It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Immigrant workers from around the world are on strike at one of the nation's largest beef plants. Photo: Essential Workers for Democracy
In less than a quarter-mile stretch of sidewalk, chatter in 57 languages overlaps with the sound of dancehall, bachata, Thai pop, Haitian kompa, and Micronesian hip-hop. At sunset, dozens gather for iftar, breaking their Ramadan fast; the music, pulsing from boomboxes and cell phones held up to megaphones, swells into one shared hum.
In this sliver of land across from the sprawling JBS beef processing plant—among the largest in the country—workers from around the world have united in the largest U.S. meatpacking strike in 40 years.
The 3,800 workers at the JBS beef processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, walked off the job on Monday, March 16, launching a two-week unfair labor practice strike.
This is the company’s flagship beef plant in the U.S. Its previous contract with Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 expired last July.
Strikers say JBS has been increasing the speed of the production line while cutting work hours from 40 a week to 35, squeezing out more work for less money. A thousand Haitian workers at the Greeley plant have filed a class action lawsuit against JBS for discriminatory practices that push them to work at dangerously fast line speeds.
Line speed is a major issue in the meatpacking industry. The UFCW International recently spoke out against a new proposal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to remove federal limits on line speeds entirely.
“We’re demanding our rights, both in terms of wages and working conditions, because before the strike, they really took advantage of us,” said a worker in the brisket trim department, who spoke in Spanish and asked to remain anonymous. “They want the same output, but fewer hours and fewer people.”
After 18 years working at JBS, he said, “everything is so expensive. Everything has gone up, except our wages.”
‘ONE WRONG MOVE CAN TAKE YOUR LIFE’
Workers are also demanding that the company stop charging them out-of-pocket costs for personal protective equipment like mesh vests and arm guards—essential because they work with knives, saws, and other sharp, dangerous equipment.
JBS garnishes workers’ wages when equipment needs to be replaced due to daily wear and tear, damage, or theft. This gear can cost workers up to $1,100, taken directly from their paychecks without their consent.
“I have never experienced anything harder than this in my life,” said Teshale Dadi, who works on the chuck line. JBS was his first job after moving to the U.S. from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. “One wrong move can take your life away.”
The various jobs mentioned in this article are all similar: cow carcasses are moving along on a conveyor belt, and workers are very quickly cutting them into smaller pieces and trimming off fat with knives.
“Access to the equipment is essential for us,” said Brett Tanner, who moved here from Arkansas and has worked as a ribber at JBS since 2024. “Personally, I love my job. I really do. We feed America. But it’s stressful sometimes, the hours we work and the physical toll the job does take on your body.”
Meatpacking jobs are among the most dangerous in the country. Workers on the picket line showed cuts, deep callouses, and chemical burns on their hands from years at the plant. Repetitive motion injuries are also common. Slips, falls, and machinery crushes can even be fatal; in 2021, a worker at the Greeley plant died after falling into a vat of chemicals.
“Our hard work makes JBS a profitable company, the biggest [meatpacking] company [in the world],” Dadi said. “Doing this hard work, everyone deserves the highest respect. Our pay is generally good, relative to [the rest of] the country, but for this specific job, I don’t think it’s even close to what we deserve.”
“It feels empowering that we have so many people standing together to send a message that we want better pay, we want more access to equipment,” Tanner said.
FACING DOWN A CORPORATE GIANT
Organizing across many languages and cultures has been a historical constant in the meatpacking sector. Union drives in the 1930s brought together Black, Mexican, and Eastern European immigrant workers to build some of the earliest meatpacking unions in the U.S.
This is the first strike ever at the Greeley plant, and the first major U.S. meatpacking strike since the 1985-6 strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota. (There were wildcat walkouts at Smithfield Foods in Tarheel, North Carolina, in 2006 and 2007.) At Hormel, 1,500 members of UFCW Local P-9 struck for 13 months, refusing concessions that their international union was pressing them to accept. The Hormel strike galvanized grassroots support from around the country, though ultimately the workers were defeated by the powerful forces arrayed against them.
