A sprawling new investigation has found that forced prison labor feeds into the supply chains of a wide and dizzying range of food and grocery companies, ranging from small local brands and restaurants to major conglomerates like Tyson, Coca-Cola and Kroger.
The two-year Associated Press investigation, published Monday, found that widespread abuse of prison workers has become a multibillion dollar industry due to partnerships between prisons, corporations and lawmakers. While prisoners, often forced to work, make pennies on the dollar or sometimes no money at all while facing physical and mental abuse on the job, states, prisons and companies make tens of millions of dollars of profits.
The reporters sifted through public information requests in all 50 states and followed nearly $200 million of goods and livestock from harvest to sales from the past six years — sometimes literally following vans from yards where prisoners are working to where the goods are delivered.
Interviews with current and former prisoners revealed that they were put through horrific conditions for the sake of profits for the brands that contracted their labor or the states that imprisoned them. Prisoners, who are disproportionately Black, have died and lost limbs on the job and have been abused by the prison staff. And because they’re not considered employees under labor laws, they don’t have the same rights as workers classified as employees do to strike or form unions.
The reporters found that prison labor is part of the supply chain of companies spanning across nearly the entire food industry, including grocers like Aldi, Costco, Kroger, Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods; restaurant companies like Burger King, Chipotle, Domino’s and McDonald’s; and industry conglomerates like Cargill, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Pepsi and Tyson, which together own such a large variety of brands that they are nearly impossible to avoid in retail settings.
Even local restaurants or smaller brands that market themselves as ethical or selling a specialty food, like Eggland’s Best or Belgioioso Cheese, have received the goods, as reporters found. Hickman’s Family Farms, which supplies Eggland’s Best and Land O’Lakes, had housed 140 women in a warehouse on its property in Arizona as the COVID-19 pandemic set in in March 2020; the women made just $3 an hour after deductions, with the state taking 30 percent for “room and board.”
One inmate transport van that reporters followed stopped at a former slave plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana, that has now been turned into a wedding venue and tourist site, where two Black men entered the site’s restaurant; one of them told reporters he washed dishes there.
“You can’t call it anything else. It’s just slavery,” Calvin Thomas, who was imprisoned for over 17 years at the Angola state penitentiary in Louisiana, told The Associated Press. Workers there are often forced to work the fields just days after arriving at the prison, which sits on a former antebellum plantation, making as much as 40 cents an hour. Thomas described how the prisoners would be forced to work through oppressive heat that would even make the guards’ horses collapse.
“Slavery has not been abolished,” Curtis Davis, who was imprisoned for over 25 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary and who now advocates against forced prison labor, told The Associated Press. “It is still operating in present tense,” Davis continued. “Nothing has changed.”
Another worker, Faye Jacobs, told reporters that her only pay for working on Alabama prison farms was two rolls of toilet paper a week, and toothpaste and some menstrual pads each month. In Alabama, as in several other Southern states, prisoners aren’t paid anything for their work for most jobs. Even when workers are paid, the state severely garnishes their wages; in the past five years, Alabama brought in $32 million by garnishing 40 percent of its prisoners’ wages, the investigation found.
Proponents of prison labor say that they view the low cost of prison labor as a good thing. “It’s a win-win,” said Sheriff Wayne Ivey of Brevard County, Florida. “The inmate that’s doing that is learning a skill set… They are making time go by at a faster pace. The other side of the win-win is, it’s generally saving the taxpayers money.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.