Prisons Are Anti-Labor Institutions. We Need an Anti-Carceral Labor Movement.

Though as a child Hunter Furr saw his father and grandfather come home from prison “tired and stressed,” he became the third generation of his family to work at Caswell Correctional Center in North Carolina, a job he described in 2022 as “a good experience. In this line of work, it’s a family and a brotherhood that no other job can give you.”

In 2023, Frank Squillante followed the career path set forth by his father and grandfather, and joined the “family” of the New York City Department of Corrections. The youngest Squillante said then that he was ready to “rank up like my father did.”

In late 2024, at a Chicago panel convened to support a coalition to stop the construction of two new state “programming” prisons with a starting price tag of $900 million, Renaldo Hudson, a community leader who served 37 years inside, told the audience: “I watched three generations of families come through and work in corrections.”

Incarceration literally tears some families apart. For others, it is a source of generational economic livelihood.

The wildcat strike waged by New York state correctional guards from February 17 to March 10 of this year highlights the prison as both a site of employment and of tremendous violence. This strike, which ended with the firing of over 2,000 guards who refused a deal offered by the state, resulted in the death of at least seven incarcerated people. A pivotal strike demand was the repeal of New York’s Humane Alternatives to Long-Term Solitary Confinement (HALT) Act. Aimed at limiting the use of solitary confinement, the HALT Act had already contributed to the closure of New York’s first supermax prison, Southport Correctional Facility, and as in other Democratic states, prison closures in New York pose a growing threat to guards’ employment.

Since the 1980s, correctional guards’ unions have used their industry’s jobs in working-class communities as a primary argument for prison construction and against prison closure. In recent weeks, in New York prisons, unionized guards responded to campaigns for decarceration and prison closure by doubling down on their efforts to channel state funds into the prison-industrial complex. At a political moment when austerity is the norm, guards’ unions clamor to maintain large claims on state budgets and represent a significant and organized obstacle to abolitionist social changes.

As two unionized educators in public universities that serve working-class communities of Democratic super majority states, we find the divestment from public education and investment in policing and prisons stark and maddening. In 2025, the California State University system, with over 450,000 students, faces a potential 7.95 percent, or $375.2 million, cut in state funding, yet California recently allocated new funding of $240 million to construct a learning and “rehabilitation” center at just one of its 34 prisons. In Illinois, state funding for post-secondary education fell 46 percent between 2000 and 2023, while budgets for the Department of Corrections increased 22 percent between 2011 and 2020, despite the fact that the incarcerated population decreased. More salt in the wound: In 2024, as public education reels from decades of budget shortfalls, almost a billion dollars is readily available in Illinois to build two new prisons with “therapeutic spaces with programming.”

While college access grows in prison, skyrocketing tuition creates higher barriers to earning a degree on the outside. Growing student debt and increasing economic precarity ensure that training for corrections and other adjacent carceral jobs are popular academic tracks for non-incarcerated working-poor people at our public universities. Is the future we want one where generations of carceral employment are celebrated for Black History Month?

Careening from crisis to crisis, our university’s unions struggle to preserve the remains of public higher education. Our unions contest perpetual budget cuts, but reflecting the wide labor movement, ours have not named growing corrections budgets as part of the problem. Our unions in higher education do take on issues that impact student learning and student well-being. Can we build on this work and recognize that challenging carceral unions has the potential to both free up state resources and create better futures all, including our students?

The Power of Correctional Unions

Thirty-eight-point-two percent of police officers, prison guards and firefighters, the occupational category of “protective services,” are unionized, among the highest levels of unionization in the U.S. Most corrections workers are, like us, in public sector unions, and prison guards are powerfully represented. Almost 100,000 prison staff in the U.S. are American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees members, and thousands of other prison workers are represented by American Federation of Government Employees.

Created in the 1950s, carceral unions have been primary advocates of prison growth. For example, the powerful California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), represents about 26,000 state prison guards. The CCPOA exponentially increased its own political power from a relatively small union that had just 3,200 members in 1973 by consistently advocating for pro-incarceration policies such as California’s notorious Three Strikes Law, opposing alternatives to incarceration, amplifying the voices of conservative victim’s rights groups and consistently positioning prison expansion as the only vehicle to public safety.