Over the last few years, UFCW Local 7 has built up a fighting reputation, with some of the largest strikes in the union. Last year 10,000 Kroger grocery workers in Local 7 went on strike for two weeks in February, followed by another 7,000 grocery workers at Safeway in June.
But meatpacking workers face a steep uphill battle as they fight for better conditions. Union density in the industry has fallen precipitously. Up to 90 percent of meatpacking workers belonged to unions in the postwar era, but only 15 percent did by 2019, as the industry consolidated and shuttered unionized plants, only to restart production in non-union plants.
The meatpacking industry is now so concentrated that the “Big Four” companies—JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef— control 85 percent of beef processing in the U.S. JBS acquired the Greeley plant when it bought Swift & Co. in 2007, one of many acquisitions and mergers on its road to becoming the world’s largest meatpacker.
Meatpacking companies have been reaping record profits since the Covid pandemic (notwithstanding fines for price fixing), even as communities suffer from plant closures and beef prices soar for consumers.
JBS, a multinational based in Brazil, is the U.S.’s largest beef processor, and also owns the second-largest chicken processor, Pilgrim’s Pride. It provides meat products for fast food chains like McDonald’s and Burger King, as well as wholesalers and grocers like Costco and Kroger.
Even in an industry known for greed and lawbreaking, JBS has a notorious reputation. The company paid a $4 million fine last year after the Department of Labor found that cleaning contractors at the Greeley plant were using child labor. It also paid $55 million in a $200 million meatpacking industry settlement over collusion to repress wages.
For a long time, the company’s effort to get listed on the New York Stock Exchange was held up by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission due to extensive corruption scandals and the company’s role in deforesting the Amazon rainforest.
In January 2025, Pilgrim’s Pride made the single largest donation to Trump’s inauguration committee, $5 million, leading to allegations of a quid pro quo. A few months later, the SEC approved the stock exchange listing.
NATIONAL NEGOTIATIONS
The Greeley plant is one of dozens of JBS plants represented by the UFCW. Fourteen of these plants, including 26,000 workers in 12 locals, are now covered by a national contract that was settled for the first time last May. Local 7, which opted out of national negotiations, is pushing beyond this agreement, citing higher costs of living in Colorado.
The national contract included wins on regulating line speeds, including steward training and provisions for walking stewards (who are empowered to move around the plant to proactively enforce the contract, and who are paid by the company rather than the union), and improvements to wages and sick leave.
A particular triumph was the establishment of a new Taft-Hartley pension plan. Pensions used to be standard within meatpacking; the UFCW touted this one as the first to be offered by a meatpacking employer since 1986. (At least one news report speculated that JBS agreed to a pension as an optics move to get its stock listing approved by the SEC.)
That said, the national JBS pension plan is relatively modest, starting at contributions of 10 cents per hour worked in the first year of the contract, and increasing by 10 cents per hour each additional year. Local 663 and Local 1846 negotiated separate language to give individual members the choice whether to continue with their previous 401k or opt into the pension.
Nearly a dozen UFCW locals have been showing up in solidarity at the picket lines in Local 7, including Local 663 from Minnesota and Local 431 from Iowa, which were part of national negotiations.
Local 7 announced at the outset that this would be a limited-duration, two-week strike. It could be shorter, the local has stated, if JBS agrees to come back to the bargaining table and negotiate in good faith.
“I hope that we get justice, and that other meat processing plants stand up and get justice too,” said the anonymous worker, who is originally from Mexico, “for the good of the Latino community, and for the workers above all.”
Caitlyn Clark is a national organizer at Essential Workers for Democracy, an organization dedicated to rank-and-file member education and empowerment for workers in grocery, meatpacking, and retail. Lisa Xu is a staff writer and organizer at Labor Notes.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
UK
CITY BIN WORKERS STRIKE
Birmingham City Council seek to ban ‘megapickets’ – Strike Map
“Birmingham City Council has confirmed it is more interested in crushing this strike than resolving it, and is showing disregard for its own workforce.”
