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.
