The South Carolina Post & Courier has had a couple of articles this week about a working prison farm. I have to admit to being unfamiliar with this concept. How many prisoner farmers do we have in America? Are many prisoners across the country growing their own food?

Journalist Yvonne Wenger reports on the addition of a $7 million dairy to the Wateree River Correctional Institution. Purportedly the dairy is intended to save money for the prison.

Wateree River Correctional Institution is the largest prison farm in the state. Inmates milk the cows and tend to their needs, run a sawmill and gristmill and grow soy, corn and sweet potatoes, among other crops.

Ozmint said the crops produced at the farms, which feed inmates across the state, help the Corrections Department keep the cost of feeding inmates low. South Carolina spends $1.51 a day on food per inmate, the lowest among all state prison systems.

Another article in the series describes the prison farms this way:

Two inmates, dressed identically in tan prison-issued uniforms, sit atop a machine Monday in the farm’s gristmill. They use the machine to grind up the corn kernels while another pair of inmates package the grits in heavy brown paper bags. They produce a bag of grits valued at $35 for just $4.70. The grits will be shipped across South Carolina to feed the state’s 24,000 inmates.

Jon Ozmint, director of the state Department of Corrections, said the prison’s three farms are key to keeping the cost of feeding state inmates at $1.51 a day each, the lowest in the country. The farms produce all the milk, eggs and grits the prisons use, saving the Corrections Department almost $600,000 a year.

The article continues:

The Wateree farm, once segregated, has been in operation since the late 1800s. South Carolina inmates also produce license tags and their own bedding.

Ozmint said inmates in state prisons don’t get paid for their work, but South Carolina’s prison industries provide the inmates with a form of rehabilitation through job training and they can get “good-time credit” to shorten their sentence. [EMPHASIS MINE]

Duane, a St. Matthews man serving an 11-year sentence for a fatal car crash he caused while driving drunk, said he’d rather work in the heat than sit on his duff waiting for the last four years of sentence to run out. Inmates can have little interaction with the media, and they are not authorized to share their last names.

He is a handyman, at one time owning his own contracting business, who is working on the construction of the new dairy. Duane said he is grateful for the opportunity to keep his skills sharp while in prison.

“I enjoy doing this,” he said Monday, as the temperature in Rembert climbed toward 100 degrees.

I have blogged before about my conflicted feelings regarding prison labor. On the one hand, I want to take prisoners like Duane and others at their word that they “enjoy” working because it provides a diversion from their incarceration and in some cases provides some meager but needed funds. On the other hand, I continue to see prison labor as exploitative and as fundamentally unjust. Additionally it serves to further depress the wages of marginalized groups of individuals on the outside. How should anti-prison activists address the issue of prison labor? Obviously if we could abolish prisons then the issue would not exist, however since abolition is not imminent what do we advocate for in the meantime?

The MetroWest Daily News wrote an editorial titled Inmates Aren't Slaves.

The tradition of prison inmates working menial jobs for meager pay dates back decades, long enough for “making license plates” to become a euphemism for going to jail.

Although prisoners are paid just pennies an hour for their work, it’s at least something, allowing them some money to purchase items from the prison canteen and helping lessen the burden on their family members who often financially support their locked-up loved ones. For some, working while incarcerated allows them to build up some small savings, giving them at least a chance to successfully re-enter society when they are released, which, after all, is part of the mission of any correctional system.

Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson would have the state remove that advantage from departing inmates and impose a greater burden on family members of remaining prisoners. Hodgson and state Rep. Elizabeth Poirier, R-North Attleboro, unveiled a bill Tuesday that would prohibit paying inmates for their work. Instead, prisoners would only receive time off their sentence – up to seven days a month – as payment for their work. Eliminating inmate pay would save the state between $2.5 million and $3 million a year, Hodgson claimed.

You know what would be better than paying inmates 2 cents an hour for their work? It would be NOT TO LOCK millions of people up in the first place!!

