The history of the South’s prison labor programs
Incarcerated people plow fields at Florida State Prison, now named
Union Correctional Institution, circa 1927. Photo courtesy Florida State
Archives
Universities are facing mounting pressure to stop using the unpaid
labor of incarcerated people — and some, like University of Florida and
University of Georgia, have done so. Will others be more transparent and follow
their lead?
This is the first in a four-part series, published in
collaboration with The Marjorie.
By Hannah O. Brown, Becca Burton, and Lyndsey Gilpin
https://southerlymag.org/symbolism-of-slavery/
In mid-June, the University of Florida released a statement
detailing actions they planned to implement in an effort to “become part of
positive change against racism.” The president said they would remove campus
monuments celebrating the Confederacy and — in a move that received ample
attention and controversy — promised to end the “Gator Bait” chant at football
games due to its reference to the Jim Crow-era history of Black people being
used to bait alligators for both hunting and entertainment.
One of the most significant items on the list was that the
university vowed to stop the use of prison and jail labor in its agricultural
operations by ending contracts with the Florida Department of Corrections and
other correctional facilities, including county jails, by July 2021.
“There are agriculture operations where UF has relied on prison
and jail inmates to provide farm labor,” stated UF president Kent Fuchs. “The
symbolism of inmate labor is incompatible with our university and its
principles and therefore this practice will end.”
Raiford, which was Florida’s first prison. Photo courtesy Florida
State Archives
But in September, amid further pressure from student activist
groups, the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences
(IFAS) ended the contracts early by “reallocating funds from other programs” to
hire replacement workers, said Jeanna Mastrodicasa, IFAS associate vice
president for operations.
For at least a decade, UF had about 100 incarcerated people at any
given time planting and harvesting crops in fields and greenhouses, working
with livestock, and operating machinery at their IFAS research and education
centers across the state. Incarcerated laborers received no pay, but could earn
gain-time, or days off of their sentence, according to the Florida Department
of Corrections (FDC) and Florida law. According to some contracts, however, the
university did pay FDC $2 an hour per incarcerated person. In other contracts,
there was “no financial obligation,” between the university and the FDC.
The university previously touted the rehabilitative nature of the
voluntary program available to people incarcerated in at least 10 state prisons
and county jails, and emphasized the program’s importance to agricultural
research in the state. It was also critical for their bottom line: Prison labor
used at the nine IFAS research farms was valued at $1,690,500 per year,
according to the university.
Despite its purported benefits, the university did not collect
data on the employment or recidivism outcomes of the incarcerated people who
participated in the program. FDC did not provide data on post-incarceration
outcomes by the time of publication. Without this information, there are many
unanswered questions: What happened to people after they finished working at
the agricultural research centers? Did they find jobs? Did they go on to work
in agriculture? Did they return to jail or prison?
In the midst of worldwide protests this summer following the
killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans by police,
UF walked back its praise for the prison labor program. In prisons and jails
across the U.S., Black men are disproportionately incarcerated. Despite being
only 12% of the general U.S. population, they accounted for 35% of the total
male prison population in 2018, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice
Statistics. That number is higher in the majority of Southern states: In
Florida, it’s nearly 48%. While some work programs have been shown to improve
recidivism rates, research shows white incarcerated people receive better jobs,
skills training, pay, and working conditions than Black people. FDC did not
provide racial data by the time of publication for incarcerated people who
participated in the program.
UF administrators would not explicitly say why the decision was
made to end the contracts. “That’s a good question. I don’t have the answer
because I wasn’t involved in the decision,” Mastrodicasa said. “My job is
simply to implement policy.”
Both Fuchs and assistant vice president of communications Steve
Orlando declined to comment. They referred The Marjorie and Southerly to the
June press release.
“We saw inmates’ work on our research farms as a way they could
contribute to furthering agricultural research for the benefit of all
stakeholders while gaining training and new skills,” said Jack Payne, the
recently retired UF senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources
at IFAS. “However, the symbolism of inmate labor doesn’t align with that goal.
We will consider how we can continue to offer educational opportunities to
inmates in the future.”
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UF is just one of many public universities in Southern states that
use prison labor in agricultural programs and on other parts of campus, or rely
on products made by incarcerated people. Students and activists have pressured
universities and companies to end these programs for years, but data on how
public universities use prison labor is scarce. Products and services produced
by incarcerated people are often hidden in supply chains.
The economic benefits for the state, universities, and
correctional institutions are significant. University and prison officials
emphasized that these programs provided rehabilitation through skill building
and work experience, and supplied detailed information about the cost savings
their institutions receive. The termination of contracts between universities
and prisons and jails will result in significant cost increases, they said.
This year, some other Southern universities have followed suit in
pausing their prison labor programs during the COVID-19 pandemic or ending them
altogether, but it remains to be seen how universities will replace those jobs
— or at least become more transparent about their use of incarcerated
labor.
The South has a long and violent history of using incarcerated
labor, from convict leasing in the 1800s to chain gangs in the 1900s. After the
emancipation of enslaved people, many Southern state governments leased out
their prison populations to private corporations and businessmen.
