Prison labour is deeply problematic for ethical reasons, but I think a lot of commentators here are misunderstanding the economics of it.
Haystack Mountain is not getting subsidised milk; they're paying market rates. The dairy is a profit centre for the prison (which in this case is government operated), used to defray operational costs. The prisoner's get paid a pittance, but that helps out the prison; not Haystack (or the grocery stores or eventual consumers). Nobody in the production chain is going to give their output away below market rate just because they got cheap inputs.
Similarly, people suggesting that the competition is putting other dairies out of business are off the mark, because again, the prison dairy is selling their product at market rates. And in this particular case, the prison dairy was set up after Haystack Mountain's supplier closed, threatening to force them out of business; they didn't close in response to the prison dairy closing.
The deeply troubling issue described in the article is forced labour, where the government can throw you in prison and then force you to work for (basically) free. Cheap cheese (or goat milk) is 1) not an ethical issue and 2) not actually happening.
Imho it's not as simple as that, the article has a paragraph who puts it in some perspective:
"Nobody wants to have a big goat dairy, so we did it," Joey Grisenti says. This farm, with its guaranteed supply of low-cost workers, can survive when other farms cannot. "A lot of people just can't afford to have the manpower that we have here," he says.".
What does this say? That goat diaries seem to be an unprofitable business unless you've got a "guaranteed supply of low-cost workers". So either goat milk products are being sold too cheap or the process of goat milking needs to be made less labor intensive.
Whatever the solution might be, one thing is for certain: These "guaranteed low-cost workers" sure as hell ain't gonna make it easier for any private competition to join the market, at least if said competition wants to pay their labor fair living wages and still stay competitive.
Then there's also the fact that plenty of countries around the world manage to produce goat milk just fine, without having to employ prison labor, among them, even developed EU countries like France, Spain, Greece or the Netherlands. Countries with way higher labor costs compared to the US, yet there seems to be no shortage of goat milk there?
The other side of this coin is that, for these "low-cost workers," the goat farm gig is probably better than their alternatives.
> Workers on this farm get strip-searched. If they're caught with drugs or tobacco, or get in fights, they could lose this job and be sent to a higher-security facility with a lot less freedom.
>
> And then there's the pay. It varies, depending on the job, but most inmates on the farm earn a few dollars a day. That's better than most prison jobs, which typically pay less than a dollar a day, but still, it's cut-rate labor.
Should that opportunity cost to the prisoners in this program have weight in whether this "cut-rate labor" is ethical or not? If the farm can't sell it's goat milk for ethical reasons and the prisoners wind up in lower-paying or worse jobs, was Whole Foods' righteous action actually ethical? Lots of complex questions here. I don't know the answers here, but it's a little annoying that one letter to Whole Foods taking the moral high ground could handwave so much nuance.
>The other side of this coin is that, for these "low-cost workers," the goat farm gig is probably better than their alternatives.
When you're talking about people who are in prison, "alternatives" can be actual torture. I'd rather work in a stinking pit than be locked in a tiny room 23.5 hours a day, and that last thing is always an "alternative" in prison.
Market rates are not arbitrary numbers that exist in a vacuum. All economic actors contribute to the market, and they are the result of competition and how low the producers are able to get and still make a living. Some are a bit higher, some are a bit lower. If the prison can always go as low as any other producer and out-compete farms that can't use slave labour to stay artificially competitive, then it will eat the market share of these farms, which will progressively go bankrupt, and the only thing that will stop the prison from eventually owning the entire market is the number of people that get convicted of some crime and jailed there.
This is why these corporations lobby/fight so hard to keep the prison industry private. Their profits are obscene, and the only way to keep themselves profitable is to ensure a steady supply of slaves ahem I mean "criminals". The more people we put in jail the better it is for these companies.
Can you imagine that? Your company profits off of human misery, suffering, and destroying families/lives. I hope hell exists..
A whole bunch of your comments have been badly breaking the HN guidelines by being uncivil and by using the site for political and ideological battle, which is destructive of what HN is for. We ban accounts that do these things, so would you please not do them anymore?
(I'm replying to this one because it's your most recent comment, not because it's the worst of them, though it is the sort of overheated rant we don't want here, regardless of how correct the underlying point is.)
The prison industry is, overwhelmingly, not private. This farm in particular in run by the Colorado Correction Industry, a division of the Colorado Department of Corrections, not a private company.
