US prisoners as a secret workforce: which top food brands are inspired by slavery?

Prisoners earn pennies or nothing at all

Unmarked trucks with prison-bred cattle leave Louisiana State Prison, where men are forced to work for pennies an hour, sometimes for nothing at all^[1]. After the animals reach the auction sites, they are bought by local ranchers and then transported several hundred kilometers to a Texas slaughterhouse that supplies giants such as McDonald's, Walmart, and Cargill.

Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of agricultural products are known to include some of the world's biggest food companies and the most popular brands linked to the work done by US prisoners across the country - though invisible and underspecified. If they refuse to work, they could jeopardize their chances of parole or even be punished by solitary confinement. Worst of all, they are often excluded from protection, even if they are seriously injured or killed on the job.

And it looks like this: in the state of Louisiana, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, some of the prisoners are working on the same plantation land where, more than 150 years ago, slaves were harvesting cotton, tobacco, sugar cane and so on. Hard work in the heat results in thirst leading to death - and the armed guards do not care; they stand with shields on their faces and clubs in their hands, and they can gratuitously beat the convicts until they are blue in the face.

The produce produced by the prisoners' sweat and blood enters the supply chains of many products used in American cuisine, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola, and Riceland rice. Despite the ban on products entering some countries because of the forced labor of prisoners, some goods are still exported lightly.

One thing is clear: many companies that buy directly from prisons are violating their own policies. On the other hand, it is not illegal since the need for labor was created and established by the then desire to rebuild the shattered economies of the South. The Constitution also states that slavery and indentured servitude are forbidden except as a punishment for crime^[2]. However, the provision is currently being challenged at the the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to fruition in around ten states later this year.

America's largest high-security prison hides some of its most vulnerable workers

With some 2 million people now behind bars, US prison labour in all sectors has become a multi-billion dollar empire, far beyond the classic images of prisoners stamping license plates, working on road crews or fighting fires. Moreover, although, say, almost every state has some kind of agricultural programme, this represents only a small fraction of the total prison workforce. 

However, it has been estimated that over the past six years, sales of farm commodities and livestock to businesses have amounted to nearly USD 200 million - a figure that does not include tens of millions more sold to state and government agencies, promoting some of the most dangerous jobs in the country.

The dirty jobs are illustrated by one of many incidents of this kind: in 2017, 33-year-old Ellington was cleaning a machine near a chicken "kill line" at Koch Foods in Ashland, one of the country's largest poultry processing companies, when the machine's rotating "teeth" grabbed the man's arm and sucked him all the way inside, crushing his skull.

The convict leasing system helped build American business empires

Angola's prison system is impressive in scale. The so-called "Alcatraz of the South" is tucked away, surrounded by alligator-infested swamps in a bend of the Mississippi River, covering more than 7,000 hectares - larger than the island of Manhattan - and boasting a "private" postcode^[3]. Today, some 3,800 men live behind razor-wire walls, 65% of whom are black.

The system of "adaptation" in these neighborhoods is as follows: within a few days of arrival, prisoners go out into the fields, sometimes using hoes and spades or picking crops by hand. At first, they work for free, but later they can earn between 2 and 40 cents an hour. They also get two rolls of toilet paper a week, toothpaste, soap, and other such items that make you wipe away many tears of sadness with the same piece of tissue paper...

Convicts testify that some days are so hot that the guards' horses fall down with the prisoners. Slavery or not, the 2021 labor force, linked specifically to the goods and services produced by the state prison industry, brought in more than 2 billion dollars. This includes everything from mattresses to the production of solar panels.

Despite the claim that such 'operations' help to build character and repay the debt owed to society for breaking the law, they are often more like the discipline of brutal inclusion. Perhaps not without reason that in many countries, these programmes are the biggest money-making and slavery-generating initiatives in the solar-free environment^[4].