“They worked in brickyards and sawmills and plantations and the
like throughout the South,” said Matthew Mancini, author of One Dies, Get
Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928. Other common jobs
included railroad construction and agricultural labor.
Between 1900 and 1930, many plantations were converted to prisons,
said Stian Rice, a food systems geographer and visiting assistant research
scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County who studies the
history of prison labor in agriculture. For instance, Angola Prison in
Louisiana, which the state bought as an 8,000-acre plantation, turned former
quarters for enslaved people into prison cells. Incarcerated people tilled the
land and harvested crops as white guards watched over them. Angola still uses
farm labor on-site and is the largest maximum security prison in the U.S.,
covering over 18,000 acres and housing nearly 5,000 incarcerated people — the
vast majority of whom are Black.
Farm detail leaving Florida State Prison, now named Union
Correctional Facility, circa 1930. Photo courtesy Florida State Archives
Agricultural labor is still common among Southern prisons. The
food incarcerated people grow on site is used by the prison or, in some cases,
supplied to other state facilities. Some states, like Louisiana, allow crops to
be sold on the open market. Other states allow prisons to lease out
incarcerated people to private farms.
Vivien Miller, associate professor of American history at the
University of Nottingham and author of Hard Labor, Hard Time: Florida’s
“Sunshine Prison” and Chain Gangs, said prison labor programs today are
different, but follow this long legacy in the South. “It’s certainly a
descendant of slavery, and the ripple effects of it continue on through to the
present day in the way that we think about what an inmate looks like and the
acceptance that prisons should be harsh, custodial, and exploitative places,” she
said.
In 1930, Congress passed legislation requiring the federal
government “to provide employment for all physically fit inmates.” The
legislation prohibited the public or private sale of prison-made goods. But in
1934, the Federal Prison Industry was established as a government-owned
corporation organizing prison labor programs and selling prison-made products
under the name UNICOR. Prison labor laws were updated in 1979 under the Prison
Industry Enhancement Certification Program, a federal program that oversees
correctional facilities’ partnerships with private industry.
Most incarcerated people work inside prisons. According to a 2017
Prison Policy Initiative report, the high end average of seven Southern state
prison systems that pay workers for on-site labor is 54 cents an hour. But
there are also state-run correctional industries, which use incarcerated labor
to build goods such as dorm furniture or license plates that are sold to state
agencies, nonprofits, or county and local governments. Those working for
correctional industries make an average of 86 cents an hour, according to PPI.
(Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas don’t pay anything, according to the data.) That
extremely low wage has to cover many costs incarcerated people have to pay for
medical expenses, supplies, food, phone calls, and court fees.
Prisoners work in a UNICOR (Federal Prison Industries – UNICOR is
the trade name) program producing military uniforms. Photo: Federal Bureau of
Prisons, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The vast majority of jobs are determined by state, federal, and
private prisons, or county jails — and there is no central regulating body to
determine wages, types of work, or working conditions. That’s allowed Southern
states to enjoy the economic benefits of prison labor — particularly for
agricultural work, Rice said.
“The growing period is significantly longer, and the demand over
the calendar year is nearly continuous — something that you don’t see in other
places with a migrant labor population,” he said. “You have the effect of free
labor from the state, and you are essentially keeping the wage rate for
non-prisoners artificially suppressed.”
The University of Florida used more prison labor than any other
college in the state — much of it at agricultural research centers — but it is
a common practice among public universities. Rice said that “it makes perfect
financial sense” that large public universities like UF, University of Georgia,
and others have utilized this system.
“Essentially what it is doing is allowing the university to not
pay an agricultural worker pool — that’s obviously financially in the interest
of the university,” he said. The relationship — a state university contracting
with an institution like a county jail or state prison — exists much more
easily than contracting out with a private grower or competing with trained
agricultural workers, which could charge much more for labor. For instance,
IFAS bases the valuation of their cost savings on $14 per hour for the same
labor.
Crop rows at the IFAS Plant Science Research and Education Unit in
Citra, Florida, Crops. Photo by Josh Wickham, UF/IFAS
University of Florida and University of Georgia officials said
that the programs “build character,” offer “work experience” and “training” for
post-release jobs. Many of these programs are technically voluntary, and some
incarcerated people have expressed that working outside on a farm is better
than staying inside.
But there is limited data on how effective certificates are in helping
incarcerated people land a job post-release, and officials did not provide data
on what happens to participants after they’ve been through these programs.
“You look at people’s experiences trying to find jobs when they’ve
been released, and there’s a lot of difficulty that comes with having a
criminal record,” said Wanda Bertram, communications strategist for the Prison
Policy Initiative. “Your social network is obliterated by being incarcerated.
You’re going back to, often, an impoverished community with fewer social
contacts and a criminal record — and in all this, the fact you practiced farm
work is supposed to help you?”
Carly Berlin and Anna Hamilton contributed reporting and editing.
Disclaimer: Hannah O. Brown and Becca Burton are employed by the
University of Florida. Their contributions to this story were completed as
private citizens and not as employees, agents, or spokespeople of the
university.
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