Andrea R. Morrell is an associate professor of anthropology at Guttman Community College, City University of New York. Her book Prison Town: Making the Carceral State in Elmira, New York (Nebraska, 2025) was published last month.

In Prison Town Andrea R. Morrell illustrates the converging and shifting fault lines of race and class through a portrait of a prison town undergoing deindustrialization as it chooses the path of prison expansion. In this ethnography, Morrell highlights the contradictions of prison work as work that allows a middle-class salary and lifestyle but trades in other forms of stigma. Guards, prisoners, prisoners’ families, and meager amounts of money and care work travel through spaces of free and unfree via the porous borders between prison and town. As Morrell captures the rapid expansion of the carceral state into upstate New York from the perspective of a small city with two prisons, she demonstrates how the prison system’s racialized, gendered, and classed dispossession has crossed its own porous borders into the city of Elmira.
 

1. Deindustrialization, Racialized
Labor, and Prison Expansion

In 1944, James O’Connor of Kingston, Jamaica, then a colony of the United Kingdom, came to Elmira to work in iron production at General Electric’s (GE) Elmira Foundry. James was one of 111 Jamaican men recruited by GE from across the Caribbean and Latin America to fill what GE said were one thousand open jobs in the foundry, in the context of World War II labor shortages. In Jamaica, James had worked for ten years at a cricket club. On his first day in Elmira, he spoke to the local newspaper and was outfitted with new steel-toed boots for the dangerous work at the foundry. He and Eustace Fothergill, another man in the group, ate stewed beef, mashed potatoes, and rice prepared in a communal kitchen in their barracks on the foundry’s campus. James and his coworkers did “heavy and dangerous” aspects of the work, such as “pouring of metal and operating the annealing oven,” making gray iron castings for GE trucks, tanks, ships, and aircraft engines. Unlike immigrant men from Italy and Poland recruited to work in Elmira’s industries in the early twentieth century, James was likely deported to Jamaica after completing the length of the contract on April 28, 1946.

A generation later, before the onset of the economic downturn of the 1980s, Roy Mayers, a white American-born man, was working in a warehouse and decided to take the civil service test to become a correction officer. When I interviewed Roy in 2008, he told me, “We knew that that was a more secure employment than where we were at. Even if the plant was still there and going great guns, a state job would have been better time off, better benefits. There’s no doubt there.” But after being offered the job, Roy considered not becoming a prison guard:

We were making ends meet, the lifestyle wasn’t too bad, my wife was working at the time. One day I was in the [warehouse]. . . . I put the forklift in reverse and I’m ready to back out in reverse and [a supervisor] was right behind me. And he says, “Roy, I gotta ask you a question. There’s a rumor going around that you’re going to turn that job down with the state.” And I said, “I been toyin’ with the idea, yeah, thought about it.” He says, “Let me tell you one thing. If you do, I’m gonna kick your ass all the way around this warehouse.” He said, “You’re the only one who passed the written test, who passed the physical test. If you turn this down, I’m gonna kick your ass all over this warehouse.” He says, “Git outta here.”

Roy took the correction officer job, and the warehouse where he had worked closed a few years later.

In this chapter, I tell the story of Elmira’s racialized working class beginning in the Fordist period, through the collapse and restructuring of industrial manufacturing and industrial unionism, to the city elites’ and their allies’ attempt at a carceral reindustrialization in the late 1980s. The story of New York’s expanding carceral state is the story of how whiteness and Blackness emerge, reemerge, and are strengthened through the categories of work. I argue that in order for us to understand the racialized system within the prison—where a majority Black and Latino/a/x prisoner population is guarded by overwhelmingly white guards, a situation common across the state—we must understand the racialized history of labor in Elmira in the context of New York State and the world. In other words, it isn’t just a fact of nature that prison of mostly Black and Brown men is controlled and surveilled by mostly white guards; rather, the racialized history of labor set the stage for the current pattern. While both James and Roy represent Elmira’s working class, albeit in different ways, it was the experience of men like Roy of European ancestry whose working lives were meant to be “saved” by an attempt at a carceral reindustrialization.

