Prison inmates are picking fruits and vegetables at a rate not seen since Jim Crow.
Convict leasing for agriculturea system that allows states to sell prison labor to private farmsbecame infamous in the late 1800s for the brutal conditions it imposed on captive, mostly black workers.
Federal and state laws prohibited convict leasing for most of the 20th century, but the once-notorious practice is making a comeback.
Under lucrative arrangements, states are increasingly leasing prisoners to private corporations to harvest food for American consumers.
The American food system relies on cheap labor. Today, median income for farm workers is $10.66 an hour, with 33 percent of farm-worker households living below the poverty line.
Historically, agriculture has suppressed wagesand eschewed worker protectionsby hiring from vulnerable groups, notably, undocumented migrants. By some estimates, 70 percent of agriculture's 1.2 million workers are undocumented.
As current anti-immigrant policies diminish the supply of migrant workers (both documented and undocumented), farmers are not able to find the labor they need. So, in states such as Arizona, Idaho, and Washington that grow labor-intensive crops like onions, apples, and tomatoes, prison systems have responded by leasing convicts to growers desperate for workers.
Since Reconstruction, states have used prisoners to solve labor supply problems in industries such as road and rail construction, mining, and agriculture. But convict leasing has also been a powerful weapon of white supremacy, and, now, anti-immigrant sentiment. ... Southern states passed vagrancy laws, Black Codes, and other legislation to selectively incarcerate freed slaves. For example, under Mississippi's vagrancy law, all black men had to provide written proof of a job or face a $50 fine. Those who could not pay were forced to work for any white man willing to pay the finean amount that was deducted from the black man's wage.
During the late 1800s, mass incarceration created an army of cheap labor that could be leased to private businesses for substantial profit. In 1886, state revenues from leasing exceeded the cost of running prisons by nearly 400 percent. Between 1870 and 1910, 88 percent of convicts leased in Georgia were black.
But cheap convict labor also suppressed wages for free whites, and, by 1900, poor whites began pushing back.
In 1904, James Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi on a platform of returning whites to work and blacks to confinement. These populist white supremacist sentiments later dovetailed with national economic concerns during the Great Depression, when agricultural failures led to widespread unemployment.
In the 1930s, the Ashurst-Sumners Act and accompanying state laws prohibited convict leasing and the sale of prisoner-made goods on the open market. Inmates still worked in agriculture, but the food they produced had to be consumed by other prisoners or state workers.
By the late 1970s, with growing competition from foreign manufacturing, American companies sought out domestic sources of cheap labor.
Under pressure from corporate lobbies like the American Legislative Exchange Council, Congress relaxed restrictions on convict leasing with the Justice System Improvement Act. As the manufacturing and service sectors began hiring prisoners, agriculture expanded its use of migrant workers.
Today, convict leasing offers significant revenues for prisons.
Most wages paid to inmates are garnished by prisons to cover incarceration costs and pay victim restitution programs. In some cases, prisoners see no monetary compensation whatsoever. In 2015 and 2016, the California Prison Industry Authority made over $2 million from its food and agriculture sector.