

My grandfathers were both guards, which is what drew me to the project. Elmira has had a prison since 1876. It was the third prison built in New York State, after Auburn and Sing Sing. In the mid-’80s, during the big prison boom era in New York State, they built a second prison in Auburn and it was completed in ’88. In 1991, it was converted to an all-special housing unit, a “SHU” facility. That second prison closed two years ago. So now there’s just one, and it’s maximum security.

You just completed an ethnographic study of Elmira, as a prison town. What’s unique about a prison town, and what did you find about Elmira in particular?

Many prison towns share the commonalities of the violence within the prison “leaking out” of the prison. There are high rates of alcoholism and domestic violence, often described by guards as “letting the job get to you.” In Elmira, there is also a panic that crime is rising in the town because prisoners’ families are moving to the city to be closer to their incarcerated kin. I found that not to be true, but rather that Elmira is just becoming poorer, in a pattern similar to many deindustrialized cities.

Elmira has had a prison for 150-plus years. The second prison was sought after by the town elites, as a way to make up for the losses of deindustrialization. There’s a very clear pattern of state reorganization: Basically, New York State was giving out prisons in a parallel pattern of development to “enterprise zones.” This was the foundation of neoliberal state policy in the ‘80s: Public sector growth was limited to prisons and policing while the state created avenues, like enterprise zones which offered tax cuts, for private capital to flourish. The only state funding that was being given was through prisons, prison expansion and the salaries of prison workers. That’s why Elmira wanted the second prison.

So, there wasn’t exactly a crowded field of options for the local economy.

Right. The way the story is often told is that small towns were salivating for prisons. I think it’s more correct to say that certain elements of the local elite were salivating for capital. I found that in Elmira, like most places, there are debates about what kind of place Elmirans want the town to be. There is an interfaith group that runs a welcome center for people visiting the prison after seeing women and children waiting in long lines in the rain for their visits. Not to mention that having the reputation as a prison town may scare off other potential investments.

That was the case in the ‘80s, that was the case in the ‘90s and that’s the case now. It’s important to think about Elmira as a place where prisons grew, and why it was a place ripe for prison expansion. But I also think then, after it was built and maintained, what does a prison do to a place?

And I think it is a source of immiseration. To me, that’s the most important part of it. It foments racism. The last time they would release the information to me, in 2008, the guards at Elmira were 97 percent white, and my fieldwork indicates that this has held steady. And the prisoners are 60 to 70 percent people of color. As Dylan Rodriguez says, it’s not an apartheid in the orthodox sense. Right? But there is a racial character undoubtedly to how these relationships inside the prison happen. And that’s replicated and becomes stronger on the outside; it brings that set of relationships and brings it onto the outside.

Part of the story that you’re telling is how an industrial workforce was transformed into a workforce that’s dependent on the prison.

Absolutely. And when they were building the second prison, the former industrial workers were the ones who were imagined to be the guards. One guard I spoke with talked about taking the guard exam in the early ‘80s. He scored really well, and his boss at the A&P plant, a massive food processing facility, said: “If you don’t take that job, I’m gonna kick your ass. That’s a good job!” And a year later the A&P plant closed down. Right? So, in the imagination of the state, this was who was going to take those jobs. However, there are only 400 or 500 jobs in the prison, compared with the tens of thousands of jobs lost to deindustrialization. Prison expansion did not bring the city back to the era of near full employment — “the glory days” of the city. But there was also some truth to it. If you have a high school diploma and you want to stay near your family in Elmira, here’s the set of choices. Prison work is one of those choices

Can you say a little bit more about the racial breakdown? I have studied the New York City system, which is a lot different from upstate: ninety percent people of color guarding 90 percent people of color. In City Time, David Campbell and I reflect on meeting many incarcerated men at Rikers who say “this is nothing like upstate,” where the “good ol’ boys club” is still very much in control. Looking at places like Elmira, I’m interested in how it came to be that a certain percentage of the former industrial workforce were staffing the facilities, while another percentage of that same workforce became locked up in them.

Part of the formation of whiteness is that when you become a guard, you are well compensated enough that you become a category of “good white.” And that protects you in some limited ways from doing state time. The dispossessions of Black and Brown workers by the state through mass incarceration are built on the organization of Jim Crow North, are built on immigration restrictions of the postwar era. In some ways, these racializations become naturalized in the institution of the prison as jailer and jailed, deserving and undeserving.

How do labor unions figure into this transition?

It’s a defeated union system. I went to the unions there when I was doing research, and they are trying to make sense of the fact that a huge part of the workforce is this right-wing group that left the AFL. Guard and police unions are not a group of people that sees itself aligned with the historical goals of the union movement. During World War II, there was a CIO union working in the steel-based industries in Elmira who went on strike with Jamaican workers there on temporary visas. There were real historical solidarities there, and those have diminished with the transition to a prison-based local economy.

What is it about the prison that is so disastrous for solidarity?

