Work as Punishment: Prison Labour in the 19th and Early 20th Century

With the birth of the modern prison, work behind bars was primarily conceived as a means of intensifying the pain of imprisonment through additional, corporal punishment. The fact that prison work was thought of as a monotonous grind from which individuals could not escape and which regularly pushed them to their mental and physical limits is symbolised by the infamous treadmill, which began its existence as an atonement on the new conception of the prison work machine rather than as modern exercise equipment for physically underworked office staff.Footnote ¹⁴ Since the end of the 18th century, the English and German penal systems received their main reform impulses for the redesign of prison work from the English philanthropist John Howard (1726–90). He called for systematic reform of state prisons and thus gave rise to new legislation in not only England but also other European countries, which differed from its predecessors in particular in its claim to be humane.Footnote ¹⁵ At first, Howard endeavoured to improve the living and especially the hygienic conditions in the asylums. In addition, he encouraged the construction of so-called cell prisons. The Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia, opened in 1829, corresponded precisely to this ideal and became the model for many new prison buildings, such as Pentonville Prison in England or German prisons in Münster, Breslau, Bruchsal or Berlin-Moabit. Cellular prisons made it possible to isolate prisoners to a large extent, which, along with regular work, was seen as a prerequisite for their rehabilitation in the name of humanity. The focus on isolation was based on the belief that prisoners in solitary confinement could not negatively influence each other and that prison was therefore not a ‘school of crime’. Accordingly, reformers disagreed on the question of whether solitary confinement at night should be combined with communal work, or whether working hours should also take place in isolation. Regardless of this, prison reformers agreed that the underlying goal of improving prisoners was only achievable through a combination of moral education and habituation techniques, that is, a combination of prayer and work.Footnote ¹⁶ Work as an additional corporal punishment gave way to the idea of a meaningful use of labour with its aim of making it easier for prisoners to find work after their releases. Although there was no talk of rehabilitation in this context, the economic dimension of prison labour, which emerged alongside the idea of humanising the penal system, corresponded at its core to the modern criminal policy objective of reintegrating offenders into society.

Despite the developments in the penal system in the 19th century, the importance of prison work in criminal policy had by no means diminished at the turn of the 20th century. In 1900, Franz von Liszt, professor of criminal and international law at the University of Berlin, explained that ‘organised compulsory work is the essence of the prison sentence, it is its life element, the element with which it stands and falls’. His justification: ‘Our modern prison sentence owes its origin to the idea that the person who is capable of work, but is work-shy, should be accustomed to regular work and thus be made a useful member of human society again’.Footnote ¹⁷ On the one hand, prison labour was supposed to get the prisoner used to earning his living honestly in the future. This was a rather new idea. On the other hand, prison labour was still attributed the quality of being able to counteract prison as a supposed school of crime (this was already laid out as an idea in the solitary cell). If a prisoner was not kept busy, according to von Liszt, prison threatened to become a place ‘where he learns what he does not yet know, where he establishes criminal connections, perhaps for his whole life’.Footnote ¹⁸ In this way, he linked prison labour with the idea of prevention, which is still at the centre of the discussion of criminal policy logic today. But regardless of how prison reformers thought about the connection between prison labour, crime prevention and humanitarian concerns, prisoners still perceived it as additional punishment and a means of their destruction, as can be seen, for example, in the memoirs of a former prisoner who was forced to work in Münster prison for eight years at the turn of the century: ‘I have the feeling’, wrote the man in 1900, ‘that the penitentiary treatment was intended to wear me out personally, destroy me spiritually and make me morally impossible for the world’.Footnote ¹⁹

There is much to suggest that the contradiction between reform ideas and the reality of imprisonment that speaks from the prisoner’s experience was by no means resolved even after the founding of the Weimar welfare state.Footnote ²⁰ However, a reform of the prison system was pursued independently of this, with the main aim of enacting a penal system law and making the concept of rehabilitation the goal of the prison system. Prison work was already thought of in this context as a resocialisation measure that was not intended to harm the body of the prisoner, but to ensure economic survival and social integration of the released inmate. But when the National Socialists came to power, most of the reform efforts came to an end.Footnote ²¹ In particular, prison labour served as a means of systematic extermination, in not only concentration camps but also labour education camps (Arbeitserziehungslagern)Footnote ²² and ordinary prisons.Footnote ²³ The obligation to work was continually tightened; by the end of the 1930s, prisoners had to work six days a week from 7 am to 6 pm. There were hardly any breaks. With the beginning of the war, prisoners were increasingly needed for the war economy, which meant that the prison companies were more and more frequently converted into armament factories. Working hours were increased again, up to twelve hours.Footnote ²⁴ In combination with a decidedly poor nutritional situation and mostly a lack of medical care, work in prison had once again become a kind of corporal punishment that contributed to the systematic extermination of those who did not belong to the ‘Volksgemeinschaft’.

