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When the United States ratified the 13th amendment in 1865, federal lawmakers very nearly outlawed slavery for good — but not entirely. Tucked within arguably the most important corner of the US constitution is a massive caveat: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States” (emphasis added.)
In the 160-some years since that amendment, a quieter type of forced servitude has lived on in the US: prison labor. From the debt peonage of the post-Civil War reconstruction era to the privatized contracting of the 21st century, prison labor is a massive money maker, generating $11 billion worth of goods in 2022 alone.
As horrifying a thought as it is, one of the companies still benefiting from the practice is in the news for another reason: spreading a gut-busting diarrhea parasite through mass-produced shredded lettuce in grocery stores and fast food outlets.
It turns out that Taylor Farms, the agricultural company widely believed to be behind the cyclospora outbreak currently raging throughout the US, is also heavily involved in modern-day forced labor.
In reporting from 2023 that was resurfaced this week on social media, the publication Prison Legal News revealed that Taylor Farms was contracting labor from the Arizona Department of Correction, Rehabilitation, and Reentry for the low, low price of just $4.75 an hour — far below the cost of a non-incarcerated worker the federal minimum wage. (And to be clear, that’s not the hourly wage paid to the inmate, which is capped at $1.50 in Arizona.)
Taylor Farms is just one firm involved in the practice in Arizona. Others include Hickman’s Egg Farms, NatureSweet, and Televerde, each of which contracted labor from Arizona DCRR’s for-profit arm, Arizona Correctional Industries. That company’s job is basically to churn out bulk goods for the state of Arizona, like license plates, though it also makes quite a bit of money selling the labor-hours of incarcerated people to private companies.
Worse yet, some of those incarcerated workers may have been here as non-citizens — meaning it would be illegal to employ them in the same low-wage jobs if they weren’t being held in detention. As Prison Legal noted at the time, at least 26 prisoners employed by these companies had been detained by ICE, meaning that outside of incarceration, hiring them would have been illegal. To put it bluntly: their status as prisoners was the only thing that made the arrangement legal.
In all, the DCRR told Prison Legal it had hired out 15,700 “Mexican nationals” between 2008 and 2023, though couldn’t say how many of those workers were undocumented immigrants.
As Ruben Reyes, director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association told the publication at the time: “I’m venturing a guess that a large majority of the people who are labeled a Mexican national by [DCRR] are unauthorized to work here.”
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