Leprino was able to gain a competitive edge—access to an ingredient that’s difficult to source—by partnering with Colorado Correctional Industries (CCi). Had they known about the partnership, its customers (and their customers, the pizza-eating denizens of the United States) may have chosen to avoid the company’s cheese, whether out of a desire not to support the prison system or a belief that their food dollars should go toward companies whose workers earn living wages. But they probably never found out about the relationship: Prisons don’t generally publish the names of the companies that purchase the food they produce.

The Counter identified over $40 million in transactions between private food companies, prisons, and prison industries since 2017, including sales to major food industry players like Cargill and the Dairy Farmers of America. Across the country, at least 650 correctional institutions have some sort of food processing, landscaping, or farming operation, according to research by sociologist Joshua Sbicca and feminist geographer-political ecologist Carrie Chennault at Colorado State University.

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In some states, food produced in prisons makes its way into restaurants and grocery stores through companies like Leprino, though in most places, food produced on prison grounds feeds the prison system and the public sector. Elsewhere, private food companies contract with state correctional industries to hire incarcerated workers, often for meager pay. In some ways, the small world of prison food production is a microcosm of the American food system, which has roots in slave labor and all too often functions as a race to the bottom: Fueled in part by cheap labor and low overhead, the drive toward production and profit leaves behind the people who plant the seeds and butcher the beef.

This article is the first of a three-part series on food production in the nation’s prisons and will focus on prison sales to private businesses. The next stories will focus on sales within the public sector and, then, working conditions and wages in prison jobs.

The Counter obtained records of food-related business relationships between prisons and private companies in Colorado, Louisiana, Ohio, South Carolina, and Wyoming, via public records requests. Our investigation reveals previously underreported ties between food companies and prison industries.  For this story, we’ve relied on additional information from Florida, which supplies ground meat using prison labor; Arizona, which contracts with local farms and manufacturing plants to send incarcerated people to work offsite; and Tennessee, which sells grain to Cargill.

The notion of work as punishment has enabled prison administrators to compel incarcerated people to work on farms and in dairies for low or no pay and without basic labor protections, sometimes in service of secretive billionaires they’ll never meet. Not unlike undocumented immigrant farm workers who fear advocating for better pay and working conditions might lead to deportation, people who work in U.S. prisons have little power to make things better.

The buyers: A dairy conglomerate, gourmet steak producers, and a tropical-fish supplier. Plus, an extraordinary Covid workaround.

Leprino is far from the only food business that purchases ingredients from prisons. Dairy Farmers of America, the conglomerate that markets about 30 percent of the raw milk produced in the United States and manufactures brands including Borden, T.G. Lee, Plugrá, and Breakstone’s butter, purchased more than $10.5 million worth of milk from prisons in Colorado and South Carolina from 2017 to 2020. Until months ago, incarcerated people in Ohio carved beef for a company that sells its Wagyu steak at gourmet retailer Balducci’s, as well as for several local farms and ranches. People in Colorado prisons have grown grapes for an award-winning winery, while those imprisoned in Arizona have worked in food manufacturing facilities that supply pre-made salads for companies that serve major retailers such as Walmart, Kroger, and Ralph’s. And in Louisiana, prison-raised cattle are sold on the open market at auction.

It’s generally illegal to sell prison-manufactured goods across state lines except through one small federal program. But that rule has long included an exception for agricultural goods. Today, the loophole has mushroomed into a multimillion-dollar industry, a quiet set of business relationships that slip prison-grown food products into restaurant menus and onto supermarket shelves undetected. Someone imprisoned in Arizona might work at a canning plant that produces taco sauce sold at Safeway and on Amazon, but the jar doesn’t come with a “packaged in prison” label or other disclosure.