The Social Impact of Labour: New Concepts of Imprisonment in the Federal German Welfare State

Prison labour as a specific form of forced labour remained legitimate after 1945, in Germany as well as internationally. The basis for this was laid by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention No. 29 of 28 June 1930, which obliged member states to refrain from forced and compulsory labour but made an exception for prison labour as long as it was under public supervision and did not involve private individuals.Footnote ²⁵ In this respect, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) of 4 November 1950 was even more generous and allowed prison labour in private companies.Footnote ²⁶ Last but not least, the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners of 1955 also provided for compulsory work. ‘All prisoners under sentence shall be required to work, subject to their physical and mental fitness as determined by the medical officer.’ However, the rules also stipulated that prison work must not ‘be of an afflictive nature’ and thus not constitute an additional punishment.Footnote ²⁷ Although this meant that the use of prison labour was maintained at the international level, it was no longer to be used as a special form of corporal punishment.

In the case of West Germany, the possibility of using prisoners as forced labourers while simultaneously rejecting forced labour was enshrined in the 1949 German Basic Law. It states in article 12(2), one of the fundamental rights that opens the constitution and enjoys special protection against legislative change, that no one may be forced to do a particular job. Yet, its third paragraph, mirroring the ILO statutes, stipulates that forced labour was permissible in the case of a ‘deprivation of liberty ordered by a court’. This was fleshed out in the principal legislative moment of correction reform, the 1976 German Prison Act (Strafvollzugsgesetz, StVollzG),Footnote ²⁸ which deals with prison labour in relative detail. Section 37, paragraphs 1–5, explains:

The ability to pursue paid employment after release is explicitly stated here as the purpose of prison labour in the context of resocialisation. However, the fact that successful resocialisation, at least in theory, requires the inmate’s consent seemingly had no bearing on the obligation to work.

Regarding the obligation to work, paragraph 41, subsection 1, states:

The fact that West Germany rejected forced labour on principle but upheld it in the case of a state-imposed prison sentences was justified by its framing of prison labour primarily as a tool for resocialisation. It was seen as a means of social integration and security, personal satisfaction, identity formation and the establishment of social status. This perspective aligned with the ‘penal-welfare complex’ (David Garland) of the late 1960s, which viewed work as a benevolent force shaping individual biographies.Footnote ³⁰

Although the ‘humanitarian’ function of prison labour only gained systematic importance in the context of prison reform in the late 1960s in West Germany, the first impulses for this development had already been formulated after the end of the war. The Office of Military Government for Germany (OMGUS) – the highest administrative body in the American occupation zone of Germany and the American sector of Berlin during the first four post-war years – proved to be particularly reform-minded in the field of the penal system. It established a prison branch with a prison officer in each of the four American-occupied countries and, shortly after the ‘Control Council Directive No. 19’ was issued, drafted the so-called Instructions for the German State Governments on the Administration of Prisons, which served as a framework for prison regulations to be issued in the states of Bavaria, Bremen, North Baden-Württemberg and Greater Hesse.Footnote ³¹ The ‘Instructions’ primarily addressed the daily life of prisoners, including their working conditions. Work facilities in the US zone were to be equipped with modern machinery and operated according to economic principles. Monotonous occupations performed for their own sake, which primarily caused suffering for prisoners and did not qualify them for the free labour market, were therefore not intended. Finally, prisoners in the American zone were not to suffer from hunger, at least no more than the free population, which led to the decision to provide a regular food allowance of 1,550 calories per day.Footnote ³² This instruction, while not explicitly stated, ensured that prison labour did not amount to corporal punishment.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the US military government was committed to the abolition of the so-called Zuchthaus (Engl. penitentiary). Prisoners in a Zuchthaus were required to wear specially marked clothing, had longer waiting periods between writing letters and receiving visitors compared to regular prison inmates and lost their civil rights. Above all, however, they were subjected to longer and harder labour than other prisoners while receiving lower compensation for their work. This meant that labour, in this form of incarceration, was explicitly used as a means of intensifying punishment.Footnote ³³

