Naiima Khahaifa

“Making Prisons Work” unveils the hidden story of Black Correctional Officers or COs, whose overlooked labor influenced prison reproduction in the aftermath of the 1971 Attica Prison Uprising, a key site of the prisoners’ rights movement. Focusing on New York State, the project examines how 1970s correctional workforce integration policy transformed the prison system's social landscape, as new tensions and solidarities emerged when Black men and women integrated the overwhelmingly white-male workforce of the disproportionately Black and Latino male-populated prison system. Thus, by analyzing the life and occupational history narratives of Black COs recruited by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, primarily in the 1980s, this book explains how prison reproduction and the carceral geographies of western New York came to depend on the labor of Black COs.