treadmills and citizenship

Source

An observation by Keally McBride in Punishment and Political Order (2007) popped into my head earlier:

The U.S. political and economic systems have been sustained by the ideology linking citizenship and labor. But maintaining this construction is requiring that a significant proportion of our population, particularly black men, be sacrificed. The unemployed are branded as criminals, removed from public view, and permanently crippled in their attempts to participate in the workforce. Releasing prisoners from the burden of maintaining this fiction for the rest of us should be enough provocation to dismantle the links between choice, labor, and citizenship.

One of her points, or puzzles, is that labor is connected to punishment in the US even when that labor isn’t directly profitable. Naked exploitation isn’t enough to explain the practices of prison farms like Parchman in Mississippi that, yes, had operations that were profitable for a period, but persisted in the South far later than their economically viability.

The socializing function of labor is even clearer in the context of children. Progressive-era reformers, who gave us the juvenile court, held similar beliefs about the virtues of labor. They saw the manual training of young boys in reformatories and industrial schools as the means to correct the noxious influences of rapidly industrializing cities like Chicago. Through work, “delinquent” and “dependent” boys could be socialized into middle-class norms of propriety and a life of productive, lower-class work. Reformers held on to these beliefs long after it was clear (for example) that small-scale farming was no longer sustainable nor was ‘farmer’ a viable career path for their wards.

Over time, we’re simply left living with a residue or echo of these older relationships and assumptions in our contemporary practices. McBride continues,

… we would do well to remember the origins of the treadmill. Tocqueville points out that treadmills, “machines that work without producing,” were developed in English prisons in 1822 to provide constant activity for prisoners without undue competition for other workers.’ At the time, it was inconceivable that such a machine would find its way out of the prison. How curious, almost two hundred years later, it has become a common metaphor for understanding the experience of work and leisure, the rhythms of modern life, even outside the walls of the prison. Endorsing rock crushing, boulder pushing, or any other form of labor, purely for the sake of laboring, shows how far we have traveled from Locke’s initial calculation that labor is fundamentally a matter of rationality (145).