Even in the ‘Draft of a penal code’ (Entwurf eines Strafgesetzbuches) from 1962 – submitted after eight years of work by the ‘Great Panel Law Commission’ (Große Strafrechtskommission) to fundamentally reform the penal law of 1871 (Reichsstrafgesetzbuch), which had largely remained in effect in its original form – the concept of the Zuchthaus and the use of labour as a means of intensifying punishment were upheld.Footnote ³⁴ However, this (along with other extremely restrictive positions of the government draft) were incompatible with the reformist spirit of West Germany. In response, fourteen German and Swiss lawyers presented an ‘Alternative Draft for a Penal Code’ (Alternativ-Entwurf eines Strafgesetzbuches) in 1966.Footnote ³⁵ This alternative draft eliminated the idea of the Zuchthaus entirely and instead proposed a modern system of sanctions based on the idea of resocialisation. In November 1987, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP) fraction submitted it as a parliamentary bill to the Bundestag. Neither the government draft from 1962 nor the alternative draft from 1966 were adopted into the new penal code without modifications. However, as part of the ‘Great Panel Law Reform’ (Große Strafrechtsreform), the Zuchthaus was abolished through the ‘First Criminal Law Reform Act’ on 25 June 1969,Footnote ³⁶ taking effect on 1 April 1970 – thus, at least formally, putting an end to prison labour as an additional form of punishment.

Subsequently, in the new West German Prison Act, which was enacted on 16 March 1976 and came into force in January 1977, meaningful employment that qualified the inmate was deemed crucial for resocialisation. Since most prisoners did not have any specialist knowledge, the main aim was ‘to provide, maintain or promote skills for gainful employment after release’.Footnote ³⁷ Although a marked change, the statute did not satisfy reformers who demanded ‘to give the sentenced person the possibility to choose the job from the range of jobs offered by correctional institutions’, and thus comply with the ‘Minimum Principles of the United Nations’ as well as with the Basic Law’s stipulation that ‘the right to freely choose one’s occupation, place of work and place of training’ meant that no one could be ‘forced into a particular job’.Footnote ³⁸ Moreover, only the free choice of job would counteract the impression that work is ‘part of the punishment and thus itself punishment’.Footnote ³⁹ Finally, in West Germany the so-called principle of assimilation applied. This meant that ‘life in prison should resemble as closely as possible the general living conditions outside’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Setting prison labour on equal terms with free labour was in line with what reformers wanted from modern prisons geared towards resocialisation. But the very same experts were by no means unanimous when it came to the purpose of labour. Some still saw work as a tool for maintaining order and discipline. ‘Unemployed prisoners’, one document explained, ‘by their very nature are particularly prone to insubordination, rebelliousness and violence, and thus pose a threat to prison security’.Footnote ⁴¹ Furthermore, statistics in the West Germany showed a clear correlation between unemployment and crime.Footnote ⁴² At the same time, the idea of order referred to the effects that regular work should have on the prisoners. This involved the demands of work on self-discipline, stamina, willingness to socialise and manage punctuality and, last but not least, the ability of the worker to subordinate himself (rarely: herself) to others.Footnote ⁴³ The guiding assumption was that a prisoner managing to adapt to commercial routines would find it much easier later on to reintegrate into a society that followed very similar rhythms. For the business enterprise ‘educates the people living in it to certain ideas of order in such an intensive way that the entire modern consciousness of order is substantially influenced by it’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Finally, reformers were convinced that resocialisation through work could only succeed if prisoners approached it with joy. ‘In a predominantly work- and performance-oriented society’, the argument went, ‘a positive attitude towards work can in many cases make it much easier to affirm society and its norms’. Any education through work should therefore be preceded by education for work.Footnote ⁴⁵

In addition to this classic regulatory thinking, which is reminiscent of the penal system debates of the 19th century, the reform debates on prison work reflected the general developments towards the humanisation of working life.Footnote ⁴⁶ A perception of increased rationalisation pressure and a concomitant intensification of work and worsened working conditions – often if not always correctly identified with Fordist mass production and the Taylorist organisation models – had spread in the course of the 1960s. By the following decade, calls for making labour more humane were standard fare among trades union leaders, social democratic and Christian-social politicians,Footnote ⁴⁷ and sociologists and industrial relations experts. Underlying their diagnosis was an appreciation that demands for shorter working hours, higher incomes and more leisure time had long overshadowed qualitative questions about the actual work process. ‘Humanising’ work therefore was supposed to (re)establish nothing less than ‘human dignity in the workplace’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Specifically, the focus was on occupational health and safety,Footnote ⁴⁹ the reduction of physical and mental stress, higher qualifications for employeesFootnote ⁵⁰ and more democracy. The research programme ‘Humanization of Working Life’ aligned with the debates on a more humane penal system in terms of not only its objectives but also in its specific content. Issues such as occupational safety, the design of workspaces and workstations and worker codetermination were relevant to not only male industrial workers but also forced labourers in prison.Footnote ⁵¹

Despite these developments, however, it should not be overlooked that the idea of humanising working life behind prison walls had clear limits. The normalisation of work failed primarily because prison labour remained forced labour and violations of the work obligation could be punished accordingly with disciplinary measures.Footnote ⁵² In West Germany, these disciplinary measures included various prohibitions, such as the right to read books, listen to the radio, watch television or receive visits; restrictions on leisure time, work or loss of earnings were also conceivable. Finally, there was ‘detention for up to four weeks’, which was presented as an appropriate disciplinary measure in the above-mentioned house punishment conference (Hausstrafenkonferenz). However, this measure could only be imposed ‘in cases of serious or repeated misbehaviour’.Footnote ⁵³