In some cases, the trail goes cold long before it’s possible to link prison food buyers with the retailers and restaurants they later supply. A single distributor, Tropaquatics, Inc., buys virtually all the prison-farmed tilapia from both Colorado and Wyoming, totaling more than $650,000 in purchases over the last three years. Yet the company advertises itself primarily as a pet fish supplier, and owner Larry Heimlicher declined to disclose his retail customers, saying only that they included “ethnic supermarkets,” and that he is ending his relationship with CCi. The corporations that purchase food produced in prison may not even know where it winds up: “In terms of tracing that grain, crops from Tennessee are commingled with grain from other locations and loaded onto vessels at various export terminals to ship to locations all over the world,” a spokesperson for Cargill wrote in an email, adding that grains produced from Tennessee prisons make up a “very small amount” of the company’s total U.S. volume.      

Lucrative business relationships can set up incentive structures that encourage prison management to put clients’ needs above incarcerated people’s health. In March 2020, as the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry swiftly shut down its off-site labor partnerships to prevent the spread of Covid-19, its biggest customer, egg producer Hickman’s Family Farms (a relationship that brought in $7 million in fiscal year 2020), balked at the prospect of losing many of its workers. The company argued in a letter that it should be allowed to continue using such labor throughout the pandemic, claiming its egg processing operations counted as “critical operations.”

The Arizona Department of Corrections granted Hickman’s an extraordinary exception: It agreed to allow the egg company to continue to employ 140 incarcerated women throughout the public health emergency, going so far as to let Hickman’s house them onsite in a 6,000-foot warehouse. Arizona Correctional Industries even built and delivered bunk beds for the makeshift housing. By the summer, at least five residents had contracted Covid-19.

How is this legal? The logic and law of prison labor

Prison labor is far from the only category of coerced labor in the United States, sociologist Erin Hatton demonstrates in the book Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment. People who participate in welfare programs have to prove they’re working or looking for work in order to continue receiving aid. College athletes and graduate students fit into this category too, Hatton argues, because their employers wield so much power in determining their future success or failure.

Prison industries often argue that the jobs they offer are rehabilitative—that they provide meaningful job training, give incarcerated people a sense of purpose, and prepare people for life after prison. But, Hatton argues in the paper Punishment and Society, prison labor is punishment first and foremost. The same is true for so-called “workfare,” or policies that require people who rely on the safety net to prove they spend many hours a week working or looking for work, she writes. While Hatton acknowledges that the work may offer some ancillary benefits, “their labor is legally, socially, and institutionally constructed as punitive.” She goes on to identify the most punitive aspect of these jobs: poor pay, lack of autonomy, and mistreatment at work.

“Like all Americans, prisoners are culturally expected to fulfill a moral obligation to work, the shirking of which—perceived or real—has long been used to justify exclusion from the rights of productive citizenship,” Hatton writes in Coerced.

When the 13th Amendment to the Constitution banned slavery in 1865, the text included a clause allowing “involuntary servitude” as “a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” “As the 13th Amendment passed, was anybody thinking of a burgeoning prison industry? No,” said Caroline M. Kisiel, historian and associate professor at DePaul University.

The punishment carveout facilitated a pernicious postwar labor dynamic. Southern states implemented Black Codes, discriminatory laws that often required Black citizens to work or show proof of work or be jailed. Those laws fueled the growth of the convict leasing system, which hired out people in prisons and jails to work on railroads, mines, plantations, and domestic service, often in dangerous conditions.

Unions allied against the practice of convict leasing. They argued that their members could not compete with low-cost prison labor. These dynamics became even more pronounced as the Great Depression put many out of work, said Stian Rice, visiting assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

“The real conversation is between—to put it bluntly—prominent segments of white society arguing over what’s the best economic measure to take. The fact that [prison labor] was a brutal, extremely violent kind of arrangement … does not play into the conversation,” said Rice.

Congress passed the Ashurst-Sumners Act in 1935, which prohibited the interstate sale of goods made using prison labor, but included an exception for agricultural products. Prisoners could still work on farms and manufacture goods; those goods just couldn’t be sold across state lines. (For a brief period of time in the 1930s, some prison-made goods were labeled as such.)

