Depends on where you wind up. You usually get punished, but some places are worse than others about it.

The most common punishment for refusing to work is suspending “privileges” like the ability to buy from commissary or recreation like yard time or visiting the library. Remember that it’s common for hygiene items to only be available for purchase from commissary, so by denying you commissary access, they’re effectively saying you can’t buy extra tampons if you refuse to work.

At worst, it can be a reason to put you in isolation, move you to a higher security prison, or deny you parole.

It’s a scam, like everything in modern prisons. They intentionally underfeed prisoners, so that you have to buy extra food from the prison store, where it’s overpriced but at least you’ll get the calories and nutrients you need to stay healthy. Most prisoners don’t have external income, so they are forced to work those prison jobs for pennies on the dollar.

And this is just one example of how prison administrators have intentionally set things up to fuck over prisoners as much as possible. In the U.S., it is sad but true that a large percent of the general public simply does not care, they think the prisoners “deserve it”.

Oh, and those books you’re talking about, do you think those come for free? Do you think you’ll get them if you’re on the guards’ shit list because you’re too lazy to work? That varies by location, but you can be sure that there’s no guarantees of access to literature.

It’s pretty common for people to be released before they’ve served their full sentence. It makes sense if we were to consider the purpose of prison to be rehabilitation — someone who cooperates is far more likely to be deemed safe to release. The problem is that the penal system barely pays lip-service to rehabilitation. Ideologically, it seems like it’s split between two, often contradictory models: the rehabilitative approach, and the punitive approach.

If someone is in for a crime where early parole seems likely (if good behaviour), then it’s not so much that their sentence is being reduced for doing the menial work, but that they will experience an effective increase to their sentence if they refuse to work.

Plus even if someone was unlikely to get parole, I imagine they’d still be pretty disincentivised to resist. I know someone who did time, and there was a particular prison guard who hated her, and when this guard was working, she would often find that her food was bad in some way, such as mouldy bread (She struggled with depression and suicidality, which meant there were periods where she would eat her food in her cell alone, rather than in the canteen). She would also receive disproportionate punishment for things under this guard, such as being sent to solitary confinement if someone tried to start a fight with her. I think the original beef with this guard started when my friend spat in her face during initial processing, but my point is that guards have an insane amount of power to make someone’s already miserable life even worse. I wouldn’t be surprised if refusing to work might lead to privileges being removed for the entire group, which would mean the guards wouldn’t even need to punish you — the other prisoners would do it.

The prison system is disgustingly inhumane even when they’re following all the rules they’re meant to. It’s even worse in reality though, because of how little accountability there is. People trying to push for political change constantly hit a wall because the average politician doesn’t want to stick their neck out for prisoners, and the average voter thinks of themselves as ontologically different to prisoners (who they see as criminals who deserve everything they get (which also ignores the fact that a heckton of innocent people are in prison))

" Or if their sentences get reduced for arbitrary menial work, that seems like a robbery of justice to victims"

Victims are already robbed of justice. They are dragged through the courts, often being retraumatised again and again, because the system cares more about punishment of criminals than it does about actually helping people heal from a crime. As someone who has been a victim of a violent crime, one of the most painful things was learning that the same person who had robbed me had gone on to do more severe crimes after their release. I hate knowing that the prison system made that outcome more likely, and I wonder whether there might have been more justice in the world had I not reported my attack. It feels like the sentence they got for robbing me might as well have been a death sentence, from what I’ve heard about them after they were released. Society says “once a criminal, always a criminal”, and then it puts you in a context where all you can be is a criminal. It’s fucked up and it hurts my heart to think about. Someone made a victim of me, and that was something awful that should never have happened. However, it’s not justice to then turn that person into a victim too (especially as I learned that they had had a pretty fucked up life before attacking me. It doesn’t excuse it, but it does help to explain it).

Sorry. That got longer and heavier than I expected. I feel quite strongly about this topic.