Against this background, the draft of the resocialisation paradigm, in which labour, that is, work that sought to mirror free employment provisions, played a central role, appears as an ambitious domestic policy change and a typical reform project of the progressive Social-Democratic-Liberal Party coalition that governed from 1969 to 1982. However, a successful example of ‘daring more democracy’, as Chancellor Willy Brandt had promised in 1969, it was not. Rather, prison labour continued to operate on a paradox: while it was no longer to be understood as an additional punishment, it still governed the body and the psyche of the inmate, often in ways that were beyond his control. Although the reform debates addressed the fact that the prisoner’s social and economic existence was perilous at best in light of inadequate pay that neither allowed for savings nor covered social insurance such as retirement, healthcare, unemployment, child allowance or disability (but also because of predominantly unskilled work that was of little attraction to future employers), these concerns by no means determined the debate. In fact, none of these made it into the eventual reform bills, which meant that the inmates could not sue for equal opportunities.

Economic Arguments for Prison Labour: The Perspective of Employers’ Associations

Neither the assignment of work nor the types of sanction for violations of work obligations alone were what distinguished prison labour from free labour. Rather, the type of work available to prisoners was far more limited than in free society. Behind prison walls, the variety and personal opportunities that the Miracle on the Rhine (Wirtschaftswunder) offered on the West German labour market were nowhere to be felt. In the 1950s, the main focus was to maintain the principle of self-sufficiency in prisons through prison labour, which is why most jobs available to inmates were in domestic work, gardening and agriculture. In line with this, the Tegel Prison, for example, ran a pig farm in the 1950s and recruited the necessary workforce from among the prisoners.Footnote ⁵⁴ To save costs, construction that arose both inside and outside of the facilities was also carried out by prisoners whenever possible. Additionally, tasks in other governing agencies, especially in welfare institutions, were often executed by inmates. Prisoners could even be called upon to assist during natural disasters, and they also worked in public sector agriculture, forestry and water management. Likewise, they were employed in road construction and the development of wasteland in the 1950s. At Tegel Prison, printing work for other authorities was carried out with the help of prisoners until the late 1950s. This included, among other things, ‘Guidelines for criminal proceedings, as well as cover sheets for these’ (Richtlinien für das Strafverfahren, sowie Deckblätter hierzu) or the ‘Journal of the Prison Service’ (Zeitschrift für Strafvollzug), which had been published by the Prison Staff Association since 1950. In the prison’s locksmith workshop, locks, keys and cell windows for West German penal institutions were manufactured, while the prison carpentry workshop fulfilled government orders for a wide range of furniture. Tegel Prison also had a tailoring and a shoemaking workshop that produced prison uniforms. All in all, the head of Tegel Prison summarised the work situation in a letter to the president of the Berlin Corrections Office in January 1959, stating ‘a consistently sufficient level of employment is guaranteed’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although manual and, indeed, more often than not unskilled or semi-skilled labour accounted for the bulk of professional activities, their variety indicated that prison labour was not designed to push the prisoner to his physical limits. Rather than punishment, it was an integral part of running penitentiaries in an economically viable way.

If these practices had a pre-modern smack of feudal holdovers and subsistence economy (aptly echoed in the term Hand- und Spanndienste, literally ‘hand and hitch-up services’, to which they are related),Footnote ⁵⁶ the twentieth century witnessed the introduction of monetary economy and industrial production also within the penitentiary system. There were different work systems in West German prisons, including the entrepreneur system (Unternehmersystem), the contract system (Auftragssystem) and the direct labour system (Regiesystem). In the entrepreneur system, a private entrepreneur set up his machines and the associated workplaces within the prison and supplied all the raw materials necessary for production. The prisoners, who were made available to him by the institution in return for a fee, carried out the work, while the entrepreneurial risk lay solely with the entrepreneur. In the contract system, prisoners also worked for independent entrepreneurs who provided the raw materials, paid for the labour and managed distribution. However, in this case, the workplace was set up by the institution itself. The direct labour system consisted of the prison-run enterprises described above, where work was carried out under the aegis of the prison administration. The state was solely responsible for job procurement, cost calculation, distribution and risk. Although prison labour primarily involved (often low-skilled) work in factories, it could also encompass domestic work. Within the institution, this included, for example, unskilled kitchen work, distributing meals or laundry, cleaning and (until the 1970s) heating. In addition, prisoners (provided they were qualified) could work as barbers or medical orderlies. With the approval of the supervisory authority, they could even do paperwork and accounting tasks in prison administration, a privilege granted only to few prisoners as a special sign of trust.Footnote ⁵⁷