These two men’s histories also frame Elmira’s racialized working class as a part of an imperial world economy in the twentieth century. While these are relatively small populations—James representing a few hundred Jamaican men who did industrial work on temporary work visas and Roy representing a few thousand white men who became prison guards during the postindustrial period—their access to work and citizenship reflect how the enforcement of borders have been used to fortify both the United States as an imperial power and the preferential citizenship of the category of white workers. The jobs available to working-class Elmirans across immigration status have shifted over the last three generations and those divisions have been lived in a racialized way. Historian of Jamaican guestworkers in the United States Cindy Hahamovitch writes that during World War II, in addition to Caribbean and Mexican workers, “Canadians came too but no one bothered to count them; they were not bound by contract and officials didn’t seem to worry about whether they left. In the imagination of U.S. officials, guestworkers were men of color whose movements had to be carefully monitored.” The story of racialization and the maintenance of whiteness for some workers was written by borders and their enforcement.

I follow the shifting formations of race and class in Elmira from three perspectives. First, I show the development of Elmira’s whitened immigrant working class at the Remington Rand typewriter factory, focusing at times on the life of my great aunt. Second, I show how Jamaican workers on guest visas work in the same Remington Rand factories as their mostly white-coded coworkers during wartime production, but without the access to U.S. citizenship. Finally, I look at a series of obituaries for Remington Rand employees to show how Elmirans navigated the dissolution of the Fordist system of labor and how people across the city imagined its future. Rather than separate from the development of the carceral state, the creation of distinct racializations in the categories of work and citizenship was pivotal in the imagination of who belongs behind bars and who would walk the concrete floors securing their incarceration.

Fordism’s Wake

The period of near-full employment during World War II and the years of relative working-class affluence during the twenty-five or so years after are recalled as the glory days of the City of Elmira. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Elmira transformed from a small regional trading post—a railroad stop—into an industrial center, home to several international companies, including Remington Rand (bought by Sperry and now part of Unisys), U.S. Steel’s American Bridge Works, and Bendix (now Honeywell). These corporations grew and so did the population of the city, as tens of thousands of people—many of them European immigrants—sought to work in the burgeoning steel industry. During World War II and the postwar period, workers won access to health insurance, were offered housing or housing assistance, and, often, secured career-long work in manufacturing. All of this was achieved through robust and rapid unionization and union militancy. In contrast to the prisons, which people repeatedly told me during my fieldwork were “just there,” seemingly natural parts of the Elmira landscape, the steel-based industries are remembered as places where people were proud to work.

But the good times would not last. In the waning days of the manufacturing boom, prisons began to emerge across the country as what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called a “geographical solution that purports to solve social problems by repeatedly removing people from disordered, deindustrialized milieus and depositing them somewhere else.” Thus, when Southport Correctional Facility was built in Elmira in 1988, it was lauded by its proponents less for its purported role in the state’s public safety than for the jobs it created. The expansion of the carceral state must therefore be analyzed as a process equally political and economic, one that involved building infrastructures, hiring Upstate labor and disempowering downstate and labor, transferring money from state coffers to the infrastructures of punishment. This process occurred parallel to and dialectically with the disappearance of the higher wages for some workers in the post-Fordist period. The crises of post-Fordism—of revenue loss, of wealth redistribution, and of profound loss of income, employment, and stability—emerged through the same racialized mechanisms that supported its development. Despite the breakdown of Fordism, the specter of a Fordist past remained, and remains, critical to understanding what was expected to replace it. In Elmira, the white male workers who made up the bulk of the well-paid working class were expected to be the new recruits to prison work; they were construed by the city’s mayor as men who didn’t want to receive “municipal welfare” but were in search of “good” work.