About the Project

The Work and Us is a participatory research project that seeks to develop the capacity of imprisoned people to engage in data collection and analysis around issues of importance to them in collaboration with researchers and organizers on the outside. The project began in the Fall of 2021 as an inside-outside collaboration between Minali Aggarwal, Jacqueline Groccia, and Stevie Wilson, an incarcerated researcher and organizer. 

The original objective of the project was to make sense of incarcerated people’s perspectives on the “cheap labor” explanation for the growth of mass incarceration, which was being popularized through various media and state-level legislative fights to eliminate the “exception clause” from the Thirteenth Amendment. 

We have prioritized a participatory methodology that centers the voices of currently incarcerated people, aiming to provide an alternative perspective to the prevailing state-driven narratives that dominate the discourse on prison labor. Unlike other approaches that rely heavily on institutional statistics and/or those that fail to directly ask currently incarcerated people about their experiences, our method involves disseminating surveys directly to incarcerated people, providing a platform for them to share their lived experiences and develop theories regarding their own political conditions. Through this engaged method, we seek to model a new path for movement scholarship.

Although the project started with a focus on prison labor, our work will expand to include parole and other issues of importance to currently incarcerated people. We will make our data publicly accessible through a digital archive (coming soon).