The legality of prison labour in entrepreneurial enterprises was the subject of political debate in the mid-1950s. The key legal standard in this context was the Forced Labour Convention of the ILO. In September 1955, it prompted the president of the Berlin Prison Office to ask the executive boards of the prisons in the city’s western sectors how they were dealing with the Convention’s requirement that prison labour was only permissible under state supervision. Indeed, Berlin’s Senator for Justice (equivalent to a secretary of state in the other German Länder) commented that the actual employment of prisoners by business enterprises did not comply with this order in either Berlin or any other Land. Given that the Federal government intended to ratify the Convention, however, business as usual would no longer be an option. The solution that the Senator’s office came up with illustrated a willingness to respect the Convention’s letter rather than its spirit: instead of abolishing the allocation of prison labour to enterprises altogether, the municipal authorities intended to obtain a declaration of consent from the prisoners in order to circumvent the Convention, which, however, was rejected by the executive board of the Tegel Prison.Footnote ⁵⁸ Any regulation, was the board’s response, ‘that consent declarations should generally be obtained from prisoners to work in entrepreneurial enterprises appears unacceptable for the implementation of the penal system’. The reason given for the rejection was the educational impact of prison labour and its essential role in ‘resocialising’ prisoners. If these were asked to consent, the members of the board feared, up to half of all inmates might refuse to work in enterprises, effectively making the entire scheme unworkable and leading to high non-employment rates.Footnote ⁵⁹ As reform-minded as these words sound, it would certainly be a misunderstanding to see the reference to resocialisation as an anticipation of the socio-psychological reason of the Tegel executive board with its emphasis on voluntariness. Rather, a traditional paternalistic understanding of authority and very tangible economic interests are expressed here. However, despite such objections, the ratification of the ILO Convention on 1 June 1956 finally made such consent mandatory, which illustrates not least the dogmatic superiority of international law (‘international law breaks national law’). Although West German prisoners still had to perform a special form of forced labour after the signing of the ILO Convention, they were at least given a rudimentary right to self-determination over their work.

Yet what this right amounted to in practice was contingent on factors on the ground, as refusal to provide labour could well lead to trouble with the prison authorities. Also, the Convention did not remedy the fact that prison labour remained punishment insofar as it put prisoners at a massive economic and social disadvantage. Their wage loss was the employer’s gain and, indeed, a controversial competitive advantage, arguably as exploited labour. Commercial enterprises that did not employ prisoners saw themselves at an economic disadvantage because of the higher wage costs they had to pay to free labour. The General Association of the Plastics Processing Industry (Gesamtverband Kunststoffverarbeitende Industrie e.V), for example, complained to the president of the Berlin Prison Office in early 1959 that W. Moebes, a local manufacturer, was distorting competition by means of producing at Tegel. In their reply, the Prison Office explained that out of forty-two employed prisoners, Moebes used thirty-four for unskilled, manual work such as sorting and packing. Only eight were machine minders, and the machines they were operating were so outdated that they could no longer be used in modern plastics processing anyway; in other words, they were hardly competitive. Also, work done at Tegel amounted to no more than 3 to 5 per cent of Moebes’ total output, which ruled out an advantage over other companies in the same sector.

Apparently, however, the president did not deem these arguments sufficient and therefore added another reason why the cooperation with Moebes was unproblematic. It was well known, he told the association, that ‘prison labour is almost always inferior to the work done by free labourers’. If the company nonetheless chose to produce at Tegel, it must have been due to a willingness to help in ‘the re-socialisation of prisoners’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The reference to resocialisation was rather obviously opportunistic to ward off criticism. How tasks that were described by himself as monotonous or performed on outdated machines were to help prisoners find jobs was not discussed in the prison official’s missive. Nor was it mentioned at any point that jobs such as packing and sorting in the 1960s were typically done by women in the open labour market, which meant that this type of employment was not suitable for resocialisation through work in a men’s prison anyway due to its gender-specific classification.Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, his take on resocialisation through work bore the imprint of earlier notions of respectability and discipline rather than implying the acquisition of skills that would help people find work after release. In short, the correspondence in the Moebes affair illustrated that officialdom and (local) politics continued to conceive of prison jobs primarily in terms of work rather than economically and socially valuable and valued labour.

