Incarcerated people have a long history of work that provides goods to government agencies--furniture, license plates, workers’ clothing--but in recent years prison industries have expanded into providing services, too. In this talk, you will learn about recent growth of digitization work in American prisons. From newspapers to yearbooks to state records, an increasing proportion of the cultural record is being made available to researchers via the labor of incarcerated workers. We will also examine the ethics of this practice and what practical steps we can take to enact change.
