Prisoner Labor Legacies: An interview with Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc

While recent news has highlighted how prisoners have fought wildfires, prison labor is not a new phenomenon. Although incarcerated people have built highways, dams, and buildings, their contributions to American infrastructure are often made invisible. Both Elizabeth Hargrett and Xander Lenc have studied how prisoner labor has shaped America’s infrastructure with a focus on North Carolina and California. They co-directed the Carceral Labor Mapping Project, a 2023-2024 Research Team at Social Science Matrix. 

Elizabeth Hargrett is a PhD candidate in UC Berkeley's History Department, and holds a Masters degree in History from EHESS in Paris. Her dissertation explores North Carolina's history of convict labor, and shows how incarcerated labor shaped (and in turn, was shaped by) the state's highway systems, landscapes, and scenic tourism industries in the early decades of the 20th century. 

Xander Lenc is a PhD Candidate in UC Berkeley's Geography Department, where he studies how prisons have adopted their spatial patterns—and their problems—from other economic and intellectual spheres, from naval architecture to ecology to mining to electrical engineering. In doing so, he argues that any meaningful solution to mass incarceration in the United States requires a complete overhaul of our geography.

An edited transcript of this interview is available at https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research-article/prisoner-labor-legacies.