The biggest harm from these prison labor businesses is not to the prisoners (who, in the article, say it's better than their alternative), but to the other dairies out there who have to compete with businesses employing Thirteenth Amendment slave labor. As the article points out, non-prison dairies have a tough time staying in business, due in likely no small part to a taxpayer subsidized competitor who doesn't really have to pay their staff.
The prisoners all said they liked working much more than they liked being in prison, so so wouldn't really call it "slave labour"
And even if they didn't like it, how is forcing them to do some work any worse than forcing them to be in prison? In both cases you are forcing them to do something they don't want to do.
Create laws that criminalize trivial and victimless actions -> Sentence them to prison -> provide cheap labor as an alternative -> prisoners like cheap labor better than prison conditions -> achieve moral high ground? Nope.
Aside from the 'Create laws that criminalize trivial and victimless actions', I see nothing wrong with that, you are only making the prisoners happier during their time in prison. Prison is partially about punishment anyways, so really you are effectively reducing their sentence. Also I really doubt that the government is profiting off these prisoners, it costs a lot to keep someone in prison.
There are lots of ways to make prisoners happier during their time in prison.
Provide places that one can ensure one's own health and safety, including private cells. Make sure folks have enough underwear and toiletries. Provide actual medical and psychiatric care. Provide well-balanced meals. Heck, we could easily make sure masturbation isn't against the rules.
We could extend that stuff by doing things like paying the prisoners minimum wage. The money could be used to pay child support, debts, help support a spouse, pay for nicer toiletries, and so on. Or just saved up so that the person can actually afford to get on their feet after prison.
It's not the government that's profiting, it's the private prison companies that lobby the government to keep themselves in business and for a steady supply of prisoners from the enforcement of the aforementioned victimless crimes that land people in the prisons they own.
> Slaves would have probably chosen to pick cotton, if the alternative was abuse and torture (Which they by and large did.)
So if, hypothetically, there were slaves given the option to pick cotton or be tortured, would you prefer to remove the option that they pick cotton, and force them to be tortured? Because if we are comparing prisoners to slaves and jail to torture, that is effectively what you are advocating for.
Or would you like to abolish prisons in general, since being in prison is comparable to torture in your eyes.
That's a false dichotomy. The real solution to this problem is, and was, as you strangely seem to have forgotten history, to abolish slavery altogether.
Likewise in prisons the solution is to abolish slave labour and instead give the same work rights to prisoners as to the rest of the population, including minimum wage.
For some perverse reason there is the general idea floating in people's minds that prisoners should be subjected to as much suffering as possible. Being deprived of their freedoms is not enough, they should also sleep in unhealthy conditions, be raped, and be forced to work for next to nothing. This is not the social contract, and this is not an efficient way to fight crime. In fact it probably contributes to create more crime.
> Likewise in prisons the solution is to abolish slave labour and instead give the same work rights to prisoners as to the rest of the population, including minimum wage.
Why should we do that though? It costs a lot of money to keep people in prisons, the prisoners should help pay for that through their work. I think that they should get paid something, but since their food and housing is taken care of getting paid minimum wage seems excessive to me, and no one will hire a prisoner for minimum wage anyways.
> For some perverse reason there is the general idea floating in people's minds that prisoners should be subjected to as much suffering as possible. Being deprived of their freedoms is not enough, they should also sleep in unhealthy conditions, be raped, and be forced to work for next to nothing.
Do you actually know many people who think that? I've never heard anyone say that 'prisoners should be subjected to as much suffering as possible,' or anything along those lines.
The purchasers pay market rates. The prison makes the money, which I can see being wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that competitors are not being harmed. If the price was below market then you would have a point, but it isn't in this case.
"Michael Allen, the activist who got Whole Foods to stop selling Haystack Mountain's goat cheese, says he understands why prisoners like having those jobs. But he'll keep fighting against prison labor until the workers get paid better."
I don't follow such logic. Inmates get free shelter, free food, free healthcare (well, taxpayers pay for it, but that's another topic), so it's only fair that they make up some of it by providing labor imho. Do such activists honestly propose paying them market rates? How about people living on minimum wage then that get to pay for everything themselves? Also, many people go to prison without any job experience, providing them with some increase their chances of reintegration to society. And just look at the place of that farm (pictured in the article), I myself would accept some wage cut to work in a place with such view.
"How about people living on minimum wage then that get to pay for everything themselves?"
How about them? Is it not a fundamentally flawed system when workers at the bottom of the scale wonder if they wouldn't be better off in prison? How do they feel about having to compete with forced labour?
What entitles consumers to pay sub-living wages in order to benefit from a product? This reminds me of people feeling entitled to pay shit prices for some services because "it's just a student job".