By Strike Map
Birmingham City Council has applied to the High Court for an injunction against “persons unknown” in response to growing disruption on picket lines during the city’s long-running bin strike.
The move would effectively ban protesters from delaying refuse lorries from leaving depots and comes just days after the largest Megapicket of the dispute. Over the last year, Megapickets have been organised by Strike Map, a worker-funded organisation that tracks and supports industrial action across Britain and Ireland, and have been backed by trade unions, trade union leaders, politicians, and community activists.
Strike Map co-founder Henry Fowler said:
“This is an act of pure cowardice by Birmingham City Council, backed by their unelected commissioners. The council’s continued escalation of this dispute has already cost taxpayers £34 million. Seeking this sweeping injunction shows they are more interested in wasting public money and hiding behind the courts than in resolving the strike.
“This council’s contempt for its own workforce and the people of Birmingham could not be clearer. With elections coming this May, Labour councillors should start thinking about new jobs. We and our supporters will not end our solidarity with Birmingham’s bin workers. You cannot ban solidarity.”
The injunction application, issued on 3 February 2026, seeks to prohibit for six months any protesting activity by persons unknown, without the council’s consent, in support of strikes organised by Unite the Union. This includes entering, occupying, remaining on, or blocking access to the following council depots:
Lifford Lane Depot, Ebury Road, Kings Norton, Birmingham, B30 3JJ
Perry Barr Depot, Holford Drive, Birmingham, B42 2TU
Smithfield Depot, Sherlock Street, Birmingham, B5 6HX
National trade unions, including the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), a Labour Party affiliate, have pledged full support to the Birmingham bin workers and have attended all three mega-pickets held over the past year. FBU General Secretary Steve Wright has called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to intervene and bring the dispute to an end.
Wright said:
“Solidarity is a fundamental cornerstone of the trade union movement. Throughout history, employers have tried—and failed—to ban effective strikes and protests because they are powerful.
“By seeking this injunction, Birmingham City Council has confirmed it is more interested in crushing this strike than resolving it, and is showing disregard for its own workforce. As a Labour-affiliated union, we will not stand by while a Labour council abandons the principles it claims to represent. We will be calling on other Labour-affiliated unions to express their grave concern over how this dispute has been handled.
“It is now clear that the council and its commissioners are incapable of negotiating a settlement. That is why we are calling on the Prime Minister to step in and end this long-running dispute.”
ASLEF, the train drivers’ union, has also pledged large-scale support for the striking workers. Dave Calfe, ASLEF General Secretary, added:
“Let us be absolutely clear: standing with workers in struggle is not a crime. Solidarity cannot be banned by an injunction.
“We are deeply disappointed by the actions of Labour’s Birmingham City Council, which risk damaging the Labour Party both locally and nationally. This Labour government was elected to bring hope and deliver change for working people. Every day this dispute continues, that promise rings increasingly hollow.
“The trade union movement will stand with Birmingham’s bin workers. We call on the council to return to negotiations and abandon these shameful tactics.”
The Black Death arrived on the shores of England in May 1348 and, in less than two years, spread throughout the country, killing an estimated 2 million people. The death toll from the disease, which was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, got so high that officials in London and other cities opened new cemeteries where hundreds of bodies were interred every day.
According to a new study, those who died around the time of the Black Death may help scientists answer a decidedly modern question: How can malnutrition early in life shape the health of humans far into adulthood?
The answer may be more complicated than scientists once suspected, said Sharon DeWitte, lead author of the study and a professor in the Institute of Behavioral Science and Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder.
In the new research, DeWitte and her colleagues examined chemical clues hidden in the teeth of nearly 275 people buried in English cemeteries before, during and after the Black Death. The team discovered something surprising: People who experienced malnutrition early in their lives may have survived threats to their health, like plague, at greater rates than their peers up until young adulthood, or roughly before the age of 30.
Those survival advantages, however, could have dropped significantly when the same individuals entered their middle and late adult years.
“What this might indicate is that if people experienced a period of starvation early in their childhoods or adolescence but survived, that could have shaped their development in ways that were beneficial in the short term but led to poor outcomes once they got older,” DeWitte said.
