When many people think of prison labor, they get an image in their head of convicts stamping license plates for pennies an hour. In fact, however, prisoners are employed to perform far more tasks than the public thinks, including packaging coffee and fighting fires. Proponents of maintaining prison labor claim that giving prisoners jobs helps them earn some cash to fund their prison stay and also to find legitimate work upon release. That said, the treatment of inmate workers should be monitored closely, since they are often excluded from protection under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The United States tends to admonish other countries for abusing prison labor while looking the other way when the same thing occurs at home. Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection fined stevia production company PureCircle for importing a product made with forced prison labor. Yet, when American companies use prison labor in order to keep costs down, they are usually ignored by the United States government.

Prison labor in farming and agriculture

The agricultural industry in the United States has a long history of using prison labor. The United States has grown dependent on cheap labor for its food system, relying on undocumented workers and minimum wage loopholes to keep production costs low. However, with the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration came a dearth of inexpensive undocumented labor,  leading many farms to turn to convict labor to fill these gaps.

Convict leasing

It is important to recognize the relationship between forced inmate labor and slavery. Many common crops (such as Idaho potatoes and melons) are grown, harvested and/or processed by prison workers through a system called “convict leasing,” which refers to states’ leasing out inmates in correctional institutions to private farms and factories as laborers. The practice began in the Reconstruction South when there were not yet enough prisons to accommodate all the convicts in a given state—most of whom were former slaves.

Convict leasing was largely banned in the 20th century, but has once more grown in popularity as immigrant labor has become harder to find. Multiple states have now passed legislation allowing agricultural businesses to use prison labor when they cannot find enough workers to hire, and most prison workers are paid significantly less than non-prison labor.

Parchman Farm

Located in Mississippi, Parchman Farm, one of the most notorious penal institutions in the United States is one of many prisons modeled after a Southern slave plantation that emerged in the early 20th century. Housing more than 1,000 inmates in its earliest years, it utilized the aforementioned convict labor and very quickly became a huge moneymaker for the state, earning $185,000 ($5 million today) in its second year of operation alone. To this day, prisoners at Parchman Farm are still expected to work the fields, growing fruits and vegetables instead of cotton.

Parchman’s legacy has been the inspiration for numerous books, movies, and songs including the classic films Cool Hand Luke and O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the popular 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward. American folk musicologist John Lomax traveled to Parchman in the 1930s to record and preserve the legacy of the African American folk music sung by inmates.

Prison gardens

It is important to note the difference between farm programs in prisons and the leasing of labor by agricultural companies. The Market Farm Apprenticeship Program at Mountain View Correctional Facility in Maine is an example of the former. Mountain View has an apple orchard and a vegetable garden that inmates learn to tend, and the produce they grow is then cooked within the facility and fed to the prison population. As another example, at Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas inmates can opt to participate in a skills-building horticulture certificate program while producing sustainable, organic food for the prison and nearby food banks. Prison gardens such as these are frequently lauded as therapeutic and healing, but some have alleged that they perpetuate many of the injustices within the American prison system.

The prison labor debate

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Most people know it as the amendment abolishing slavery. However, the qualifier, “except as a punishment for crime,” can act as a loophole that allows companies to employ incarcerated people for wages significantly lower than the federal minimum wage. Furthermore, some prison facilities still use forced labor—that is, prisoners who are made to work even if they do not volunteer to do so.

The increased use of prison labor in the food system has led to backlash from activists and people in the food industry who want to end the practice. Some advocates for social justice call the use of prison labor in agriculture “disturbing” because of the health and safety risks—such as pesticide exposure and heatstroke—inmates face when working in the fields.

Those who support employment of prisoners argue that there are many benefits to working while incarcerated. Perhaps the most obvious is skills-building; prisoners can learn trades and then ideally apply these skills upon release. Furthermore, working can be a break from the monotony of prison life.