"Also, many people go to prison without any job experience, providing them with some increase their chances of reintegration to society."
yeah, by forming them to a job that can apparently no longer sustain a free farmer.
Sadly enough it is true. I was told in some colder areas homeless people would commit a crime they know would amount to a few months prison sentence in the fall just to have a reliable shelter and food for the winter.
Or there was a story of a man who robbed a bank then waited for the police to come so he could get some cancer treatment while in prison.
When these things happen there is something very very wrong in a society
Yes, life is horrifying for people on minimum wage. Why not make life better for people out of prison rather than exploit people in prison and then hold them up by comparison to the free but brutally impoverished ones and say "look how great you have it, you're not doing slave labor!"
Supposedly rehabilitation is a goal of prison; how nice would it be if prisoners walked out with a small nest egg, to help them get settled and survive while they go through the impossibly difficult task of finding a job with a criminal record? Right now, it's very tempting to go straight back into crime or drugs since these are the only career opportunities available. Maybe saving at minimum wage for 5 years would give them enough money to for the first time in their life feel safe, or enough capital to invest in something that could make their lives better, like tools, a business, etc. Maybe they could get some fulfillment and feel like they are part of a social unit by sending money back to their family while in prison. Maybe if they are paid the market value of their labor they will develop confidence that their labor is worth something and a viable alternative to, say, crime.
And yes prison is expensive for the state, but that's the state's problem and provides no justification for exploitation. The state can't do something unspeakable to you like lock you in a cage to be beaten and raped for decades and then make you pay for it. If prison is too expensive, the state should imprison fewer people. There are far more economically efficient alternatives to locking up millions and throwing away the key (like improving conditions for the poor!); the state is making a stupid, cruel, and horrible choice and it should pay the full price for it or it has no incentive to make a better one.
> Inmates get free shelter, free food, free healthcare (well, taxpayers pay for it, but that's another topic), so it's only fair that they make up some of it by providing labor imho.
You call these things free? If I shot you in the head, would you consider it me giving you a free bullet?
The problem with this is that allowing prison labour to be cheaper than free labour puts competitors out of business and gives incentives to the state and business lobbyists to arrest more people for the sake of profit instead of reformation or containment.
There are two different approaches to this that are the same on the outside. Paying the workers more is one, the other is charging a minimum for their time, but X% of their earned wages go to some other entity (the government directly, victim support, community projects). This would help the issue with competition, but not necessarily the other issues. It also doesn't touch the moral aspect of how much people should get paid.
Get rid of private prisons, period. You can even keep the same business model except instead of the profits going to a corporation, the system is run as a non-profit government entity and the workers are actually paid a fair wage.
As it is right now, we have slaves working to enrich CEOs, board members and investors.
You can even keep the same business model except instead of the profits going to a corporation, the system is run as a non-profit government entity
Which is exactly what's happening in this case. There's no private corporation, it's a governmental division, yet the inmates are still paid a pittance. Maybe you should review your preconception of private industry vs government.
1) Just because you're in prison, doesn't mean you deserve to be treated like a work animal. Some people are in there for serial murders, while the vast majority are there for theft, tax fraud, smoking marijuana, etc - maybe even for "resisting arrest".
2) Even if what you said made "economic sense", while disregarding any human rights the prisoners might have, the problem is that many (or most?) of the prisoners are now in private prisons. That means those prisons get both the taxpayer money and the free labor. So both the taxpayers and the prisoners lose, while the private prisons score a double-win. Do you think that's how it should work, too?
The labor issue isn't a clear cut ethical no-no. Working to a productive end is one of the few rehabilitative avenues available. I'm pretty sure these type of jobs are seen as sought after privileges.
Private prisons are most often jails (ie. short term, not places that do this) and do not represent the majority of prisoners.
Sometimes advocates publish misleading figures about this by focusing on prisoners staying in contracted out facilities. The majority of those are prison beds in county jails. These are used to relieve over crowding, house prisoners closer to trial location or otherwise reduce transport. In some places, counties run these as a revenue generator.
> I myself would accept some wage cut to work in a place with such view.
Would you take a wage cut down to $1 dollar a day?
And if so, would you still do that putting yourself into the shoes of the inmates who face grim job prospects as ex-felons when they get out regardless of their work history?
The law isn't some fixed thing that we, as a society, have no control over. If you read the history of the War on Drugs, we essentially criminalized a good chunk of what African Americans do, with the very thinly veiled purpose of oppression.