That is not say that the point of insufficient quality of prisoners’ work was entirely wrong. Instances of companies that refrained from or stopped producing in prisons because of the poor quality of the work done can easily be found. About the same time the plastic producers association worried about unfair competition, their colleagues at the Association of the German Toy and Christmas Tree Decoration Industry (Verband der Deutschen Spielwaren- und Christbaumschmuckindustrie) informed the board of the Tegel Prison that the Berglas company intended to give up producing Christmas baubles in the penitentiary. Prisoners had had to blow glass baubles over a small gas flame from so-called blanks made in Berlin from discarded neon glass tubes, which were then painted and silver-plated. However, according to the association, the output was either too small or too poor, so that production behind bars proved unprofitable after two years and was discontinued.Footnote ⁶² Another example is that of a shoe manufacturer who, in the mid-1960s, failed in his attempt to set up a modern assembly line in a prison. He planned to generate 80 per cent of the turnover that he could have achieved with free labour under the same technical conditions. However, this plan failed because it was apparently impossible to achieve a cooperative labour of the prisoners on the assembly line. According to a report on this case at a conference of the Association of Prison Officers in 1966, there was repeated friction both among the prisoners as well as between prisoners and the supervisory staff.Footnote ⁶³ It seems that the idea of using prison labour for resocialisation did not invalidate market dynamics while the prison met its limitations precisely due to its closed nature (which, of course, was its very core) and the implications this had for quality and quantity of manpower. The baubles proved a point also conceded by contemporary observers: a business inside a prison could be established in a very similar way to a business venture outside, but it could not operate on a day-to-day basis in the same way as its counterpart beyond the prison walls, precisely because there was neither free recruitment nor qualification-based selection of the workforce.

Inmates as Employees or the Value of Occupation and Pay

Prisoners hardly played a role in the reform debates regarding prison labour, as – in Albert O. Hirschman’s well-known terms – the institution not only curtailed their right to exit but also their voice.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, they did use the few opportunities they had to express their opinions on the issue. The most important source for reconstructing the inmates’ experiences and perceptions, however, is prison magazines. The primary source here is Lichtblick (ray of hope), a magazine published in Tegel Prison. The Lichtblick, which is still published today (now online), is the first and oldest prison magazine in West Germany. Founded in 1968, it was not subject to censorship by the prison administration, though it was read by them, which likely led writers to exercise a certain degree of caution. Moreover, the content of these magazines is not necessarily representative of all prisoners. Those who wrote for them and commented on everyday prison life were generally more educated than the majority of prisoners. This is not only supported by their confident command of language but also by the fact that many authoring prisoners were familiar with the criminological and political arguments for and against the penal reform, as well as the language used by the reformers. Nevertheless, the magazine provides at least an insight into how the inmates experienced prison life and what expectations they had regarding prison work.

One repeatedly appearing aspect in prisoners’ accounts was the possibility of eventually entering the labour market with completed vocational training. Therefore, prisoners welcomed the so-called Employment Promotion Act (Arbeitsförderungsgesetz) enacted in 1969.Footnote ⁶⁵ The new law was about ‘individual promotion of further vocational training and retraining’, with which the labour offices had been charged by the legislature to ‘secure and improve occupational mobility or to enable occupational advancement or to counter looming unemployment as early as possible’. As the state’s responsibilities did ‘not stop at the gates of the penal institution’, as a contemporary representative of the Labour Office explained, vocational training measures for prisoners were also increasingly promoted.Footnote ⁶⁶

Although prisoners stood to benefit from the law, they had to accept certain restrictions. At Tegel, training was only offered for professions ‘that were in short supply in Berlin and would therefore ensure satisfactory pay even after retraining’. Therefore, in 1972, training courses for painters, decorators and upholsterers were offered, each lasting four months, as well as courses for metal and machine workers, which lasted twelve to fifteen months. Courses for welders and stone setters/pavers were said to be in the planning stage. All prisoners who were physically able and whose release date was short after completion of the training could participate in the existing courses.Footnote ⁶⁷ There were hardly any apprenticeships beyond manual trades at Tegel, despite reform ideas to the contrary. However, during a visit to the prison in 1972, representatives of the Labour Office assured the inmates that they were working on introducing further apprenticeships and training companies. In addition, the Senate also wanted to offer inmates with a background in commercial professions a job opportunity in accordance with their qualifications.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, as far as placement prospects in the commercial sector or in public administration were concerned, the Labour Office cautioned the inmates not to get their hopes up too high: ‘the type and extent of the delinquency significantly influence the prospects of finding a corresponding job’. Despite formal qualification, job placement could only be offered on a ‘case-by-case’ basis.Footnote ⁶⁹

Even though the job facilities at Tegel Prison improved continuously over the course of the 1970s, and prisoners were able to train as tailors, carpenters, locksmiths, upholsterers, saddlers or typesetters in addition to the professions mentioned above, it would be an exaggeration to claim that the offer of vocational training as a central means of work education, which had long been demanded by prison reformers and was well received and in some cases utilised by prisoners, can be said to be a success story. After all, another demand that was formulated even more passionately by the prisoners than the work and training opportunities was appropriate remuneration, which was not granted to them.

