Prison guard was caught taking money from an inmate for contraband, the indictment says

If you've shopped at Walmart, Target, Costco, Whole Foods or many other major grocery chains recently, chances are you've purchased food produced by prison labor, according to a years-long investigation published this week by The Associated Press. Beef, soybeans, corn and wheat are just some of the products that have made their way from prison farms and barns to the consumer market.

While a 1935 law prohibits the transportation of goods produced by “convict labor” across state lines, there is an exception for agricultural products, the volume of which is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the Associated Press reports.

The Marshall Project noted that the discovery itself is not entirely new. Reports over the past few years have regularly shown that prison labor is part of the American food supply chain. But by sending reporters to track trucks leaving prison plants, the Associated Press was able to uncover some of the ways in which these products are hidden in complex trade networks that obscure where things come from and where they go; often they are sold by companies that claim not to use prison labor.

As the report notes, farming is actually only a small part of the total work done by inmates in prisons and detention centers across the country. This includes both the work inside prisons associated with their day-to-day upkeep, as well as the prison industry and people loaned out to the free world to work. For the vast majority, this work is barely paid (if at all), with the average prison wage maxing out at 52 cents an hour. A recently proposed pay raise in California and a recently passed raise in Pennsylvania were both measured in cents, not dollars. Prison labor is also done without legal health and safety protections, even in extremely unsanitary or dangerous work like fighting wildfires.

Many prison inmates are forced to do their work under threat of punishment. “What makes it forced is that if you quit, you get punished,” Johnny Perez told The Nation last year. Perez worked in textile production in the New York state prison system, earning 32 cents an hour. He continued, “In prison, there is no way to report. [sick] because of Covid; they are placed in solitary confinement or given a behavior report.”

The privations of prison life create their own grim incentives to work, even when they are not explicitly based on punishment. Carla Simmons describes how the food in her Georgia prison has gotten worse and worse, and how meals from the kitchen alone never satisfy her. Georgia is one of the few remaining states where prisoners are generally not paid, and prison staff there reward work with quarterly “incentive meals” or the fleeting prospect of a reward bag full of (usually expired) snacks. Simmons describes how people vie for work assignments based on the likelihood of fishing a prison guard's discarded food out of the trash. “The desire for a stable source of food is a basic human need, and the prison system functions by exploiting that desire,” Simmons writes.

The Associated Press investigation came two months after a group of inmates in Alabama sued the state prison system, alleging it created a “modern-day form of slavery.” The suit alleges that prison officials deny parole to deserving candidates in order to keep them in the state program that leases inmates to local businesses and government agencies. People who participate in these programs are required by law to receive the local wage for work, but the Department of Corrections is allowed to keep 40% and charge fees for necessities such as laundry and transportation to work.

The lawsuit alleges that the state's labor practices in prisons violate several laws, including the Alabama Constitution, which prohibits slavery and forced labor as punishment for crimes due to a recent amendment. The amendment passed in 2022 when Alabama joined a handful of other states that ratified the language. Since then, about a dozen other states have introduced similar proposals.

Such changes in the law don't always have the impact their supporters hope for. Colorado was the first state to pass such a law in 2018, but four years later inmates there too filed suit against the prison system, arguing that the state still uses punishment to force prisoners to work against their will. The state said in court filings that while it does strip privileges from people who refuse to work, it argued that this is different from punishment.

Like many people in freedom, people in prison often find deep meaning and satisfaction in their work. For the Prison Journalism Project, Lexie Handlang describes how her job as a tractor driver was the only thing that made her feel human behind bars, offering her a sense of normalcy and a break from the monotony of life in her housing unit.

Chandra Bozelko, who found similar fulfillment in her prison work, expressed concern in a 2017 opinion piece that political pressure against prison labor may actually be hurting inmates. “Socially conscious companies and agencies are likely to pay inmates higher wages, train them for better jobs, and do more to prepare them for life after prison,” Bozelko argued, so it would be better “if these companies were not deterred by vocal critics of prison labor.”

Bozelko argued that the best solution is to give incarcerated workers the opportunity to unionize. According to a 2022 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, the right to organize is currently one of the many labor protections not available in prisons.

Others see it quite differently. Ivan Kilgore sees prison work as a distraction from the indignities of the penal system, and argues that it is a misunderstanding of the situation to think of oneself as a prison “worker.” “Prison work assignments, presented to us as privileges, serve to lure us into conforming to the prison's disciplinary regime, which amounts to complicity and participation in the manufacture of our own continued enslavement,” Kilgore wrote for Inquest last year.