By devaluing incarcerated labor, prisons devalue all labor. Prisons are fundamentally anti-labor institutions, and guards’ unions are fundamentally anti-labor in their orientation.

Currently, CCPOA is a key force opposing community-led campaigns to begin closing California’s prisons. CCPOA donated $2.9 million to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political efforts (31 percent of the union’s political spending since 2001). As a Democratic governor, Newsom has slowed prison closures despite clear recommendations from the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, invested new funds in developing a “California Model” that emphasizes rehabilitation while increasing prison spending, granted significant raises to prison guards and vetoed a bill that would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars by eliminating empty prison beds.

While guards’ unions can collaborate with organized labor (for example, in 2011, prison guards linked arms with teachers to resist the union-busting austerity measures of Scott Walker’s administration in Wisconsin), assumptions of solidarity are dangerous. Just as unionized cops suppress worker activism, unionized prison guards enforce the exploitation of incarcerated workers whose labor runs prisons.

The guards in New York, members of the powerful New York State Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association, Inc., have repeatedly framed their labor action around worksite safety, and invoked racist imagery of incarcerated people as inherently violent and dangerous. Yet during and just before this strike, groups of guards beat to death Messiah Nantwi and Robert Brooks, raising the question: who is actually violent and dangerous?

Without union or other representation, incarcerated people are forced to cook, clean, wash clothes, take on administrative tasks, care for the dying, provide medical support and legal advocacy, tutor, and more. If paid, they receive meager wages. For example, over 1,000 incarcerated people fought fires in Los Angeles this year for the inhumane wage of less than $11 dollars a day. (A unionized firefighter trainee in the Los Angeles Fire Department makes $85, 315 a year plus benefits.) By devaluing incarcerated labor, prisons devalue all labor. Prisons are fundamentally anti-labor institutions, and guards’ unions are fundamentally anti-labor in their orientation.

Job Crisis

Despite their unions’ power, being a prison guard is toxic work. In 2021, corrections officers quit “in droves” across the county. From guards’ unions to the U.S. Senate, the message being conveyed is one of “crisis” in U.S. prisons: staff shortages, decrepit facilities, faulty equipment, or as a journalist described the Maryland prison system “buckling under its own weight, struggling to perform its most basic functions.”

As sites of death and harm for incarcerated people, it is not surprising that research reports high rates of depression and self-harm for prison guards. Black folks in corrections continue to report racial harassment. Misogyny is rampant. In a 2024 study, 34 percent of prison guards interviewed reported experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (compared to 14 percent of military veterans and 7 percent of the general public).

Our aim is not to mitigate or minimize the forms of violence guards perpetrate on incarcerated people and their visiting loved ones. Rather, we highlight that the toxicity of the prison-industrial complex leaches into the bodies of these workers. Laboring in corrections is not a “good job.”

The “crisis” in the field of corrections has been adroitly deployed by guards’ unions: Unsafe and harmful working conditions justify larger corrections budgets to purchase new, more lethal, weapons and technologies, to (re)build prisons, and more. The New York strike tried to circumvent the legislative process, allowing guards to dictate how prison reform, particularly solitary confinement, is or is not implemented. The crisis always requires more state dollars, and pro-prison policies and legislation that invariably equate prisons and guard work with public safety.

Addressing this “crisis” in corrections justifies incursions into other public spaces. In Illinois, after almost a year of labor action highlighting prison guards’ occupational hazards, in early 2025 the state issued a press release detailing “new partnerships” to increase the cadet or guard training class capacity by up to 300 percent by using public educational facilities — community colleges and elementary schools — as corrections officers training sites.

Building Futures

Jobs always seem to be available in the prison and punishment industry, and our students’ precarious economic realities tend to pull them toward academic tracks that offer the promise of secure employment, economic stability and health insurance.