Okay and I very much agree that this is a problem, but that is an entirely different problem that needs to be addressed with a less corrupt law system. Not related to using prisoners to work instead of letting them rot in a cell.
No, it's highly interrelated. The ability for the judicial system to extract rents via prison labor alters the incentives for having and enforcing oppressive laws. Currently, forcing people to work on goat farms through threatening to imprison them is limited by economics - the police, prosecutors, etc only have so much resources, and the marginal prisoner costs the system money. When that's no longer true, things can end up dystopian in a hurry.
Sure, the inmates may "deserve" to be in prison but they're also human beings and NOT slaves.
It is morally unacceptable that anyone can profit from slave labor in a free country. Moreover, it also hurts honest businesses who are required to pay their workers normal wages.
What about the argument that they are provided "free to them" food, shelter and clothing? And therefore them working for very small amounts of money, is really them paying for those things.
If the people don't want to provide things to folks imprisoned, the state should look into ways to keep folks from being imprisoned. It won't stop all of it - but at that point, prison is more of a public service.
Change laws and punishments so that fewer crimes result in jail time or removal from the workforce, for example. Especially for non-violent crimes. Improve conditions for poor folks, the mentally ill, and so on.
No, the prison uses the money they make from the sales for the prison, that was in the article. Haystack would still have bought the milk for standard price, and sell their cheese at standard price. The extra money from the cheap labor when into the prison itself.
No, I think crispyambulance is right. The article said every other local supplier closed doors, so Haystack couldn't have bought the milk at that price.
The point is to reward prisoners for being functional and using their time constructively. It's important to give prisoners every chance to become habituated to a normal life.
There are prison systems that don't force their inmates into slave labor. Being against slavery, even in the prisons, is not promoting illegal activity in any sense.
You could require the prisoners be paid out of the segregated finances of the dairy and simultaneously garnish that pay to assist in paying the same prisoners living costs.
Or perhaps make products that either aren't cost effective for market, or solely to serve food-banks or other charities?
You could require the prisoners be paid out of the segregated finances of the dairy and simultaneously garnish that pay to assist in paying the same prisoners living costs.
"In the years after Haystack Mountain started making cheese, one of the company's biggest problems was finding a reliable source of goat milk. Jim Schott's small farm couldn't produce enough on its own, and every outside supplier eventually went out of business."
Any competitor will get out of business if you have to pay your forced labor only 1$ a day.
That's not how the timeline of the article reads. The prison was the last resort after the other suppliers went out of business.
From the article, it says they were weeks away from no cheese at all. The prison specifically stepped up the market demand. They didn't push other's out of the market.
Haystack is paying market price for the milk. They are paying full value for the milk and they aren't paying the labor costs of the prisoners. They are buying milk.
An interesting lesson about authenticity and transparency here.
The problem here isn't so much that the prison labor is inherently unethical (it may or may not be), but when people buy cheese at Whole Foods, they assume it's being made by happy people living their dream on a farm they own.
When that turns out not to be true, it's a problem. If you find out about it from an activist and not from the supplier themselves, that makes it worse.
Seems like Haystack could use this as part of their marketing story - put a note on the cheese about it, about how they are providing meaningful work for prisoners, it's better than working inside in a factory, it gives them skills for when they get out.
>>it's better than working inside in a factory, it gives them skills for when they get out.
That argument starts to fall apart when you think about it: The skills they are gaining are only applicable to an industry that is unsustainable outside of slave labor.
Luckily, most people don't think about it and just take what they read at face value.
Would you say that if you were to switch industries right now, none of what you've experienced in your working life would be useful in your new profession?
I recommend that everyone watch the Netflix documentary "13th." The central theme is that slavery has never stopped being legal in the United States it just moved to the prison system. Below is the text of that amendment.
Section 1. 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, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Haystack Mountain is not getting subsidised milk; they're paying market rates. The dairy is a profit centre for the prison (which in this case is government operated), used to defray operational costs. The prisoner's get paid a pittance, but that helps out the prison; not Haystack (or the grocery stores or eventual consumers). Nobody in the production chain is going to give their output away below market rate just because they got cheap inputs.
Similarly, people suggesting that the competition is putting other dairies out of business are off the mark, because again, the prison dairy is selling their product at market rates. And in this particular case, the prison dairy was set up after Haystack Mountain's supplier closed, threatening to force them out of business; they didn't close in response to the prison dairy closing.
The deeply troubling issue described in the article is forced labour, where the government can throw you in prison and then force you to work for (basically) free. Cheap cheese (or goat milk) is 1) not an ethical issue and 2) not actually happening.