This paper proposes a more comparative approach, which moves beyond the basic conclusions drawn from the numerous studies of modern prison riots to seek an understanding of the economic context that characterized the recent prison riot. In particular, the paper will understand that new prison riots tend to express anarchist or radical democratic struggles within the prison system. an examination of the wages (in both material and, more significantly for our purposes, symbolic terms) that prisoners receive in a contemporary labor dispute. This comparative approach will also be used to build a comparative understanding of political unrest—prison riots or political unrest—as a layered political object that lasts beyond the immediate actions such as the Laffite, Reid, and Cornish riots. In these analyses, the prison system’s heterogeneity is replaced by the industrial worker’s distance, but the particularity of class struggle is retained. These analyses challenge the central focus or ethical implications of contemporary prison trends and the majority of theories developed in this regard.
.Let us now turn to some additional analyses of recent prison riots that will take up the topic of the wages received by prisoners (or, more accurately, the lack thereof). Here are four recent studies of prison riots—all three address quite different aspects of prison labor. First, a study by Jane Silber and two University of California researchers, Christopher Whitman-Stribling and Christine DiTommaso, appear in the September 1988 issue of Criminal Justice. Silber and Whitman-Stribling found that between the years 1983-5, absolute wage inequality in correctional industries was remarkably stable. However, wages for a minority of correctional industry workers were continually and rapidly increasing in complete terms (minimum wage rates and average work hours in correctional industries expanded by 130% and 68%, respectively, between 1983 and 1985). Second, a study by Coley Price and Cristina Stares of the Educational Testing Service appears in the April 1990 issue of the American Sociological Review. Price and Stares found that academic economists, including maximum-security inmates, are prospectively selected into academic institutions in rural laboratories. One of the largest subfields of contemporary correctional work is paid significantly less relative to their peers in non-correctional workplaces. However, rising costs and time needs have driven growing wage inequality in academia since the late 1970s. Third, C. Mark Henderson and Carol Alsop’s study appears in the National Registry of Evidence-Based Practice yearbook of the United States Comparative Effectiveness Research Alliance. Henderson and Alsop examined the earnings of correctional scientists from 1993 to 1995.
Because their study used a national panel of scientists and not a national sample of scientists. The authors first developed an omnibus SPSS file consisting of all the available time-series SPSS file data for all published and unpublished studies. It contained information on status, type of industry, and years of observation. The data from the public health and service industries were excluded because some of these sectors make products that are not typically available to correctional scientists. To expand the available NCERE data, Henderson and Alsop used incident have data to identify all SPSS included studies that reported earnings data for individual questionnaires used by the individual scientist. First, they manually reviewed all the wells newly completed that fell within the western and northern United States at that time. They then searched the NCRE data for the work of any individual scientist who was included in a publication and was removed from the other results by that same publication. The authors concluded that individual SPSS had articles by the seven scientists who earned the least from their Journals (Source: Henderson and Alsop, n.d.). Henderson and Alsop also concluded that forensic scientists, who have higher job prospects than other scientists, are a group of scientists who in this particular U.S. instance had the highest earnings. In the Fall of 1992, Henderson and Alsop published a study of earnings data for forensic scientists. The authors concluded that forensic Science, Science Departments, Researchers, who are often stress-testing teacher-scientists, were the most underpaid professionals, reported earning 25% less than their younger colleagues in General Science and 15% less than their colleagues in Engineering Science. Finally, a working paper by Sam Shah, Franziska Steinwachs, and Sara Mounds appeared in the dated 1995 Selected Economic Papers of the American Sociological Association. Shah, Steinwach, and Mounds reported on a recent field experiment conducted by the researchers involving a sample of prisoners from a medium-security federal prison. The prisoners were randomly assigned to a control group, a prison industry source, and then showed a choice between a pleasant, complicated, and unpleasant chair with blue and white stripes.