The Associated Press found goods linked to prisoners wind up in the supply chains of everything from Frosted Flakes to Coca-Cola.

A hidden path to America’s dinner tables begins here, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country’s largest maximum-security prison.

Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or sometimes nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s, Walmart and Cargill.

Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world’s largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

They are among America’s most vulnerable laborers. If they refuse to work, some can jeopardize their chances of parole or face punishment like being sent to solitary confinement. They also are often excluded from protections guaranteed to almost all other full-time workers, even when they are seriously injured or killed on the job.

  • mozz@mander.xyzEnglish
    301·
    10 months ago

    An outrage. I don’t want prisoners in the US to make my food, just vulnerable immigrant populations kept perpetually at the edge of deportation, and subsistence foreign farmers victimized by a century and a half of gunpointed economic oppression with the full-throated support of the entire permitted US political spectrum.

    • Yamainwitch@lemmy.world
      61·
      10 months ago

      Um don’t forget all the child labor too! America is an equal opportunity shit show for all ages!

  • AllonzeeLV@lemmy.world
    25·
    10 months ago

    Slaves. These people are slaves.

    The US competes only with China on how many prisoners we have in the world. And we blow every other nation on Earth away including China in per capita prisoners. Land of the “free,” lol.

    Who would have thought for profit prisons and legal slavery could cause such a thing?! Everyone. Everyone with 2+ brain cells to rub together, the politicians and lobbying companies knew exactly what they were doing in the 80s and 90s, they just didn’t care about the ethics of it, only the profit projections.

    There is no depth to the capitalist’s depravity in pursuit of mooooaaaar profit. Don’t let the expensive suits meant to imply refinement and civility fool you, they are single minded, insatiable beasts, ravenous for the taste of blood capital.

  • Yamainwitch@lemmy.world
    17·
    10 months ago

    Absolutely sickening read. And to think so many of these companies are “double dipping” they get to use literal slave labor and get government subsidies all while raising prices for the everyday customer. Just shameful.

  • CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.world
    12·
    10 months ago

    Would it be possible to have info on the product labels like “Lowest wage earned while making this product - $0.15/hr” or something along those lines?

    I think prisoners make pennies per hour, but ICBW