The research is part of DeWitte’s ongoing effort to understand the past to help humans living today.
“Mortality varied during a catastrophe 700 years ago in ways that might have been preventable,” she said. “My hope is that we can absorb that lesson and think about how human health can vary across different social categories today, and figure out the points of intervention where we can do something to reduce that burden.”
Childhood health
How experiences early in life shape our health long into the future is far from clear cut.
Some studies of modern humans, for example, have linked low birth weights in infants to health problems later in life. Babies born small, a possible sign of nutritional stress, seem to be more prone to illnesses like cardiovascular disease and diabetes in adulthood than the population at large.
The Black Death, sometimes known as the second pandemic of plague, might be an ideal laboratory for studying these questions, DeWitte noted. In part, that’s because the death toll around Europe varied drastically—in some parts of England, for example, about 30% of the population died, while mortality rates reached 75% in Florence, Italy.
“It raises questions about why mortality was higher in some populations than others,” she said.
To pursue those questions, DeWitte and her colleagues turned to teeth.
Environment matters
She explained that what humans eat as infants and children leaves a mark in the development of our adult teeth—subtly shifting the types, or “isotopes,” of carbon and nitrogen atoms present in the dentine. In particular, when people experience extreme nutritional stress, their bodies will begin to break down their own fat stores and muscle, which have a different signature of isotopes than food that is eaten.
In the current study, DeWitte’s team examined the isotopes present in the teeth of hundreds of people buried in English cemeteries between 1100 to 1540 AD. They included the East Smithfield Black Death Cemetery, which opened in London in 1348 and where the bodies of hundreds of plague victims were stacked in a mass burial trenches.
DeWitte emphasizes that the team’s results are far from definitive—in many cases, the group doesn't have any records about the humans included in the research, so it’s hard to know for sure how they died or how healthy they were in life.
But the findings carry hints that malnutrition early in life may shape the health of adults in ways that aren’t necessarily good or bad—it all depends on context.
When infants or children don’t have enough to eat, DeWitte said, their bodies may develop in ways that prime them for hardship later in life. They may have altered metabolism, for example, so that they use calories, which may be scarce, more efficiently.
Those changes can be beneficial—that is, until the environment changes and food becomes more plentiful. Some evidence, for example, suggests that in the wake of the Black Death, conditions for survivors in England improved as laborers demanded higher wages.
“People who experienced nutritional stress as children may have had a mismatch with their environments later in life,” DeWitte said. “If there’s now a resource abundance, but their bodies were shaped for an environment of scarcity, they may have poor health outcomes, like packing too many fat stores, which can lead to cardiovascular disease.”
For DeWitte, the study is another example of what humans living today can learn from people who died hundreds of years ago:
“For a very long time, I've been interested in this question of why some people experience good health and others living in the exact same society don’t.”
Co-authors of the new research include Julia Beaumont and Jacqueline Towers at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom; Brittany Walter of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency; and Emily Brennan at the University of South Carolina.
Childhood nutritional stress and later-life health outcomes in medieval England: evidence from incremental dentine analysis.
Article Publication Date
30-Jul-2025
Saturday, June 07, 2025
‘Prisons Are Akin To Chattel Slavery’: Inside The Big Business Of US Prison Farms And ‘Agricarceral’ Slave Labor
“If you look at the history of agriculture in the United States, it’s built on dispossession, it’s built on enslavement,” says Joshua Sbicca, director of the Prison Agriculture Lab, and the legacy of that violence lives on in the big business of “agricarceral” farming today
Private companies and state governments have long exploited the 13th Amendment to create a profitable agribusiness system that runs on prison slave labor. “If you look at the history of agriculture in the United States, it’s built on dispossession, it’s built on enslavement,” says Joshua Sbicca, director of the Prison Agriculture Lab, and the legacy of that violence lives on in the big business of “agricarceral” farming today. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host and former political prisoner Mansa Musa speaks with Sbicca about the prisoners farming our food, the parties profiting from their exploitation, and the ongoing fight to uphold the basic rights and dignity of incarcerated workers.