Legislators approved an additional workaround for the ban on the trade of manufactured goods when Congress authorized the development of the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP) in 1979. PIECP is a relatively small program—it employed just under 5,400 incarcerated workers in the first quarter of 2020—that allows correctional industries to partner with private companies to employ incarcerated workers. It also requires that companies pay a prevailing wage, a rate based at or above minimum wage on expected compensation for similar nearby jobs. Yet workers who participate in PIECP do not take home their full wages: States are allowed to garnish up to 80 percent for room and board, taxes, and other expenses. Again, Rice said, the concern about wages was not so much about the rights of incarcerated workers—rather, lawmakers wanted to ensure prison labor did not undercut the free market.

The landscape changed again in the 2010s, as states began passing strict immigration laws that threatened to deter undocumented workers from seeking farm jobs. “There is this real rush to get prison labor out there in a way that isn’t illegal, even if it is, you know, vaguely similar to what was going on in the 1880s,” Rice said. Idaho soon passed its own version of PIECP, legislation that allowed farms to contract with state correctional industries to hire prison labor.                          

From prison to plate 

If these forms of carceral agriculture in the United States are at least 150 years old, the secrecy with which products reach our plates is a bit newer. A few years ago, Colorado Correctional Industries did not hide the fact that its tilapia was sold at Whole Foods Market. Then, in 2015, organizer Michael Allen, founder of End Mass Incarceration Houston, led a protest accusing the company of exploitative practices, citing the low wages of people in prison in Colorado.

At the time, Whole Foods said it liked the idea of supporting suppliers who “found a way to be a part of paid, rehabilitative work being done by inmates,” and that it believed the work would help people get back on their feet after prison. But it wanted to acknowledge its customers’ discomfort with Whole Foods sourcing products that were grown using incarcerated labor. The company announced its intention to stop selling foods made with prison labor. The change also impacted goat cheese maker Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy, which also sourced goat’s milk from Colorado Correctional Industries.

Chuck Hellmer, president and general manager of Haystack Mountain, said Whole Foods’ decision reduced the company’s sales numbers “tremendously.” He said CCi’s goat dairy has since shuttered, but he still stands by its programs. “I asked a lot of questions of CCi, and after the additional analysis and research that I did, I was even more strongly in favor of using CCi. … The program, I would say, is probably a model program for the rest of the country.” CCi did not respond to a list of questions by press time.

The Whole Foods dustup may have changed one company’s purchasing policies, but it did not fundamentally lift wages for people who work in prison jobs, as Allen had intended. Instead, the distributors who buy CCi tilapia and trout simply stopped disclosing the names of their restaurant and retail clients. Tropaquatics, Inc., declined to provide details about its customers. A spokesperson for Frontier Trout Ranch, which has purchased at least $127,000 worth of tilapia and trout produced by CCi, also declined to be interviewed for this story, citing negative impact from past press coverage of the program. A spokesperson for Colorado Correctional Industries said in an email that it plans to wind down its tilapia operation by September.

It’s unclear how strictly Whole Foods continued to enforce the policy. Dawn Jump, founder of Jumping Good Goat Dairy, also sourced goat milk from CCi for a time, though she said she permanently switched suppliers in spring 2017. Whole Foods carried one of her cheeses off and on around that time, but she could not immediately say whether the company’s purchases overlapped with her sourcing from the prison dairy. “They didn’t tell us anything about that being against their rules. It was never brought up as a topic of conversation, and they did not encourage me to do anything different,” she said.

A spokesperson for Whole Foods said that the grocery chain does not sell products made with the use of prison labor, adding that its Supplier Code of Conduct was updated to prohibit the practice in April 2016.

Yet Whole Foods also sells products like Plugrá butter made by Dairy Farmers of America, which has recently purchased over $10 million in milk from prisons in two states. Dairy Farmers of America did not respond to queries about how it used milk purchased from South Carolina and Colorado corrections.      

Even though Allen’s protest led to Whole Foods dropping CCi products, press coverage at the time was not all negative. An NPR reporter who visited CCi’s goat farm in 2017 called it “beautiful.” Currently and formerly incarcerated workers interviewed for the story said they liked working on the farm. With its small operations and focus on specialty products—wine grapes, buffalo milk, tilapia, goat milk—visitors to the farm may have had difficulty finding fault with CCi programs.

