Hometown Prison: Whiteness, Safety, and Prison Work in Upstate New York State

Mass incarceration has been shown to be a force of racializations and class inequality in US life, but little literature has focused on the lives of prison guards. Highlighting the lived experiences of prison guards at two state maximum security prisons in Elmira, New York, a small multiracial city in central New York State, this article uses Cedric Robinson's notion of racial capitalism to show how prison expansion unfolds in New York State at the end of the twentieth century. Guard labor includes both the physical work of control and of basic social reproduction and is done by people who are connected to the cultures, histories, and political economies in which they were raised, what Elmirans often call one's "hometown." I examine prison guards' narratives of their racial encounters inside and outside the prison, their sense of their racialized selves, and their relationship to what they see as often boring, violent, and stigmatized work. I show how the expansion of the carceral state over the past forty years, the period most often referred to as mass incarceration, maintains Fordism's labor hierarchies in a retooled racialization: as jailer and jailed.