The NYU Prison Education Program (PEP) is a college-in-prison program that aims to expand access to higher education within communities impacted by the criminal justice system and to model how a research university can advance solutions to real-world problems. In 2018, NYU PEP formed the Research Lab, a collaboration between faculty and formerly incarcerated students at NYU, to study the costs of incarceration and to generate grounded policy recommendations and advocacy initiatives around responsible decarceration in the city and state. Students with lived experiences of incarceration are hired and trained by faculty members in the methods and ethics of social science research and take part in all aspects of research, including identifying research questions, design, data collection, and dissemination. By drawing on researchers from NYC communities most affected by incarceration, the Research Lab hopes to amplify their voices and concerns and to increase communities’ capacities to respond to the effects of incarceration.

In 2018, members of PEP Research Lab began research on the relationship between debt and incarceration in New York City. As privatization and austerity measures have shifted the cost of the carceral system onto individuals, incarcerated persons are increasingly compelled to pay for their institutionalization, including amounts for administrative fees and legal support, and for covering basic necessities during incarceration. The result is that many fall into a debt trap upon release into vulnerable urban neighborhoods, which unsurprisingly are rife with myriad forms of predatory lending. The fiscal burden is borne largely by family, friends, and community members whose own limited financial resources are continually drained to support incarcerated loved ones through a broken legal and institutional system.

Abolition Labor is the first full account of the national movement to end forced labor, much of it unpaid, in American prisons. It draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated persons in Alabama, Texas, Georgia and New York to give a more holistic picture of these work conditions, and it covers the new prisoner rights movement that began with system-wide work strikes involving more than 50,000 people in the 2010s.

Incarcerated people work for penny wages (15 cents an hour is not unusual), and, in several states, for nothing at all, as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, garbage cans, athletic equipment, and uniforms. And they harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and labor in meat and poultry processing plants.

Abolition Labor provides a wealth of insights into what has become a vast underground economy. It draws connections between the risky trade forced on prisoners who hustle to survive on the inside and the precarious economy on the outside. And it argues that, far from being quarantined off from society, prisons and their forced work regime have a sizable impact on the employment market and the economic life of tens of millions of American households.

The carceral state extends far outside prison itself, drawing in families and communities in deeply consequential ways. One of the most consequential is through carceral debt. In our Family Debt Project, we analyze the many forms of financial support that families and communities provide loved ones in prison–and the complex ways this support shapes familial relations of care and reciprocity. Based on a survey of over 500 New Yorkers who support loved ones in prison, and 200 qualitative interviews with a subsample of them, we document the stream of resources flowing from kin networks into penal institutions. From commissary costs to telecommunication expenses to legal fees to child support, this project explores the reciprocal effects of carceral debt on family and community life. The project will result in a book, to be published in 2025.

The Family Debt Project is researching several aspects of familial debt: How are carceral debt and financial support managed in familial networks? How does this debt become entangled in familial relations? How does it shape family relations of care and familial bonds? Are some forms of debt more consequential? For whom? And how to female kin navigate the racialized and gendered dimensions of financial extraction and accountability?

The personal automobile is an icon of freedom, and the pleasures of mobility rightfully prized by those who have been caged. But arrests from traffic stops are the primary means by which they become incarcerated. Paradoxically, the car functions at the cross-roads of two great systems of unfreedom and immobility—the credit economy and the American carceral system. Our researchers investigate this paradox in detail, tracking how the long arms of debt and carcerality operate in tandem in the daily life of car use and ownership. They document the numerous ways in which discipline and control are exercised daily, far outside the prison or jailhouse walls, in ways that are redolent of the criminal justice system. These include the tyranny of the credit score, revenue policing, subprime lending, the expansion of data mining and scrutiny of individual conduct by government and corporations, the surveillance technologies built into cars, and the road warrior culture of a highly militarized society oriented to fossil fuel extraction and its procurement.

Beginning in Fall 2019, our team has been conducting research on the costs of commissary and related consumer spending during incarceration. By studying the commissary system, our aim is to trace the flow of money into the prison, its circulation inside, and the fiscal effects on families on the outside. To date, our researchers have conducted qualitative interviews with over 50 formerly incarcerated men living in New York City, as well as with their family members, exploring the multiple financial costs people face to meet their basic needs during incarceration. Our findings show that people must spend considerable sums in order to cover basic needs while incarcerated, and that they often have to rely heavily on family and friends for financial assistance. As a consequence, incarcerated individuals and their families often face an impossible choice: drain the household’s resources to support their loved ones inside or leave them exposed to the most brutal forms of deprivation.

Incarcerated people and their families have been especially vulnerable to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prisons and jails have become epicenters of the pandemic as have the poor, urban, predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods from which they draw. The pandemic has had important and long-term ramifications for life inside prison facilities, including for the financial costs faced by incarcerated people and their families. By drawing on in-depth interviews and oral histories with people who were incarcerated during the pandemic, as well as with their families, this project examines different aspects of the COVID-19 crisis in New York State prisons, from the lack of adequate medical care experienced by incarcerated persons, to the challenges of staying in touch with loved ones and the heightened costs of prison telecommunications.