“Personally, I think there was kind of an intersection between this modern … romanticization of agriculture, where we’re watching documentaries about people leaving their lawyer jobs and opening up a farm someplace,” Rice said. “At the same time, you have this imagination of prisoners getting out of their cold, dark cells and into nature and doing work with their hands. And isn’t that lovely?” he added.

“It sort of puts a wet blanket on this idea that there is a whole lot of violence that’s going on.”

In a series of interviews and surveys by the nonprofit Impact Justice for a six-part report on food in prisons, formerly incarcerated people reported widely varied experiences working in food production. In some cases, people said they received helpful training, enjoyed the fresh air, and snacked on food they grew. In other places, they found the jobs extremely difficult and were not allowed to eat the food they produced. “I would also say that, if people aren’t being paid fair wages for their labor, that’s problematic in and of itself. But in terms of the actual experience, I think it probably varies from person to person,” said Leslie Soble, lead researcher on the study.

If Colorado’s “beautiful” prison farming operation lends itself to “back to the land” rehabilitative farming narratives, conditions at Louisiana State Penitentiary disrupt such daydreams. The facility is sited on a former plantation, where enslaved people harvested food. Today, nearly three-fourths of those housed at “Angola” are Black, and most are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, ProPublica reported last year. Notorious for its history of violence and, more recently, inadequate medical care, Angola came under fire last year for “deadly neglect” and dysfunctional care during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Prisoners at Angola can be legally forced to work once cleared by a medical doctor, and most are required to perform field work, like harvesting soybeans and corn for at least 90 days upon arrival. For long hours in the hot sun, they earn as little as 4 cents per hour. People assigned to field work have complained of inadequate drinking water, which the state has disputed, and of armed guards patrolling the fields. In 2018, prisoners organized a work stoppage and published a list of demands, including “class rooms for our education and rehabilitation, not slavery.” Also, “[w]e are demanding that a national conversation inquiring how state prison farms across the country came to hold hundreds of thousands of people of African descent against their will,” organizers wrote.

Some of the crops produced at Angola are sold on the open market: Between 2017 and 2020, The Counter found that Louis Dreyfus Commodities, an affiliate of the massive Louis Dreyfus Company (which manufactures everything from pet food and biodiesel to orange juice concentrate), purchased $2.4 million worth of shelled corn and soybeans from Louisiana’s Prison Enterprises. According to the Prison Enterprises website, that product was “primarily” grown and harvested at Angola. Louis Dreyfus Company did not respond to questions about how it used corn and soy sourced from Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Prison Enterprises also sells livestock on the open market. The range herd is housed at five separate state correctional facilities, though Angola is the largest by far. Between 2017 and 2020, the state prison enterprises recorded at least $5 million in sales of calves, steers, and heifers through open auctions. It’s difficult to trace them any further: Auction companies handling business on behalf of Prison Enterprises did not respond to interview requests.

In recent years, student groups have organized campaigns to sever ties between state correctional industries, which build dorm furniture, and public universities. Allen’s protest against Whole Foods followed a similar trajectory: The loss of lucrative contracts, his logic went, might encourage prison operators to raise wages.

But the protest didn’t result in minimum wage policies for people in prison in Colorado, a broad shrinkage of the prison system, or even a shuttering of the tilapia operation he targeted. In general, boycotting food companies that purchase food from prisons may ultimately have little impact on the labor conditions on prison farms—much less any broader impact on the criminal justice system.                     

“We can get rid of the milk from the prisons. But so what’s the outcome there?” said James Kilgore, a formerly incarcerated activist and scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “What’s the structural change that comes from not buying milk from the prisons? … What’s happening to that milk, what’s happening to the people that are there? Is it really disrupting the system?”

“I don’t think you’re going to dismantle mass incarceration one prison product at a time.”

