"Chaos theory incarceration"
The Guardian
March 16, 2007
By Sasha Abramsky

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In Colorado, a debate over illegal immigrants has led to the re-emergence of leasing prisoners for work. According to Senior Fellow Sasha Abramsky, this is not a good thing.

Chaos theory incarceration
In Colorado, a debate over illegal immigrants has led to the re-emergence of leasing prisoners for work. This is not a good thing.

By Sasha Abramsky
March 16, 2007 10:00 AM

A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and triggers a series of events that, ultimately, impacts weather systems thousands of miles away. It's the example always used of how seemingly unrelated phenomena are, beneath the surface, powerfully intertwined.

So how about this one? Voters in Colorado, angered by the inability of the federal government to deal with the issue of illegal immigration, pressure legislators to pass a draconian state bill against illegal immigrants. It requires people to present state-issued ID to access government services, and allows state police to check on suspects' immigration status, thus giving a power to sheriffs' deputies traditionally reserved for federal immigration agents.

The result: as illegal immigrants move elsewhere, Colorado's farmers suddenly face a huge labour shortfall, since they've been relying for decades on an easily exploitable pool of unprotected, underpaid, immigrant workers. What does that lead to? Fears of unpicked crops rotting in the fields and dramatically higher prices at the supermarket.

The solution: have the department of corrections lease out prisoners to man the fields, lend guards to the farmers to guard the inmates, and then bill the farmers for those guards' wages. About a dozen large farms in the state will soon be receiving prisoners - prisoners who have ostensibly volunteered for the work will be paid the princely sum of 60 cents a day.

It's a disturbing development for many reasons.

If states establish a precedent by which prisoners can replace free-world labour, a tremendous downward pressure on the wages of low-skilled workers is created. Why pay a living wage when you have the ability to contract with the state for workers paid a fraction of that wage?

Moreover, if you allow the state to lease out prisoners, even if they are volunteers, you insert a powerful profit motive into the incarceration system. This occurred, with deadly consequences, in the post-civil war South, when states like Alabama and Mississippi contracted with mining companies, railways, road-construction businesses and farms to lease out their prisoners.

Not surprisingly, this resulted in local law enforcement looking to arrest as many blacks as possible, so that they could then be rented out as "hands" to these companies. And it also resulted in diabolical conditions of confinement: since the companies were responsible for their prisoners' living arrangements, they found they could maximize their profit by skimping on food, clothing, medical care and even remotely habitable accommodations. Data gathered by late nineteenth century journalists such as the Louisiana-born George Washington Cable and other researchers indicates this led to mortality rates in the southern prison-work camps on-par with those in the Soviet Gulag a half century later. The head of one of the big prison work camps in Florida, a state that preserved this practice into the 1920s, told Blake McElvey, a prison historian writing in the mid-1930s, that the sites were similar to Siberian camps during the Tsarist era.

While Colorado's move isn't about to recreate Siberian conditions for prisoners, it does create a real risk that profiteers will cut corners with these captive labourers.

To make matters worse still, it might make it more difficult to establish sensible criminal justice policies. Let's say, for example, that Colorado's legislature - after looking at an array of data indicating that incarcerating low-end offenders doesn't have the public safety bang-for-the-buck proponents hoped for - decides to rein in the startling growth in its prison population that has occurred in recent decades. One way to do this might be to divert more low-end drug offenders into treatment programs, rather than putting them behind bars. But if low-end offenders are being leased out to the farms, there could be pressure from farmers to preserve their source of cheap labour by maintaining current incarceration practices.

Whatever the problems with border control in America's southwest, and whatever the merits of voters' angst in states like Colorado, putting prisoners to work in place of illegal immigrants is surely not the answer. It's bizarre enough that a butterfly in the Amazon can trigger a storm in Antarctica. But it's beyond bizarre that a state-level debate over how to tackle illegal immigration could lead to the re-emergence of prisoner-leasing programs in the United States.