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mansa Musa:
Welcome to Rattling Bars. I’m your host, Mansa Musa.
We oftentimes, when we look at agriculture in society, we see fields and fields of crops, irrigation system, birds flying and chirping. This is the agribusiness as it relates to a fantasy. But when you look at the agribusiness in prison, you see an entirely different story. You see men in the same kind of uniforms providing the labor to produce plants and crops. You see officers, guards on horseback with shotguns, overseeing them, making sure they do not run or escape.
Prisoners are left out in the field, as Malcolm said, one time from, can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night, but they’re left out there at ungodly hours. Recently I spoke with Professor Joshua Sbicca, who is an educator, community builder and associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University, author of Food Justice Now: Deepening the Root of Social Struggle and co-author of A Recipe for Gentrification, Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. Thank you for joining me, professor Joshua Sbicca.
Joshua Sbicca:
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on your show.
Mansa Musa:
And introduce yourself to our audience and tell them how you got into the space that we’re now talking about today.
Joshua Sbicca:
Sure. Yeah. I’m the director of the Prison Agriculture Lab out of Colorado State University. And the Prison Agriculture Lab is a space for inquiry and action related to understanding agricultural operations inside the criminal punishment system.
And we do a lot of research to understand what’s happening and provide translations of that research for a public audience, for a media audience, so that people can see behind the curtain of the prison and understand specifically what it’s like to be on a prison farm and to understand the scope of that work.
So I come at this work originally actually through doing food justice work and in particular working with an organization called Planting Justice, who is an organization that works with formerly incarcerated people. It’s also worked inside prisons like San Quentin State Prison in California. And through that work was exposed to the perspectives of a lot of formerly incarcerated people who’ve had to work in prisons, but also who were working in a more positive way with plants and in gardens.
But it stoked this question in me, though, what’s happening more broadly in the US prison system when it comes to agricultural operations. And so that sort of curiosity was really the impetus behind the launch of the prison agriculture lab.
Mansa Musa:
And I did 48 years in prison, and I was in the Maryland system and one of the prisons, they called it the penal farm. And the reason why they called it the penal farm is because that was when it was first built. That’s what the design was. It was designed for producing food for the prison population, as well as the general society in that region, which was western Maryland. Professor, can you give our audience an overview of the history of the agribusiness and practice in prisons in the US?
Joshua Sbicca:
Yeah, absolutely. And maybe I’ll start first with just laying out what are some of the trends right now that we know? So through our research, we found there are around 660 adult state-run prisons that have agricultural operations of some kind.
And we found these fall into four categories, horticulture and landscaping crops, food processing and production, and animal agriculture. And within each of those, kind of broad categories, are a whole bunch of specific practices.
And so you have everything from essentially plantation-style, large cropping kinds of operations, to more diversified gardens. And so it really runs the gamut, but we do see a concentration of agricultural operations in the South. We also know that in the South there’s a greater number of prisons in that region compared to other parts of the US.
And we’ve also asked kind of why are these things taking place? And so currently, according to the prison system, there’s four main reasons why these operations take place. One is idleness reduction. So essentially, kind of because prisons force people to work in the name of, they don’t want “idle hands doing the devil’s work.”
Another is financial reasons, so feeding the prison population or producing profits for the prison system. There’s also more or more, I should say training purposes. So educational and vocational programs are tied to ag operations.
And then lastly, a very small subset are reparative. So we understand this is for community service purposes, donating the food that’s grown, or greening the prison or something like that. But I’ll say that that’s a huge exception, that there are those sorts of reasons for these operations.
As far as the more historical kind of connections, you know, one of the pieces that I think is really clear is that if you look at the history of agriculture in the United States, it’s built on dispossession, it’s built on enslavement. And a lot of those violent kinds of logics in agriculture find their way into the prison system, as the US prison system begins to develop in the 1800s.
And the same groups who were bracketed out of this sort of agrarian utopia that was being built for white immigrants to the US, as those people were bracketed out, they were then incarcerated again as the prison system began to develop. And yet agriculture was somehow imagined as a tool to discipline incarcerated people and compel them into being an orderly subject, basically.
