Is Prison Labor Tainting Your Breakfast Cereal?

It is not magically delicious!

In 1865, the United States abolished slavery, with one glaring exception. The 13th Amendment still allows for forced labor as part of a prison sentence. This was very convenient for many Southern states as they just found ridiculous reasons to arrest Black people and put them right back to work on the plantations from which they had just been freed.

Heck, the reason the Louisiana State Penitentiary is called Angola is because it literally used to be a plantation called Angola — which itself was named after the country that so many of the slaves who worked on it were taken from.

Now, sure, by the time 1928 rolled around, all of those states had abolished convict lease programs as well, but that doesn’t mean that forced labor in US prisons went anywhere.

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This week, the Associated Press published an investigation that found that “hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the agricultural products” in our restaurants and on our supermarket shelves in this country is tied to prison labor.

And it’s not nice outside time, either:

Willie Ingram picked everything from cotton to okra during his 51 years in the state penitentiary, better known as Angola.

During his time in the fields, he was overseen by armed guards on horseback and recalled seeing men, working with little or no water, passing out in triple-digit heat. Some days, he said, workers would throw their tools in the air to protest, despite knowing the potential consequences.

“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you and beat you again,” said Ingram, who received a life sentence after pleading guilty to a crime he said he didn’t commit. He was told he would serve 10 ½ years and avoid a possible death penalty, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a sympathetic judge finally released him. He was 73.

Well, that sure seems a lot like … something.

The businesses the AP was able to tie to the prison labor include restaurants like “McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill,” products from “Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice,” and other products on the shelves of stores like “Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods.”

But wait, it actually gets worse! In addition to being extremely cheap labor, prison labor is also labor without any other rights, either. Prisoners can be maimed or otherwise hurt while working and not only do they not get any kind of workers compensation, they may not even be allowed to file a complaint.

In some cases, prisoners were even killed while working without the company even admitting any wrongdoing.

One of those was Frank Dwayne Ellington, who was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after stealing a man’s wallet at gunpoint – a result of Alabama’s habitual offenders act. In 2017, Ellington, 33, was cleaning a machine near the chicken “kill line” in Ashland at Koch Foods – one of the country’s biggest poultry-processing companies – when its whirling teeth caught his arm and sucked him inside, crushing his skull. He died instantly.

During a yearslong legal battle, Koch Foods at first argued Ellington wasn’t technically an employee, and later said his family should be barred from filing for wrongful death because the company had paid his funeral expenses. The case eventually was settled under undisclosed terms. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the company $19,500, saying workers had not been given proper training and that its machines had inadequate safety guards.

Part of the problem, as it so often is with forced labor, is the overall murkiness of supply chains. The only way the AP was able to determine where the products were going was to have reporters follow the trucks from prisons all across the country to various locations. It’s especially difficult to track livestock, which will often be raised at the prisons and then sold on the open market, with buyers having no idea where it came from. So a company could very well have a policy against using forced labor or prison labor while being entirely unaware of where their ingredients are coming from.

We are, according to one recent report from the Australian human rights organization Walk Free, one of of only 17 countries that still practices state-imposed forced labor, the other countries being Belarus, Brazil, China, Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Mali, Mongolia, Myanmar, North Korea, Poland, Russia, Rwanda, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Very good and normal company we are in there!

Now, this does not mean that prison labor does not exist in other nations. It does, but in very different and less overtly psychotic ways than in the US and these other countries. Australia actually requires prisoners to work — “as an essential component of inmate development and effective Correctional Centre management” — but pays them AU$70.29 ($45 a week) so that inmates can

a) purchase necessities included within the 'Buy-Up' schedule and other approved purchases
b) assist family responsibilities
c) make a victim compensation contribution
d) accumulate savings for resettlement

Similar systems exist throughout Europe, though work is not mandatory or promised, as there simply aren’t that many jobs to go around.

For instance:

In France, generally speaking, inmates earn an average of 330€ per month (excluding taxes) for full-time equivalent. On this income, 20% is levied on the portion going from 200€ to 400€ and 25% on the portion that exceeds 400€, for the compensation of the victims. Then, another 10% is levied on the remaining amount of income and is placed in a blocked account, destined to the inmate on his day of release.

These are not great wages! However, in the United States, workers in non-industry jobs make an average of $0.12 to $0.63 an hour, while those in industrial jobs make an average of $0.33 - $1.41 an hour. And that’s only when they are actually getting paid, because not all states require that.

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It would be one thing if we were talking about jobs where workers are taking care of things in the prison itself, building skills they can use on the outside, or earning money so that when they leave they have some saved up. We are not. We are talking about jobs that often pay 12 cents an hour, for which people are often not being properly trained and which are often dangerous (especially when one is not trained). We are talking about people being mistreated and abused and working in intolerable conditions.

Look. I understand that there are people out there who feel they need to be bananapants rich and that in order to do that they need to pay people pennies. I understand that there are people out there who desperately need for incarcerated people to be treated horribly.

It doesn’t have to be like this! We don’t have to do literally everything in the most horrifying way imaginable. Incarcerated people can be treated with dignity and the rest of us can eat breakfast without worrying that we are eating a bowl full of Slavery Flakes.