Inside Jobs: Prison Work in the American Labor Market by ADAM REICH
From the stone quarries of Sing Sing that supplied marble for early New York City landmarks to twenty-first-century construction projects staffed by formerly incarcerated workers, Inside Jobs traces the relationship between prison work and the labor market over the past two hundred years. Sociologist Adam Reich demonstrates how prison labor has repeatedly been used to solve economic problems—disciplining workers, lowering labor costs, managing unemployment—revealing unexpected connections that challenge our assumptions about freedom, coercion, and labor itself.
Inside Jobs is an illuminating examination of prison work’s history, its relationship to work outside prison walls, and how the criminal justice system disempowers workers both behind bars and beyond.
About the Author
Adam Reich, Chair and Professor of Sociology, specializes in economic and cultural sociology. He is the author of five books, the most recent of which is Inside Jobs: Prison Work in the American Labor Market (Russell Sage Foundation, 2026). Reich is the co-director of the Columbia Labor Lab.
About the Speakers
Anthony Cooper is the lead instructor for Pathways to Apprenticeship (P2A), a pre-apprenticeship program that connects people from low-income communities–over 60% of whom have been formerly incarcerated–with union Building Trades apprenticeship programs in NYC. Cooper, himself a graduate of the P2A program, worked as a journeyman for Local 79 before returning to P2A to guide others into stable union labor jobs.
Geraldine Downey, Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in Psychology, is interested in the study of personal and status based rejection. In her current work, she is exploring people's expectations of rejection and their impact on the perception of other people's behavior, in anticipation of and following social encounters. Her work has focused on the personality disposition of rejection sensitivity (RS) and on its association with responses to rejection as well as efforts made to prevent it. This line of work has led her to study sensitivity to rejection based on personal, unique characteristics, as well as sensitivity to rejection based on group characteristics such as race and gender.
Barbara Kiviat, Assistant Professor of Sociology, is an economic sociologist who studies how moral beliefs and other cultural understandings shape markets and justify the inequalities they produce. She is particularly interested in how normative ideas influence the pricing and allocation of socially important resources, such as insurance, credit, housing, and jobs. Her current project considers how these dynamics play out when corporations use massive amounts of personal data to decide what to offer to individual consumers. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Socio-Economic Review, Sociological Science, and other journals.
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