Correction 05/21/2021: A graphic in a previous version of this story inaccurately stated that Cargill owns the brands Egg Beaters and Purina. Cargill sells products under these brand names, but it does not own the brands. We regret the error.

The post How corporations buy—and sell—food made with prison labor appeared first on The Counter.

On paper, the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program, authorized by Congress in 1979, addresses one of the most prevalent criticisms of prison labor: pay. Through the program, which employs a tiny fraction of the total U.S. prison population, incarcerated workers ostensibly earn prevailing wages. But they see only a sliver of their checks. 

PIECP rules allow corrections departments to withhold up to 80 percent of workers’ wages. In Idaho, for example, the state Department of Correction has taken advantage of these deductions: In the fourth quarter of 2020, the most recent data available, it kept 25 percent of workers’ total gross wages for room and board, and garnished an additional 31 percent of the money for “victims programs,” including court-ordered restitution. More was withheld for family support and taxes. 

Hypothetically, a person making $7.80 per hour, the minimum rate paid to incarcerated people by partnering companies from 2018-2020 in Idaho, might have taken home just $1.95 per hour after deductions, $1.15 of which would go into a mandatory savings account. That leaves just $0.80 for an hour of work, or $32 for a 40-hour work week. 

“Now, there are some lawmakers who like to say [incarcerated people] owe this money that they would otherwise be earning to the state that is gracious enough to provide them with room and board,” said Wanda Bertram, spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative. “That’s absolutely not true … even for people who believe in our prison system, which I don’t. The idea that the person who’s incarcerated should be paying for their own incarceration runs completely contrary to our knowledge of the prison system as a publicly funded and equally funded agency, right?”

Idaho moved forward with a PIECP-copycat initiative, passing legislation that codified a program allowing agricultural employers to contract with the state correctional industry and hire incarcerated workers. Workers under the Agriculture Work Program are classified as “trainees” and aren’t entitled to workers’ compensation or unemployment insurance, and the state is allowed to withhold wages to offset the cost of incarceration. Many of the current participants in the Agriculture Work Program have been partnering with the Department of Correction for many years. 

Though Idaho shared the names of the companies that participate in its Agriculture Work Program with The Counter and PIECP participants are published online, it’s difficult to trace the food processed by incarcerated people to the restaurant menu or grocery store shelf. For example, Dickinson Frozen Foods in Idaho, a subsidiary of the Oregon Potato Company, hires incarcerated workers through PIECP to roast potatoes for $7.80 to $10.68 per hour. Online, Dickinson notes that it supplies “most major food companies” with frozen onions. The company did not respond to inquiries from The Counter about who purchases its products, but one truck driver who recently picked up a load at Dickinson said he delivered to a Stouffer’s plant. In 2007, then-company president Paul Fox told the Ontario, Oregon-based Argus Observer that Dickinson supplied onions to Wendy’s for its chili. Wendy’s did not respond to an inquiry about whether Dickinson continues to supply its onions. 

Elsewhere, participants in the Agriculture Work Program include a cattle feedlot owned by Simplot, a company that supplies french fries to McDonald’s. The feedlot was developed to turn excess potato scraps into animal feed. According to records disclosed by the Idaho DOC, these jobs pay between $7.80 and $14 per hour before deductions. Here’s where else we could trace the food: 

Public-sector sales and better-paying jobs may address some of the more troubling financial dynamics inherent in the prison food industry, but they don’t solve other workplace issues, like worker safety. The pandemic has illuminated troubling workplace dynamics: Food factories and work programs stayed open even as workers said they felt unsafe. Incarcerated workers feared they’d face serious consequences, like the threat of solitary confinement, if they quit out of fear of being exposed to the virus. In at least one case, incarcerated people working in a food factory were likely infected on the job by nonincarcerated co-workers, seeding outbreaks back in their prisons.  Part three of this series will look at Covid-19 in prison food factories and other advocacy efforts to raise wages.

The post This under-the-radar supply chain routes food from prisons to hospitals, food banks, and even schools appeared first on The Counter.

