Robert Gangi, Vincent Schiraldi, and Jason Zeidenberg update their 1998 study of the social consequences of the disinvestment in higher education and the meteoric rise in prison expenditures in New York state in recent decades. They provide a primer on structural relations between prisons and universities. Time and again, our contributors refused to treat prisons and universities simply as institutions competing for state support in a conceptual vacuum. Instead, they repeatedly pointed out the complicity of academic disciplines and institutions in the formation and development of the U.S. prison system and situated both prisons and universities within a larger political economy. The point, our contributors might agree, is not simply to protect or defend the university or push policy-makers to choose education over incarceration, but to make changing university and prison systems part of a larger radical strategy.
Workplace is an independent journal that reports on, and advocates for, the academic labor movement.
We believe it is essential that the academic labor movement contribute to, and actively seek coalitions with, larger social movements in the U.S. and elsewhere. How America Profits from Crime . Martin, Randy, ed. The Politics of Work in the Managed University . Duke UP, 1998.