I feel like this article is pointing a gun at the wrong faces. These companies are most likely doing this as a form of social giving. The amounts involved are minuscule for the industry.
It touches on the question of rehabilitation but very superficially, when that should be the main point. Plenty of prison systems have voluntary work placement, not mandatory, and it benefits everyone.
Buried at the very end:
> In a series of interviews and surveys by the nonprofit Impact Justice for a six-part report on food in prisons, formerly incarcerated people reported widely varied experiences working in food production. In some cases, people said they received helpful training, enjoyed the fresh air, and snacked on food they grew. In other places, they found the jobs extremely difficult and were not allowed to eat the food they produced.
The choice for the prisoners is making $4.50 a day or sitting in their cell doing nothing to improve their life. Don’t act like this isn’t still exploitive to the point of it obviously being a false sense of choice —- especially with the BS that America will lock people up for. If a 14 year old kid in Alabama gets caught with a joint isn’t it convenient that the corporations in the state suddenly have access to a fresh new indentured servant — quite a nice replacement for slavery you guys have worked out for yourselves. If you want to see how civilized countries rehabilitate people see how prisons in Norway are run.
> I feel like this article is pointing a gun at the wrong faces. These companies are most likely doing this as a form of social giving.
No, they're doing it because they know they can severely underpay these workers and treat them badly, knowing that they have no recourse to push back.
People who run such businesses rarely have any pure motive. It's all about the profit and they don't care who suffers in the pursuit of it.
Now if they'd provided the prisoners with a decent wage for their work, that would be a different matter, and indicative of some good intent. But none of these companies are going to do that, when they know they have a source of people they can continually exploit.
The companies are purchasing from a distributor. They don’t decide the pay or conditions just as they don’t for other suppliers. They probably only choose to purchase because of that label and price.
Not when you read the whole sentence. They're comparing working for the purpose of rehabilitation (in which case eating the food you grow is possible), to working in order to generate the prison a profit.
Is it normal for an aerospace engineer to be able to launch himself into space? I think your stance is quite irrational / ignores the complexity of modern society.
The UK has comparably large problems as well. I don't think NZ has many prisons at all, but I don't know about the situation there, don't know about their incarceration rate. It is still not a contest between countries, but if it pleases I will state that the US is awesome.
I'm not even from the states, just giving you some perspective because it often seems the American snob past time is shitting on their own country and making comparisons they know very little about.
It touches on the question of rehabilitation but very superficially, when that should be the main point. Plenty of prison systems have voluntary work placement, not mandatory, and it benefits everyone.
Buried at the very end:
> In a series of interviews and surveys by the nonprofit Impact Justice for a six-part report on food in prisons, formerly incarcerated people reported widely varied experiences working in food production. In some cases, people said they received helpful training, enjoyed the fresh air, and snacked on food they grew. In other places, they found the jobs extremely difficult and were not allowed to eat the food they produced.