Remuneration had long come in the shape of so-called work rewards, a concept that had first been laid down in the 1879 ‘Draft of a Law on the Execution of Prison Sentences’ (Entwurf eines Gesetzes über die Vollstreckung von Freiheitsstrafen).Footnote ⁷⁰ The draft was based on the assumption that prison labour was part of the punishment and that the state was entitled to the proceeds. Although the meaning of prison labour underwent a reinterpretation after 1945, the Federal German ‘Service and Correctional Regulations’ continued to adhere to the principle of rewards. Lawsuits against the reward system were uniformly dismissed. The Hamm Higher Regional Court, for example, explicitly justified a corresponding ruling as late as December 1965 with the notion that work behind bars was ‘itself punishment’. In principle, the judges argued, in what amounted to a return to standards applied before 1945, that forced labour did not justify a claim to wages at all.Footnote ⁷¹ Westphalia, where the Hamm Court held jurisdiction, was in no way particular in this respect; the reward system, whereby the amount paid was subject to the discretion of the respective prison administrations and thus could vary from one federal state to the next, was practiced across West Germany. As a rule, there was a graduated reward system, depending on the diligence of the inmates and the standard of the work. Work rewards ranged from DM 0.40 to DM 1.00 per day. Rarely did prisoners earn more than DM 1.00 a day; monthly bonuses for special services hardly ever exceeded the 20.00 DM limit. The average total was 28.48 DM per month.Footnote ⁷² By way of comparison, an unskilled worker in agriculture on average earned a monthly gross income of DM 812.00 in 1969.Footnote ⁷³

Against that backdrop, critics of the way prison labour was organised continued insisting that its handling amounted to additional punishment. Since the 1960s, advocates of reform found support among social democratic politicians and activist lawyers who were willing to take up the issue in public, and this time indeed with the intention of taking Brandt’s slogan of ‘to dare more democracy’ at its word – also behind bars. One of the critics from inside West Germany’s Justizvollzug was John Gahlen, head of administration of a prison in southern Germany, who found clear words for what the bad rewards did to the inmates. At a professional gathering of prison officials, he explained:

Even though Gahlen, in his position as administrative manager of a prison, will have placed great value on the disciplined behaviour of the prisoners, he obviously also understood their concerns and shared their view that the wage system was morally and legally wrong. Federal Minister of Justice Herbert Jahn also experienced an argument about this when he visited Tegel Prison at the beginning of 1971 and was questioned by the inmates about the planned reforms. The concerns with which the Minister was confronted related to the issue of remuneration and articulated a clear understanding among the inmates that they were being drastically and systematically disadvantaged. When asked directly when the conversion from a more or less arbitrarily settled payment to standard wage could be expected, Jahn found himself cornered, offering a weak plea for more time: ‘This is not something that will be given to you at Christmas 1971, but will take a longer period of time.’Footnote ⁷⁵ In that he was right. Changes in the reward system were not to materialise until five years later (and indeed around Christmas time), and even then a negotiated weekly or hourly wage rate was not in the offing. The government draft for a Prison Law justified the decision against the standard rate on the grounds that prisoners could not be expected to work as productively as free workers, with consequences for costs. Therapeutic measures during working hours, frequent changes of workers and the necessary security arrangements were cited as reasons for the inevitable gap in productivity.Footnote ⁷⁶

Thus, the reform era left prisoner demands for standard wages unsatisfied in West Germany but also in the United Kingdom, France and other European states.Footnote ⁷⁷ Ironically, prisoners were not granted the right to work either, another perennial issue in the reform debates of the time. For years, lawyers had argued that such a right should be granted for ‘educational reasons’. The state’s duty of care, they held, required such a legal title if the correctional goal of resocialisation and the associated idea of reintegration were to be achieved.Footnote ⁷⁸ The fact that other European countries had granted such a right to work in the 1960s, including Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, France and Switzerland, was duly invoked – but failed to leave a mark on (Federal) German policy and regulation.Footnote ⁷⁹ And even in these in some respects more progressive nations, fundamental inequalities that were deeply, indeed structurally, ingrained in prison labour were rarely tackled and even more rarely remedied. Ultimately, Western European prison regulations had it in common that inmates were denied employee status in the workplace because they could neither sign an employment contract out of their free volition nor put their labour on the market, selling it to the highest bidder. In short, they were no more fully capable economic subjects than they were free and equal citizens.

