Compelling Labor and Chilling Dissent: Creative Resistance to Coercive Uses of Solitary Confinement in Prisons and Immigration Detention Centers

Solitary confinement has been used for centuries as a mechanism for controlling incarcerated people. Increasingly, however, prisons and immigration detention centers are strategically administering solitary confinement specifically to compel incarcerated people to perform labor. The coerced labor of incarcerated people acts as a tool in a system of racial capitalism. The largely uncompensated labor of incarcerated people results in savings for prisons and immigration detention centers across the United States. These economic savings make it efficient for the government to continue filling prisons and immigration detention centers with people of color.

This Note, published in Volume 36 of the Harvard BlackLetter Law Journal, explains how solitary confinement and forced labor exacerbate each other in our current system of racial capitalism. This Note offers five observations: First, when solitary confinement is used specifically to threaten people to work and as punishment when they refuse to do so, it continues a legacy of exploiting the labor of people of color to further a system that protects white privilege, power, and profits.

Second, officials in both prisons and immigration detention centers today use solitary confinement as a threat to coerce incarcerated people into performing low-wage or no-wage labor and as punishment for refusing to work. The use of solitary confinement to compel labor is ubiquitous in federal and state carceral facilities, whether managed by the state or by private corporations.

Third, solitary confinement is used to chill organized dissent regarding forced labor in both prisons and immigration detention centers. Incarcerated people have been preemptively placed in solitary confinement to prevent them from demonstrating against labor conditions and have been placed in solitary confinement as punishment for rising up.

Fourth, labor coerced using the threat of solitary confinement is used to construct and reconstruct the infrastructure of solitary confinement itself. In state and federal prisons, incarcerated people are tasked with producing items like beds and restraint loops that are used to furnish solitary confinement cells. In immigration detention centers, forced labor is used to clean and maintain solitary confinement cells and other areas of carceral facilities.

Fifth, advocating to end practices like solitary confinement and forced labor requires creative resistance by people inside carceral spaces and people outside of them. Art can be a powerful tool to bring oppressive conditions to the public’s attention, but care must be taken to avoid recreating elements of the prison-industrial complex through the production and display of activist artwork.

The ubiquity of forced labor resulting from the threat of solitary confinement exposes the destructive and pervasive nature of carceral violence used to further a system of racial capitalism. Understanding how oppressive practices compound one another can help us reject them altogether and imagine a world without carceral punishment.