Washington isn’t the only state that kept prison food factories running after Covid-19 began to spread last year. In 2020, incarcerated people working under the auspices of the California Prison Industry Authority (CALPIA) baked cookies, roasted almonds, processed peanut butter, and packaged snickerdoodles later sold to various state hospitals. Incarcerated workers told the Los Angeles Times they felt infection control at work was “questionable” yet worried that refusing to work would result in disciplinary actions that would prevent their release.

People in prison have labored throughout the pandemic in jobs that are considered “essential” elsewhere. Yet unlike many essential workers across the country, they lack basic job protections like sick pay and federal workplace safety oversight, not to mention hazard pay or minimum wage. Indeed, their incarcerated status has meant that many have no choice but to work in places they fear will make them sick or face retaliation. Many have continued to work even as they’ve seen other privileges curtailed in the name of disease prevention.

“In a bigger picture, this tells you that the system itself has certain financial obligations that it needs to carry out—whether those financial obligations are selling goods to other state institutions or producing goods for the institution itself in order for it to be viable. Those are the priorities,” said James Kilgore, formerly incarcerated activist and research scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“The welfare of people inside is really marginalized.”

The notion that mass incarceration persists because it produces widespread cheap labor has largely been debunked by advocacy groups like the Prison Policy Initiative: The people working in the industries that sell products to state institutions and private companies make up a small fraction of the total number of incarcerated people. In reality, much of the work that happens in prison sustains the prison itself through food prep, laundry, and janitorial services.

Still, the pandemic has proven that small yet influential prison industries can have an outsized impact on the quality of life for incarcerated people: In Washington and California, prison factories remained operational, even as incarcerated people worried that their operations were contributing to the virus’ spread.  

As we reported in part one of this series, researchers have identified at least 650 U.S. correctional institutions that have some sort of food processing, landscaping, or farming operation. About half of states run some sort of farm or animal agriculture operation. People employed in state prisons earn anywhere from nothing to $5.15 per hour, averaging $0.14 to $1.14, according to a 2017 study by the Prison Policy Initiative. In federal institutions and many states, incarcerated people cannot refuse to work.

The sociologist Erin Hatton identifies three aspects of jobs in prison that combine to make the work function as punishment: poor pay, lack of autonomy, and mistreatment at work.

If the pandemic has shown a harsh light on lack of autonomy (DeLeon wasn’t able to secure stronger virus-prevention measures on the job) and mistreatment at work (he was exposed to the virus through a co-worker whose cellmate had already contracted Covid-19), the question of fair pay has been debated for far longer. Prison administrators tend to rationalize incarcerated labor by insisting the jobs provide important training and rehabilitation. Yet the currently and formerly incarcerated people, academics, and activists we spoke to for this story largely disputed those arguments, even if some saw other kinds of value in the work.

Chandra Bozelko, columnist and author of the blog “Prison Diaries,” did not want to work in the kitchen at the women’s prison in Connecticut, where she was incarcerated until March 2014. “I was drafted,” she said, and she wasn’t exaggerating: The state of Connecticut requires incarcerated people convicted of a crime to work, if asked (people who are in prison awaiting trial are not subject to the same requirements). Her shift started at 3:30 in the morning.

But Bozelko grew to enjoy her work. Soon after she was released, she heard about the protest of Whole Foods tilapia and goat cheese that led to the company dropping Colorado Correctional Industries as a supplier. “I was literally sick over it,” she said, adding that she would have been upset if attention from activists had prompted the disappearance of her job. “I don’t know what I would have done. I was paid to go to my job, I got to walk in fresh air. I got to eat different food—like I got to have a salad rather than a gross fish patty. So what it did was save my life.”

Still, Bozelko disputed the notion, often advanced by corrections departments, that her work stirring 200-gallon vats of “casserole meals” provided meaningful job training. “Let’s be honest: Most of the stuff you are going to do in a prison job … most of it people kind of already knew,” she said.