And so in many ways, agriculture helped build the prison system. As prisons begin to develop, they needed to find a way to afford what they were creating. And so if you had a captive free labor force, you could force that labor force to grow a bunch of food to feed all the people that were then in that system. And so, farms were really central actually to the building of the US prison system and have continued to play a role over time.
Mansa Musa:
And you listed four things, talk about the relationship between how they work out as far as the agri, and as it relates to the support of the institution and the profit margin that come out in support of the prison industrial complex profiting off of it.
Joshua Sbicca:
So maybe I’ll kind of start with breaking down a little bit, these two differences. So when it comes to agricultural operations in prisons and the financial benefits of those operations, it comes in two forms. One is essentially a subsidy to the prison system in the form of food that goes to feed the prison population. And this acts as a cost savings.
So instead of a prison having to go into the open market and buy that food from a corporation, they have their prison force do that work, anything from $0 to cents on the hour. There’s a large number of prisons that subsidize the cost of feeding people in this kind of way. And food is one of the few pieces within a budget in the prison that is controllable in many ways.
And so prisons have sought to make that expenditure less and less and less over time, and it’s at a great cost to the health of people within prisons. And I’ll note that, even in cases where food is going into the prison system, it usually isn’t enough to completely feed everybody. And so food has to be bought anyway.
And then there’s the food that’s being sold on the open market. So if we were to think about it, I think about it like an agricultural/industrial complex, where have prisoners that are selling or that are working to produce crops that then get sold. And also raise animals and livestock.
So in Texas for example, there’s a huge livestock operation. A bunch of this livestock is going into livestock auctions throughout the state of Texas. And then that beef is making its way into food supply chains that go into the consumer market, where you know may be having a hamburger at McDonald’s where some portion of that was produced in a prison in say, Texas.
And so, in terms of how much money is being made, like an exact dollar figure, this is something that actually the prison agriculture lab is trying to get information on. And so we’re in the middle of a project where we’re compiling a bunch of these numbers and we’re compiling the companies that are buying from the prison system. But just to name a few know there’s big companies like Smithfield or Cargill, these large multinational corporations that are purchasing some part of their food supply from prisons. And so tracing that is much more complicated, but it’s nevertheless happening.
Mansa Musa:
Are you familiar with the farm line litigation involving the Louisiana State Penitentiary? And can you talk about your research as it relates to that and any other views you might have on that?
Joshua Sbicca:
Sure. I guess the first thing that I’ll actually say here is, I was retained by the plaintiffs as an expert witness in the farm line litigation. So I can speak about some things and not other things.
But I guess what I’ll say first is a little bit about the research that the prison agriculture lab has done. So as it pertains to Louisiana know, our research has found that there’s a lot of different agricultural operations in prisons in Louisiana, at Angola specifically. So Louisiana State Penitentiary, we know that there are large cropping operations, and that’s sort of the majority of the kind of agricultural work that takes place there.
And there’s work that’s run by the prison industry itself in LSP. And then there are fields that are run by LSP itself. And so those operations run parallel to each other but serve different kinds of purposes.
And part of what the farm line litigation is about, and this has been all kind of publicly recorded and reported on, I should say, is focusing on the heat conditions that men incarcerated at LSP are subject to, particularly in the summertime. And then the harms that are associated with working in a plantation-style agricultural system that’s reminiscent of chattel slavery. And so the pending class action lawsuit is seeking to address those two concerns.
Mansa Musa:
And to your knowledge and your research, how much money do they make versus how much profit comes out of that space? I know you say y’all was trying to pin down how much profit, but if you can give a general view of the profit margin relative to how much the wage margin.
Joshua Sbicca:
Yeah, I mean it really varies a lot by prison and state across the US, but if we’re talking about a state like Louisiana and a prison like Angola, prisoners are paid anywhere from zero to 4 cents an hour, so basically nothing. And in terms of the farm line itself, what’s come out in kind of public declarations, is that food actually goes back into feeding the prison population. So it’s different than some of the other agricultural operations that are producing food for the open market.