The editorial continues:

Indeed, the state would not be paying out that money in labor costs. But Hodgson conveniently neglects to mention what the commonwealth would lose if it stopped paying prisoners. Inmates at MCI-Cedar Junction, the state’s maximum-security prison, make every license plate affixed to every vehicle in Massachusetts. Without the cheap inmate work force, the state would have to contract with a private firm or hire new employees who would need to be paid livable wages, costing millions.

And license plates are just the beginning. Massachusetts Correctional Industries, or MassCor, is a major corporation, branching out into several industries. The Old Colony Correctional Center in Bridgewater, for example, houses a large print shop, providing discounted print jobs for state agencies, municipalities and private entities. Next door, at Massachusetts Treatment Center, inmates work in silk screen and sign shops, producing bumper stickers, business cards, street signs, city seals for police cars, etc. Inmates at MCI Framingham have been sewing American flags for more than a century. Other correctional facilities produce everything from trash barrels to beds, mattresses, eyeglasses and office furniture. MassCor even has a catalog to market its products, which generate a profit of more than $5 million a year. That doesn’t even count the savings to state agencies and municipalities, which would have to pay significantly more to purchase such products in the private sector.

While some inmates may continue to work solely to earn time off their sentence, that’s unlikely to be an incentive for many, especially those with long sentences who would barely notice the reduction. Without salaries, there would be no work force.

What is this? Under the guise of caring about prisoners’ human dignity and their professional development, this editorial board is actually making the case that it isn’t a good idea to stop paying prisoners for their work because it would adversely impact corporations and by extension the state of Massachusetts. This seems to be a more benign pro-exploitation of prisoner labor argument. The editorial board completely buys in to the prison industrial complex.

In response to this editorial, someone named Pat Ferris wrote a letter to the editor. This letter was incredibly depressing to read but I know that millions of Americans would agree with the sentiments expressed:

When early warning signs appear in young people by way of juvenile delinquency, the offender must be required to perform community service and be educated regarding the behaviors that got them into trouble in the first place. On that presumption it should be considered community service to work at some task during incarceration. Community service and working within the prison system should be a requirement if one becomes incarcerated. After all we are housing and feeding them, and if a person is not willing to work for food or shelter, they should go hungry and without a bed! [EMPHASIS MINE]

Slavery? On the contrary, more like “community service” and rehabilitation. I believe, and reason will bear this out, that this viewpoint which calls it slavery is a sign of the “viral” liberal mentality that has carried us so deeply into economic and social distress. The law was broken, a debt must be paid to society, and society must require certain criteria be fulfilled as part of an inmates rehabilitation.

We are a society of people who believe in the rule of law and that a citizen must pay a price for breaking the law. Incarceration alone does not rehabilitate, hard work and education are prerequisites that do.

God help us all…

I came across this excellent post by Stacey Patton. She writes about BP’s use of prison labor to clean up the oil spill and makes the appropriate historical connection to the convict leasing system.

Patton writes:

Since Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any state in the country – of which 79 percent of its 39,000 inmates are black – it ’s no surprise to hear that BP is using prison labor to clean up the largest oil spill ever in U.S. history.

A recent report by reveals that in the days after the Deepwater Horizon wellhead explosion, cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words “Inmate Labor” printed in large red letters. Costal area residents were rightly outraged given that they had seen their livelihoods disappear and are now desperate for work.

For me, the key passage in her blog posting is this one:

Black Codes or Jim Crow laws helped create the post-emancipation prison industrial complex in the South that was driven by profitability, racism and corruption. Black men, women and children were habitually arrested for violating Black Codes, failure to pay fines or on trumped up charges so they could be secured as labor convicts. Charged for trivial offenses, blacks were often handed heavy sentences served out in mines, railroads and farms where they endured brutal beatings, harsh working conditions and high mortality.

For a terrific book about the history of the Black Codes and Convict Leasing, read Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon.

