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Michael Gibson-Light, Associate Professor of Sociology & Criminology from the University of Denver, is The Baldy Center Mid-Career Fellow for the 2025 Fall semester. Through his research, Gibson-Light investigates the often-obscured experiences and struggles of working American prisoners through ethnographic observations, interviews, and historical and archival analyses. He also engages with local and national advocacy groups to help improve prison policy. In the classroom, Gibson-Light has recently taught courses focused on U.S. prison labor, the sociology of punishment, criminology, and qualitative research methods.

While in residence at The Baldy Center, Gibson-Light will focus on advancing a project investigating the rapid rise and eventual fall of prisoners’ labor unions in the United States in the 1970s. This work details a historical clash over incarcerated workers’ rights and status that raged from coast to coast in this period. By interrogating how labor organizations behind bars struggled against exclusion, indignity, and mistreatment within the nation’s carceral facilities, as well as the reactionary forces such actors faced in these undertakings, this historical analysis seeks to uncover the socio-legal roots of contemporary penal labor policy, and captive laborers’ role in its development. Building from scholarship on modern penal history that emphasizes the role of top-down forces in shaping the penal field, this project elevates the rhetorics and tactics of the imprisoned themselves by leveraging archival materials produced by those at the heart of the prison labor movement. In this way, it reveals how captive workers and their allies sought to change not only ground-level policy but also the terms of their own social and legal standing from the bottom up.