UCLA

This dissertation is about how the relationship between labor and incarceration impacted the trajectory of California’s carceral state in the decades following World War II. It focuses on the period that began in the 1940s, when California embraced the rehabilitative ideal as the centerpiece of its correctional policy and dramatically expanded its state youth and adult prison systems as well as its county jails and juvenile halls in the name of addressing the root causes of crime largely through prison work programs and vocational training. It explores an often-overlooked moment of contingency that emerged in the mid-1960s, when a broad swath of actors from across the political spectrum began to doubt the legitimacy of the rehabilitative ideal, producing a larger crisis in correctional policy. In particular, the dissertation analyzes a 1965 policy known as the probation subsidy program through which California provided financial incentives to its counties to avoid committing people who were being processed through the juvenile and superior courts to state custody. This policy, which remained in place until 1977, was a part of a broader search for alternatives to incarceration that has received too little attention from historians.Specifically, the dissertation argues that by analyzing three dimensions of the relationship between labor and incarceration, it is possible to more fully understand both the origins of the crisis in correctional policy that emerged during the 1960s, as well as underappreciated aspects of the ways in which that moment was contested. The first dimension of the relationship between labor and incarceration involves the many prison work programs that corrections officials established in their effort to legitimize the rehabilitative ideal, whose failure sowed doubt in the minds of political leaders, corrections officials, and incarcerated people themselves. The second dimension includes the various roles played by carceral workers themselves (prison guards, parole agents, and probation officers) in legitimizing the rehabilitative ideal and shaping the search for alternatives. Finally, the third dimension of the relationship between labor and incarceration refers to the broader political economy in which the carceral state was situated, and especially to the persistence of structural unemployment in the labor market. Not only did structural unemployment help illustrate the limitations of the rehabilitative ideal during the 1960s, it also informed efforts to address those limitations by promoting full employment as a means of mitigating crime and reducing recidivism. Although such ideas were eventually foreclosed by the embrace of more punitive correctional policy amid a larger process of deindustrialization and economic restructuring, by placing work at the center of its analysis, this dissertation highlights the contingency of the trajectory of the carceral state at the dawn of the age of mass incarceration.