Re: [Marxism] Colorado: Farmworkers replaced by prison labor

[Steve Olson <noarch99@xxxxxxxxx>]

Just another reason CO is known as the 'hate state' (anti-gay, anti-immigrant).

Greg McDonald <sabocat59@xxxxxxx> wrote:  April 2007 #1694 Vol. 104 No. 4 $1.00 
/ 75p
Official Newspaper Of the Industrial Workers of the World
Industrial Worker


Colorado to replace
immigrants with prisoners

Produce aisles in grocery stores
across America may soon be filled with
the fruits of prison labor.
Since passing draconian immigration
laws last summer, the state of Colorado
has suffered from a shortage of farm
workers, as many undocumented immi-
grants left the state. Colorado now hopes to solve this
crisis by replacing immigrants with
prisoners.

The state Department of Corrections
announced in late February that they
hope to launch a new program whereby
the Department will provide over a
dozen farms with inmates to pick pep-
pers, onions and melons. The program is
reportedly the first of its kind.
?The reason this [program] started
is to make sure the agricultural industry
wouldn?t go out of business,? state Rep.
Dorothy Butcher told the Los Angeles
Times. After the mass exodus of immi-
grants following last year?s crackdown,
crops were left to rot in the field. Now
prisoners who are considered a low secu-
rity risk will have the option of working
in the fields under the watchful eye of
armed guards?for 60 cents a day.

Immigration rights advocates were
stunned by the proposal.
?Are we going to pull in inmates
to work in the service industry too??
asked Ricardo Martinez of the Denver
immigrant rights group Padres Unidos
asked. ?You won?t have enough inmates
-- unless you start importing them from 
Texas.?

Even anti-immigration groups are
skeptical. ?If they can?t get slaves from Mexico,
they want them from the jails,? said
Mark Krikorian of the right-wing Center
for Immigration Studies in Washington.
The current plan calls for prisoners to
voluntarily choose to participate. How-
ever, the US constitution provides for
the possibility of forced convict labor,
which has been used in the past. The
13th Amendment, passed after the Civil
War, abolishes slavery and involuntary
servitude ?except as a punishment for
crime whereof the party shall have been
duly convicted.?

While immigrants are increasingly
spurned and most American workers are
unwilling to take these hard and low-
paying jobs, the prison population in
America continues to rise.
The U.S. currently has the highest
number of incarcerated people in the
world: 2,186,230 in 2005, according to
Department of Justice statistics.


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