We don’t blame our students for signing up for criminology classes or drifting into work in carceral industries: In 2025, in Illinois the starting salary for a corrections officer trainee is $57,828 per year plus full benefits. The minimum requirements, according to the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) website: “Valid driver’s license; High School Diploma or GED certificate; U.S. citizen or authorized alien with proof of a permanent resident card; Speak, read, and write English.” Overtime pay is always available.

We want futures that are not about toiling on either side of prison walls.

Beyond the always available guard work in corrections, while librarians, social workers and nurses struggle to both find and retain jobs in today’s public schools (the National Education Association reports that the median starting teacher salary in Illinois in 2024 was $43,515), these positions are available with competitive wages; health, vision and dental insurance; vacation, sick and personal days; a wellness program; an upward mobility program; a deferred compensation plan, and a retirement plan at 30 locations with the IDOC.

Mainstream media’s coverage of recent attempted prison closures often fixates on the problem of job loss. Yet where are similar outcries about job loss, public safety and well-being when budget cuts close or endlessly wither schools, colleges, hospitals and libraries?

As educators, our work is to advocate for meaningful lives and work outside of violent institutions for the amazing students who attend our universities. Guard unions helped to create a flourishing market for (toxic) jobs in corrections, and our job is to imagine and demand sustainable and affirming lives and worksites for all. There are other pathways: In late 2024, Kentucky’s Appalachian Rekindling Project bought a plot of land to keep it out of the hands of a proposed new prison build and aims to support people locally to grow plants or rewild bison. A community member observed to Louisville Public Media: “If they’re going to do something with the land, this would be a much better solution.” Closed prisons can become farms, museums, sites for teaching and learning, or other kinds of anchors for multigenerational employment or community building. The money saved could build guaranteed minimum income programs, which clearly improve community wellbeing.

Anti-Carceral Union Movements

Now is the time for organized labor movements to take an anti-carceral stance. Guards’ unions remain a powerful player in state politics, yet are threatened by the successes of movements for decarceration and abolition. With wildcat strikes and job actions at prisons that explicitly aim to expand corrections, the creation of proxy carceral organizations to manage reform, and the circulation of reports humanizing prison staff and their hard working conditions, guards and other carceral unions are on the strategic offensive. Now is precisely the right time to amplify our demands: We want futures that are not about toiling on either side of prison walls.

First, we can build and strengthen demands that organized labor divest from carceral unionism: In the wake of the 2020 uprising, a handful of labor unions demanded the removal of police unions from AFL-CIO. Select campus-based unions pushed for divestments from policing: The Professional Staff Congress union, representing City University of New York workers, passed a resolution calling for the AFL-CIO to sever ties with the International Union of Police Associations; the Graduate Employees’ Organization at the University of Michigan demanded that the university “cut all ties with police.” Beyond campus-based labor unions, let us deepen and proliferate these demands, and include guards and other carceral unions.

Second, organized labor can sign on to prison closure campaigns, oppose new spending on prisons, and advocate to move public resources from corrections to institutions that sustain and support working people as nurses unions have begun to do in California. Rather than accept the lie of austerity, or that the only place a nurse or teacher can find work with good compensation or a wellness package is at a prison, let’s push our unions to engage in collective study and action so that we might demand and create more life affirming futures for all of us.

Third, build solidarity with incarcerated workers. Why is AFL-CIO banking on guards, and not the millions of working-class people who are locked up and labor under life-threatening conditions, with little or no compensation? The goal here is not simply to have better working conditions and higher compensation for incarcerated workers. Rather, it is to strengthen the organizing of a base of people inside prison and to recognize incarcerated people as central actors in working-class struggle.

Finally, let’s ensure that all unions adopt models of common good bargaining, or social justice unionism, or the push to use bargaining to build stronger communities, which clearly shapes all our worksites. With demands that exceed employee compensation or direct workplace conditions — including affordable housing and sanctuary policies — the Chicago Teachers’ Union has pushed to use collective bargaining to affirmatively shape the communities and schools we desperately need.

We don’t want our universities to prepare more laborers for carceral industries. Unions in education and other parts of the public sector are large enough, and potentially powerful enough, to challenge the power of correctional unions. Now is the time for us to do so. Together.