Abstract

Excerpted From: Tiffany Yang, Reflections On Prison Labor, 61  Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 415 (2026). (Full Document) (26 Footnotes omitted.)

The bed frame that embraced you as you studied, as you slept, as you dreamt about worlds newly discovered in rambles across the college quad. The tomatoes simmering on the stove as you try to decipher your nana’s handwriting to recreate a pale shadow of a beloved stew. The sanitizer that protected your hands, your body, your health, your life. The fires that never reach your home. The voice that answers when you call the DMV, soothing in their reassurances. The uniform that carries your name. The roads now running with slick currents, their wrinkles and scars rolled away with steady hands. All these things and more bridge the chasm between the prison and a freer domain. Incarcerated people build, cultivate, create, protect, speak, stitch, improve-- their labor reshapes the world around us without recognition or compensation.

It is a labor sometimes offered and often stolen. But does the cruelty of captivity afford a true freedom to give?

Prison is exile. Its geography is a brutal landscape traversing leagues and astronomies to reach the front gate. Its presence looms with borders of cement blocks, barbed wire, locked doors. Its symphony is the vacuum of silence interrupted by metal and violence. Time magnifies its oppression, measured not by seconds or minutes but by decades and lives.

Prison life, too, is exile. Even in harsh conditions, seeds can grow--but prisons consume the soil and air and water needed to nourish community. Fear drives the prison’s hunger. Fear that people will speak to each other. That they will write to each other. That they will educate each other. That they will recognize the humanity in each other, and through such sustenance will see the humanity in themselves. It is afraid of the audacity of human connection, the precursor to collective liberation. And so the prison eats, and eats, and when the seeds cannot and therefore do not rise, the prison points to the empty land and says, “See, look at this wasteland, where nothing grows.”

So then, what does it mean to build? Here in the free world, the capitalism of fast commerce has led to complacency. When many of us build, we open a box to find a self-contained promise. Peer inside to see elegantly deconstructed fragments that reunite without friction. Step by step, illustrations reach out to hold our hands. We roll up our sleeves and move with the certainty of seers, confident of the end, focused on the boundaries of an enterprise’s imaginings.

But look instead to another vision. When incarcerated people build, there is no plastic pocket of uniform tools. No five-page manual showing where and how to go. No guarantees of reaching a horizon. And yet, even under the daily oppression of displacement and brutality, they build. They build communities of solidarity. They build resistance. They build transformative visions of liberated worlds that demand recognition.

To build is to join, to assemble together. It requires us, those who live beyond the prison, to reach past the borders of the free world and forge partnerships with incarcerated people. Let’s “ignite and invest in their visions.” Nourish outside support for inside actions. Transform solidarity into movement. Resurrect living documents and construct monuments to dignity, not cruelty. Let’s turn away from the page and look instead to the freedom dreaming of incarcerated defiance. We can, and we have, and we shall.

Associate Professor, University of Maryland Carey School of Law.