First of all, I think you have to think of what it means to be upstate. You and Jack Norton wrote about this in “The Long Shadow of the Prison Wall.” Being upstate is part of the punishment. And you know, when those guys told you Rikers is “nothing like upstate,” part of that narrative is the fact that the guards are white and rural, and they identify very strongly with their whiteness, especially in that system of cages. It’s also a very particular workplace. I had one guard say to me it is unsafe, physically unsafe for them to empathize with incarcerated people. He said, “Of course I sometimes think about them and their life and their experiences and their, you know, what led them, how their lives are different. But I can’t.” He physically could not think too hard about it.

These are white men who are recruited to do the work of physical control. That’s the job. The ethnographer, Lorna Rhodes, in the book Total Confinement, describes an all-solitary facility in the Pacific Northwest. One of the guards she interviewed described himself as “a dog on a chain for the state.” If you have a dog on a chain, then you can pull it back and let it go when you need to. Looking at the guard strike going on right now, I think that’s what these guards are fighting for. They’re like: You’ve let me be this rabid dog for this long. Why stop now?

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has charged six officers at Marcy Correctional Facility for the murder and manslaughter of Robert Brooks — and they obviously murdered the man. But Hochul has overseen this whole system of murder. The prison system is the architecture of murder, of slow death and lost life.

Something that I’ve been interested in, and emphasized a lot in my book Captives, is the way that guards covet their ability to use force, not just as a practical tool, but as kind of a barometer of their political power. It seems like this latest guard strike has taken up this issue, which we’ve seen a lot in the history of the New York City jails, which is the ability of guards to use violence as they see fit without any civilian oversight or the threat of any kind of consequences. Do you see this going on in the strike?

I do. This is most often framed as: “This is a difficult job. How can you take away our right to do this? I try to remember that everyone in a given prison knows that there are certain guards who have a reputation for particular brutality. Right? There’s a range of ways guards do the work of social control, and there are certain people who have a particular penchant for violence. They are useful to the wardens, and they’re useful to the state, right? Like the most brutal people serve a use and have value to the state of New York in controlling huge groups of people. Again, they’re a dog on a chain for the state.

The guards’ demand for impunity is related to the maintenance of the system in general. Because if the brass expects you to go out and kick ass, and that’s really the only way to do the job, then it’s central to how the prison functions. And it’s such a part of the culture of the job that if you reduce the guards’ ability to be brutes, to brutalize, then how do you maintain the whole system? Right? The impunity to brutalize hits up against the whole structure of guarding and the violence at the center of the system.

From this perspective, the guards sort of have a point when they say to the state: You’re tasking us with great violence, and then penalizing us for it when you lose your stomach at what you’ve asked us to do. It reminds me of a common scene from Chester Himes’s Harlem Detective novels, when the Black detectives, Grave Digger and Coffin Ed, are called into their boss’s office, and he says, “Thanks for saving the day, but do you have to be so brutal in the process?” Their reply is something like: “You have given us the job of enforcing social order in Harlem, where Black people are fenced in and kept in desperate poverty. Did you think this would be a peaceful affair?”

Right! “Did you expect it to be clean?” New York State gives guards this whole arsenal to maintain control through violence, but then says: “If you don’t do it in a way that we can suture it up, then we’re gonna let you go.”

There’s a recurrent ideology that you find among cops and guards, which is essentially a fascist ideology, that basically says: You cannot trust the elites above us; they’re weak, and anyway are just using us and will throw us under the bus at the first chance. And you equally cannot trust the rabble below; they’re just scum and will wreck society if they aren’t repressed. We occupy a middle stratum that alone understands what’s necessary to hold things together.

Rebecca Hill wrote this great essay about guard strikes in the 1970s called “The Common Enemy is the Boss and the Inmate” that shows the history of this.

As the meme goes, my book Captives is the anime, and Rebecca’s essay is the manga! This has been going on for decades, but I was recently scolded on a progressive podcast for supporting the removal of guards from the AFL-CIO.

I think that the questions that come out of removing guards’ unions and cops from the AFL-CIO would be the richest conversations the labor movement had in generations. It would open up discussions of the basic racializations that are at the heart of these prisons. If you avoid this question, you miss half of what happened to working-class life in the U.S. in the late-20th century. Right? I mean, you miss the story of Black dispossession, of homelessness and of how elites tried to resolve these racializations with prison expansion.

Cops and guards have carved out lucrative jobs and comfortable lives for themselves in a period of such catastrophic defeat for much of the U.S. working class. And they have real incentives to keep things exactly the way they are.

This brings us back to Elmira. Guards have a very distinct social position. They lost one prison, and if they lose a second one, then it destroys that group’s power. Right? And these are real people. They’re the coaches of their kids’ little league teams. They have social standing, nice cars, they can go on vacation, all the trappings of a middle-class life. They don’t want to lose that.

One final question: This strike is in violation of the Taylor Law, which prohibits public sector workers in New York State from going on strike. But the guards are winning concessions, and seem on track to succeed in getting what they want, while effectively ignoring the law.

It just goes to show, there’s no such thing as an illegal strike — only one you win or lose!