In terms of the exact dollar figures, I don’t have those exact figures, but if you were to look like in the aggregate, the Associated Press released a report about a year or so ago, and they essentially found that there’s likely hundreds of millions of dollars that are being made by this agricultural system within prisons. And so you could do some ballpark math to realize essentially that you have incarcerated people paid basically nothing while companies and/or the state are profiting off of this labor.
Mansa Musa:
And it is known that when you’re dealing with any type of large agricultural situation that you have to have some type of pesticide, or some type of way to preserve the plants that you’re growing, or create an environment for the plants to grow. In your research, have y’all found any relationship between the pesticides being used and the health, or health related issues, from men or women that’s working in these environments?
Joshua Sbicca:
Our research hasn’t looked specifically at that relationship between, kind of the environmental exposures and then the health of incarcerated people working in these systems. But one thing that I can say, is that based on various cases that I’m aware of around the country, that the use of pesticides and herbicides is part of some of these agricultural operations. So I’m particularly familiar with the case of Florida where I’ve done extensive research and I know that pesticides and herbicides are used in various farming operations. Now whether or not they’re being safely applied and whether or not people are getting sick as a result of those exposures, I think is another question.
There have been reports, again, this is in sort of publicly available documents that at places like Angola, that crop dusters are used. Again, the question is how safely is that practice happening and are people around when those practices are happening? The prison system is notoriously opaque and it can be incredibly hard to verify what’s happening in any systematic way, but there appear to be reports and information to suggest that these chemicals are being used. And then it’s whether or not it’s harmful to people is the bigger question.
Mansa Musa:
The real news recently reached out to Louisiana State Penitentiary for comment on how frequently they use crop dusters, and has not yet been provided with any official response. I come out of prison myself. When I look at the farm line and I look at the whole agribusiness as it relates to the prison industrial complex.
Unless a person is coming out of the system and buying acres of land and planting and feeding them on their own self, even with a marketable skill is virtually impossible. If you are in an environment where agriculture is the primary industry that exists in the Maryland system, in the federal system, they have industry and it is exploitative in and of itself, but they provide you with a marketable skill where a person might come out with upholstery, a person might come out with plumbing, a person might come out with cabin making, even though they’ve been exploited all them years.
I find the connection between when a person doing long-term in the Angola, or long-term on any prison where it’s agri is concerned, that they don’t have the necessary job skills to be competitive back in society. Do you have a view on that?
Joshua Sbicca:
Yeah, I do. And I think that’s a really important point that you’re making. And one of the claims of many state prison systems is that there is some sort of educational or vocational benefit to the agricultural work that people are performing.
Unfortunately, there’s very little evidence to suggest that that’s actually happening. And I think that there are several reasons for that. I think one is part of it’s like a tracking problem. It’s very difficult to track people once they leave prison. But I think more fundamentally is the point that you made, which is that you can’t buy land coming out of prison. It’s very, very unlikely that you’re going to be able to do that. And moreover, the skills that you actually developed are probably for a more frontline position.
Mansa Musa:
Exactly.
Joshua Sbicca:
So working as a field hand or milking a cow or something of that sort, and if you look at the pay that’s associated with that work, it’s very low pay, and agricultural work is some of the most dangerous work that exists in the economy. And so the thing that I’ve thought a bit about is what is it actually signaling to incarcerated people when you say, this is the kind of work you’re going to do? It signals that they don’t deserve better work.
Mansa Musa:
Right. Exactly.
Joshua Sbicca:
It signals that they deserve some of the most backbreaking, brutal work that we know exists. And to suggest that people are going to come out with a skill then, in that same sector that continues to abuse people, is ultimately this sort of disciplinary and brutal logic that has no intention of actually taking care of people.
Mansa Musa:
And under the law, you have crime, you have punishment, and the punishment is the sentence that you receive. I commit a crime, I get punished for it. The punishment is the sentence I receive. The punishment is not where I go at, and then in turn be brutally punished or physically punished.