Interestingly today’s New York Times has an article suggesting that the Delta’s Black Fishermen are being left behind by BP. BP’s racism and exploitation knows no end. On the one hand, they are using cheap black prison labor for the clean up while discriminating against black fishermen. People of color in this country need to BOYCOTT BP, for real. I for one have stopped buying any gas from them and will begin to research other products that they make so that I can boycott those too.

I am honestly very conflicted about this article that I read yesterday in USA Today called Prisoner Workforce Feels the Pinch.

The article opens:

The nation’s unemployment crisis is now reaching far inside prison walls.

Since 2008, thousands of inmates have lost their jobs as federal authorities shutter and scale back operations at prison recycling, furniture, cable and electronics assembly factories to try to make up $65 million in losses.

The job cuts, prison officials say, mean a dramatic reduction in job training for inmates preparing for release, lost wages for prisoners to pay down child support and other court-ordered fines, and more tension in already overcrowded institutions.

I have always been a critic of the use of prison labor likening it to slave labor because of the tiny wages that prisoners garner for their work. I have also been uncomfortable with the idea of coercion and the sense that this labor can be forced. Finally, I really don’t like the fact that corporations rely on prison labor to deplete the wages of other workers on the outside.

But in corresponding with prisoners in the past, I have often heard from them that they really appreciate having jobs on the inside. Even the meager earnings afford extra funds sometimes for the commissary or to help support their families on the outside. Additionally others have suggested that some jobs have provided for some valuable skills like for example carpentry. Still others have mentioned that having a job while in prison is a good way to distract them from the day to day grind of prison life.

So I was very conflicted when I read the article about the fact that prisoners are losing jobs. Is this a good or bad thing? I just don’t know what I think about it.

I read an article yesterday which really should not be surprising to me.  Apparently, the good folks in New Bedford, Massachussetts have a terrific idea.  Two Republican state reps propose to completely eliminate the meager wages that they give to prisoners for their labor.

Specifically:

In a Tuesday morning press conference at the State House in Boston, Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson and State Rep. Elizabeth Poirier, R-Attleboro, announced their plan for the state to stop paying nominal wages for inmates who work behind bars and in work-release programs.

The two Republican officials said the legislation would save taxpayers between $2.5 to $3 million a year, and made the argument that rewarding working inmates with “good time” off their sentences would be a better incentive and one that would save more money by releasing them from prison earlier.

But here’s the kicker:

Hodgson’s proposal to stop payments to inmates also raises the issue of his former policy of charging inmates and detainees at the Dartmouth House of Correction $5 a day as a cost-of-care fee. That policy was definitively ruled illegal earlier this year by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which ordered the sheriff to pay back $750,000 to inmates who were charged the fee from 2002-2004.

(On Monday July 12, there was a preliminary hearing about the timeline and manner in which those inmates will be reimbursed the money. The $750,000 has been kept in an escrow account up until now.)

Still, the sheriff was successful in lobbying both chambers of the state Legislature to pass laws allowing sheriffs to charge a daily inmate fee. But the chambers’ varying bills were sent to the joint conference committee, which established a commission to study the issue; a maneuver recognized as a way to slowly kill off a bill in purgatory.

Hodgson said it is a “no-brainer” that sheriffs should have the legal authority to charge inmates a daily fee, arguing that it helps offset the costs of incarceration.

Yes, you read that correctly they were actually CHARGING prisoners for the privilege of being incarcerated.  Do people across the country know that this is happening?  The injustice of the PIC is clear but the sense of impugnity with which the actors within this system operate is mind-boggling.  Also, does anyone actually think that the former prisoners will see a dime of the money in the escrow account?  If you do, then I have some land to sell you in Alaska?

From JustSeeds Artists' Collective

For those who are interested in a more academic study about the issue of prison labor, I highly recommend a book called “Prison Labor in the United States: An Economic Analysis” by Asatar Bair. It offers a well-researched and lucid argument that prison labor is an extension of the system of slavery.

Finally if you are interested in learning more about the types of products that are currently made by prisoners in the U.S., visit the following post.