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If you’ve shopped at Walmart, Target, Costco, Whole Foods or many other large grocery chains recently, there’s a chance you purchased food produced by prison labor, according to a years-long investigation published by The Associated Press this week. Beef, soybeans, corn and wheat are just some of the products that have found their way into consumer markets from prison farms and barns.
While a 1935 law makes it illegal to transport goods made by “convict labor” across state lines, an exemption exists for agricultural commodities that today amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars of commerce, according to The Associated Press’ reporting.
The finding itself isn’t totally novel. Reports dating back years have routinely revealed that prison labor is part of the American food supply chain. But by dispatching reporters to follow trucks leaving prison industries, The Associated Press was able to uncover some of the ways that these products are hidden in complex trade networks that obscure where things come from and where they go; often to be sold by corporations that claim not to use prison labor.
As the report notes, agriculture is actually just a small portion of the overall labor that incarcerated people do in prisons and jails nationwide. That includes both work in prisons tied to their daily maintenance, prison industries, and people who are leased out to work in the free world. For the vast majority, that work is barely paid (if at all), with the average prison salary maxing out at 52 cents per hour. A recently proposed raise in California and a recently passed raise in Pennsylvania were both measured in cents, not dollars. Prison labor is also performed without legal health and safety protections, even for extremely unsanitary or dangerous work, like fighting wildfires.
For many people in prison, jobs are done under threat of penalty. “What makes it forced…is that if you quit, you’re punished,” Johnny Perez told The Nation last year. Perez worked in textile manufacturing in the New York State prison system, making 32 cents an hour. He continued: “In prison, there’s no calling in [sick] for Covid; you’re going into solitary, or you’re going to get a behavior report.”
The deprivations of prison life create their own grim work incentives, even when it’s not built explicitly on punishment. Carla Simmons describes how the food has gone from bad to worse at her Georgia prison, and how she’s never full from kitchen meals alone. Georgia is one of a few remaining states where prisoners are generally paid nothing, and prison staff there reward work with quarterly “incentive meals” or the fleeting possibility of a prize bag full of (mostly expired) snacks. Simmons describes people jockeying for work assignments based on the likelihood of being able to fish a prison guard’s disposed food out of the trash. “The desire for a stable food source is a basic human need, and the carceral system operates by exploiting that desire,” Simmons writes.
Others feel very differently. Ivan Kilgore views prison labor as a distraction from the degradations of the carceral system, and argues that to consider himself a “worker” in prison is to misunderstand the situation. “Prison work assignments, presented to us as privileges, serve to lure us into conformity with the prison’s disciplinary regime, amounting to complicity and participation in the production of our own continued enslavement,” Kilgore wrote for Inquest last year.