Excerpt:

The manual labor of producing a material text can be intensive, difficult, and time-consuming. At various points throughout history, it has also been unfree.1 Contributing to recent efforts within book history to highlight structures of exploitation, this essay narrates the untold history of how printing entered modern prisons as a form of involuntary labor.

I focus on the nineteenth century, when British administrators in colonized India first established lithographic presses and a full-service print shop inside prisons. Using incarcerated individuals to make paper, set type, and pull presses was especially remunerative for the British bureaucracy, which relied on printed forms and book-length reports; but it was printing’s entanglements with literacy and moral edification that captured the attention of prison reformers in Europe and North America. Looking to Alipore Jail Press in India, as well as printing presses in operation at carceral boarding schools like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania and family-style orphanages like the Rauhes Haus in Hamburg, these reformers came to see the “noble art” as a key feature of the improved prison’s program of education, behavioral modification, and vocational training. Some of these efforts clashed with the existing use of contract labor to set type and cast stereotype plates at prisons like Sing Sing, which typographical unions fought. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, ideologies of reform, the respectability of printing as a trade, and the utility and profitability of textual production, especially for local governments, had created an environment in which presses were in operation in many prisons around the world, and they remain so today, printing business cards, envelopes, government forms, nonprofit booklets, and church mailers for less than the market price.

As I argue throughout this history, printing has remained a staple in modern “correctional industries,” despite shifting attitudes toward punishment, reformation, and rehabilitation, precisely because it so successfully marries [End Page 123] virtuous rhetoric about educating the incarcerated on the dignity of work to a demanding form of manual labor that profitably serves a carceral system always in need of printed documents. From the late eighteenth century, prison reformers in Europe and North America debated how much forced employment should be used to punish those within prisons and how much it might contribute to their moral reform. On the one hand, advocates of the Pennsylvania system of solitary confinement argued that making handicrafts alone in a cell would encourage penance and personal industry. On the other hand, those in favor of the New York system of congregate labor believed that grueling factory work, enforced with violence, could be used as a deterrent to future crime while turning a profit for the institution itself. Colonial administrators in India looked to Auburn Prison’s profitable—and brutal—industries as a model when renovating their own jails in the middle of the nineteenth century. Because setting type requires at least some basic forms of literacy yet is finicky work and because pulling heavy presses is strenuous manual labor in itself, printing seemed to meet the demands of both sides: it could both edify the mind and punish the body, teaching a respectable trade that was nevertheless manual, not clerical or administrative; and it did this while providing a service that was useful and sometimes profitable to the institution. In this way, the value attached to printing as an ostensibly ennobling mode of cultural production helped prison reformers resolve, or at least avoid, some of the conceptual tensions built into modern penal labor as a means of both reformation and punishment.2

Even as printing seemed to settle some of prison labor’s internal contradictions, it also introduced new and unique complications for those tasked with managing the incarcerated bodies doing it. Despite their differing approaches to labor, both the Pennsylvania and New York systems were invested in the power of silence, and their prisons were built to prevent the kind of riotous environment that was common within the overcrowded jails and bridewells of earlier centuries, where printed texts and manuscripts easily circulated.3 So seriously did prison officials take the demand for silence at Eastern State…

Trettien, Whitney. “Prison Labor and the Problem of Print.” Book History, vol. 28, no. 1, 2025, pp. 123–53. Project MUSE

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2025.a959457.