And according to the concept of penology is that once I get into the system, then I’m supposed to be provided with the opportunity to change my behavior, to develop a work ethic, to develop social skills, because ultimately I’m going to be returned. Within in the agri system, and much like in the industrial system as well, but in the agri system in and of itself, you’re going to find very few people that come out of the system that is equipped to re-socialize themselves back into society, primarily because everything is done in a plantation style. If I don’t work, if I refuse to work, I’m going in solitary confinement. Or the threat of solitary confinement exists that if I don’t get on the farm line that exists, and more importantly, I’m doing long-term, the average person is doing 15 to 20 years in that environment and come out that environment, have very little skills to adjust back in society.
So it’s inevitable that they’re going to revert back to some kind of criminal behavior which opens that cycle, repeat that cycle. And this has been my experience that I’ve seen over and over again when people leave out, we’re not prepared, we’re not equipped and we’re confronted with a society that we have to live in. We don’t have the ability to get housing, our medical benefits, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But in closing, professor, tell our audience where you see this farm line litigation going. If you can give an overview on that or based on your research and your knowledge of these types of litigation, where do you think this might end up at?
Joshua Sbicca:
Yeah, it is a great question. And when we look at how some agricultural operations are run in this plantation style, like you were talking about, where the point of the system is to heap punishment on top of a sentence, as you put it.
When we see that these kinds of systems exist, it breathes life into the argument that we need to get rid of, for example, exception clauses from state constitutions that say, you can be subject to slavery or involuntary servitude if you’ve been convicted of a crime.
So these kinds of systems, they breathe life into this analysis that prisons are akin to chattel slavery, and they traumatize people in ways that are akin to chattel slavery. And so, even though plantation style agricultural operations are the exception in the American prison system, they’re demonstrative of the larger logics in the prison system that abuse people that use incarceration and capturing the time of people in order to prop up, essentially a giant public works program.
And then on top of that, the entanglements of that system with private industry, which profits off of the captured time of people. And so when thinking about something like the farm line litigation or kind of more broadly what it represents, I think that’s why it’s significant, and that’s why we should be paying close attention, and thinking about how that logic is maybe happening in many other places as well. And so there’s an opportunity to crack that open and engage in efforts that actually uplift the human rights of people who are incarcerated, and that sees the human dignity of people who are behind bars no matter what they’ve done.
Mansa Musa:
Based on your research and your study and your knowledge of the history, what would be a good solution for the type of problem that we just outlined?
Joshua Sbicca:
Yeah, I mean, I guess the one thing that I would point to is that it’s always important to take direction from people who are on the front lines, and that’s incarcerated people, and look at the analysis and demands of people who are subject to abusive systems.
So if you look at efforts like the Free Alabama movement or efforts in the State of Florida, for example, to engage in various prisoner rights organizing, I think it’s really important to find those organizations and those individuals that are already doing the work and to find a way to plug into it wherever you’re located.
There are prisons in every single one of these states that we live in here in the United States, and there are many people that are locked up in that system. So making connections with people on the inside I think is really important.
I think on a more outside level, knowing those companies that are profiting off of the labor of incarcerated people and refusing to spend your money to support those companies is also something that we can all take ownership of ourselves and be aware of how we’re entangled with the prison industrial complex. And so I think that’s another set of actions that consumers can be taking.
And I think the last piece is, in those cases where there is a litigation or other kinds of efforts to hold prisons accountable, that people find ways to support those efforts. So those are the things that I would offer here today.
Mansa Musa:
And will say, tell our audience how they can follow you or keep track of some of the works that you’re doing in terms of your advocacy.
Joshua Sbicca:
Sure, you can find the work of the Prison Agriculture Lab at prisonagriculture.com. And personally, I’m on Blue Sky and you can find me on Blue Sky if you want to follow me on social media.
Mansa Musa:
Professor Joshua Sbicca, you rattled the bars today, and we want to always be mindful of this to say that we’re talking about human beings. We had the United Farm Workers that was working in the fields for pennies a day and inhumane conditions that was able to unionize and ultimately get treated like a human being, get a livable wage.