Conclusion: The Value of Labour and the Work of ‘Outsiders’

While penal reformers were debating prison reforms around 1970, emphasising the special value of work for the resocialisation process, elsewhere, as described above, the reform agenda of ‘humanising labour’ was being drafted. Historians have mostly integrated this debate into the master narrative of the socio-cultural transformation of the time, as expressed in the emergence of new social movements in Germany, France and elsewhere, in ideas of extra-parliamentary opposition, anti-authoritarian protests or feminist and ecological thinking. The desire for individual recognition, participation and self-development in work led to a loud, publicly audible critique of health-endangering work processes and workloads, monotonous work content and authoritarian management styles. In fact, the concept was also attractive to employers, as it promised to depoliticise industrial relations while branding investments in the workplace as contributions to the ‘humanisation’ agenda.Footnote ⁸⁰ Given the label’s ubiquity, it is all the more telling that working life behind bars rarely (if at all) figured in these debates. Clearly, the goal of humanising working conditions did not pertain to all workers. Prison labour remained the work of ‘outsiders’, betraying a notion of humanity and human rights that was far from universal but heavily status- and context-dependent.

This reflected the key unresolved tension in the objectives of imprisonment, with punishment and protection on the one hand and resocialisation on the other. While rhetorically the discursive and political trajectory was headed for the latter, the questions arising from prison work laid open the continuing significance of the former. Forced labour was prohibited, yet work in prisons was exempted; inmates faced disciplinary and material repercussions if they refused to work, yet were excluded from employee status and its ensuing rights; they were paid for their work, but not at market rates; they were expected to prepare for a world that revolved around labour, yet were not treated as the economic subjects they were supposed to become upon leaving the prison’s confines.

With these contradictions largely unresolved, the reforms of prison labour after 1945 failed, as the gap between resocialisation as paradigm and as practice was never truly bridged. If the idea of successful resocialisation was not tied to just any type of work (as defenders of minimal pay argue to the present, suggesting that remuneration is not the objective of prison work) but to what in Germany is described as a standard employment relationship (Normalarbeitsverhältnis), that is, a freely chosen, contract-based, steady, full-time employment, with negotiated, legally enforceable working conditions and adequate remuneration, decades of reform efforts had little to show by the time of reunification. Work done by prison inmates was (and still is) a far cry from these standards, and with little prospect of attaining them in the future either. It was not until 1998 that Germany’s Constitutional Court found that the operative system of payment for prison labour was in violation of the Basic Law: the meagre monies paid out – fixed at 5 per cent of average wages at the time – were obviously insufficient to make any meaningful contribution to resocialisation, which, the Court ruled, was a constitutional obligation.Footnote ⁸¹

But the guardians of the constitution did not find that prisoners were entitled to equal wages either; it was left to parliament and the executive branch to figure out what sum would meet the standards of the Basic Law’s resocialisation mandate. While referring the matter back was obviously reflected the division of powers, the decision suffered from the equally obvious shortcoming that the same authorities had avoided its own mandate ever since the 1976 reform bill had become codified law in 1977, when it came to both raising prison wages and passing a law that would include prisoners in the elaborate system of social security and benefits payments.Footnote ⁸² Therefore, another generation of judges at the Court recently found the wages system in German prisons wanting yet again. Resocialisation was not to be had at such low prices, the opinion said; and neither did the previous raise to 9 per cent of the national wage average make any particular difference – as, indeed, scores of jurists and criminologists had commented over two decades.Footnote ⁸³ The Court effectively sent the present law back to the legislators, giving them another two years to redress the deficits. Yet, as observers immediately noted, the commission explicitly failed to include welfare state provisions, especially old-age benefits, implying that the legislative gap of 1977 will remain unfilled and making old-age poverty ‘a long-term, resocialisation-defying consequence of prison sentences’.Footnote ⁸⁴

With remarkable little change between 1949 and today, a look at prison labour, like few other areas of modern societies, drastically illustrates where the boundaries of social participation were and are drawn in states that have elevated the dignity of the individual to the highest good. Within its scope, the ability to use work as a foundation for social self-positioning, that is, to decide largely for oneself about public standing, wealth and social affiliations, and thus to take control of one’s own life – features prominently. Yet all this was denied to working prisoners. Their identity as workers was all but determined by their being inmates, which even the social reforms of the late 1960s, which explicitly aimed at integrating socially underprivileged groups, did not change. Despite all the reforms, planned or implemented, the work of prisoners was largely conceived of as having other functions than that of free workers. It was not a means of individualisation but, on the contrary, one of adaptation. In a larger view, the continuity therefore runs even deeper. For all the differences and details that sets today’s penitentiary system apart from its predecessors, prisons remain closed institutions that care little for universal rights as discussed outside their walls. ‘Democracies are never perfect’, Jakob Tanner rightly emphasised, ‘they only claim to be changeable, improvable’.Footnote ⁸⁵ But the extent to which they live up to this claim to an ability to self-reform is tested, among other things, by the way they deal with prison labour as the work of ‘outsiders’.