Sociologist Josh Sbicca and feminist geographer and political ecologist Carrie Chennault of Colorado State University, who co-direct the Prison Agriculture Lab, found that prisons and correctional industries cited vocational training as one of the primary reasons why they maintain farms and food manufacturing facilities in prisons. There’s not much evidence (or, apparently, expectation) that any skills gained in these jobs result in food industry work upon release, Sbicca said. Some states do offer training certificates for specific skills, like pesticide application, but data on whether people use those certificates later in life is scarce. “What that suggests to me is this notion that agriculture is a means to work in prison,” not a ticket to a good job outside.  “It’s a means to actually feed prison populations. It’s also a means to make mass incarceration more affordable,” said Sbicca.

Unemployment statistics for formerly incarcerated people further undermine the job training and rehabilitation argument. A 2018 study by the Prison Policy Initiative found that formerly incarcerated people were unemployed at a rate of 27 percent, a number roughly five times the national average. The rate climbed even higher in the first year or two after release. This so-called “prison penalty” in unemployment is highest for Black women, at 44 percent, and Black men, at 35 percent.

“I do think it would be great if people earned a decent wage—even a minimum wage,” Bozelko said. “But if that were the cost of, say, we can only have two jobs versus 20, I would say give the 20. And I understand that puts me in what I consider a morally untenable position, which is that people aren’t making minimum wage.”

Legislators in California may be edging toward a change in the way prison labor is compensated in the state. Early in 2020, the state Senate passed a resolution known as SCR 69 affirming its support for raising wages for working prisoners in California, where pay falls between eight cents and $1 per hour. SCR 69 was not passed in the assembly and, even if signed by the governor, it would signal intent rather than concrete change.

The bill lays out reasons for a raise: More than half of inmates’ wages is set aside for restitution, and low wages mean low payments to those affected by crime. Parents who entered prison owe an average $10,543 in child support, an amount that would take over a decade to pay back at $0.37 per hour. And formerly incarcerated people often face intense financial distress upon leaving prison: Only 55 percent have any reported earnings in the first year after release, and many leave prison with “criminal justice debt” like court and lawyer fees and electronic monitoring fees. All of these factors depress the economic circumstances and opportunities of incarcerated people and their families (add to that the high cost of phone calls, emails, and toiletries in prison, and saving is exceedingly difficult).

“Being in prison is a very expensive experience,” Bertram said. “Not just for the incarcerated person, but for their family who’s supporting them.” Meanwhile, CALPIA, the state prison industry, generates $60 million each year in gross profit.

Minimum wages for prison jobs may improve the lives of incarcerated people, but some advocates worry that focusing on wages misses a broader conversation about the criminal justice system. “If you give me a job where I can make a dollar and a quarter an hour producing something in a factory, I’ll take it. I’ll go there because it’s going to give me some money, it’s going to take some pressure off my family in terms of providing support for me, et cetera. It’s the best I can get,” said James Kilgore.

“That’s a perfectly logical argument when we look at the individual level. When we look at the systemic level, improving the working conditions for people in prison means putting more money into prisons. I’m opposed to that on a structural level,” he added.

The “monster” problem of mass incarceration, Kilgore argued, requires a monster solution. It’s not enough to offer incarcerated workers personal protective equipment, thicker mattresses, or better wages; it’s not enough to dismantle private prisons in hopes of minimizing corporate profits. “This is a political project, mass incarceration. It’s a Democratic Party project. It’s a Republican Party project. It’s a neoliberal project. It’s a political project. There wouldn’t be a single prison built if we didn’t have politicians voting the money to build them,” he said.

For now, having lost his job when the food factory closed, DeLeon is working in the kitchen at Coyote Ridge, making less than half of what the factory paid. “Losing the job and the position, that was hurtful, but I did think they made the right decision” in closing the factory, he said.

“I wasn’t the type of person that [the closure most] hurt,” he said, adding that some of his peers with longer sentences felt more like “working is life.”

“In the long run, my family was still there.”

The post “Essential” and exploitable: Prison factories stayed open during the pandemic. People got sick. appeared first on The Counter.