Solidarity Beyond Bars

"""A solid piece of scholarship exploring carceral customs in Western capitalist societies, grounded in a coherent political economy.""--Bob Gaucher, co-founder and previous editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons ""From Amazon to COVID, from racial justice struggles to housing, workers have been the backbone of collective struggle. In this book, Rashid and House take us behind bars to explore the histories and contemporary struggles of incarcerated workers and the possibilities for organizing. A must read for all interested in abolition movements, workers' struggle, and the urgent need to collectively organize for a better world.""--El Jones, author of Abolitionist Intimacies ""Solidarity Behind Bars should be read by social justice and labour scholars and activists. House and Rashid take the reader through the byzantine bureaucratic, labour, and punitive structures that render prisoners' work invisible, denying them the same rights as free labourers. Well researched and engagingly written, Solidarity Behind Bars not only describes the current (and deplorable) state of prison labour but explains how legal paradoxes and capitalist impulses brought Canada to this point, and what the paths forward may be.--Melissa Munn, co-author of Disruptive Prisoners and On the Outside ""This book is a timely and important contribution to scholarship on abolition, prisoners' rights, and labour organizing. The urgent topic of prison labour unionization has rarely been articulated or proposed. The authors discuss the intricate links between capitalism and imprisonment, showing how unionization of prison labour can ameliorate some of the harms of incarceration, is compatible with larger projects of prison abolition, and how prisoners' inclusion in workers struggles will be beneficial to broader struggles against capitalist exploitation.""--Jessica Evans, Toronto Metropolitan University"