I had yet another weekly discussion with The Village Elder (VE for short) after the election. VE was appalled at Trump’s mass deportation policy. This did not shock me because VE has developed quite a noticeably left-lean throughout the last 15 years, where previously VE seemed apolitical to the point of sheer apathy. VE posed the question to me in our weekly discussion Well, who’ll work the fields if we get rid of all the immigrants? VE stood triumphantly, though did not expect my curt response; prison inmates. Yes, your read that correctly and yes, I’m serious. We could send large portions of our prison inmate population to tend the fields and continue to put produce on our shelves, even if Trump somehow magically removed every illegal immigrant from our nation.
In this article, I’ll go forward with the key assumption that Trump’s mass deportation will happen. I’m not here to speculate on how this’ll happen, debate how many illegal immigrants there are, or to opine about the morality of Trump’s proposed policy. Speaking of, I’ll just throw all morality out the window; this article is going to be strictly practical. Furthermore, I’m going to assume no other massive changes to our legal system. I’ll assume that the War on Drugs will continue, and hence the drugs-to-prison pipeline will remain robust; I don’t live in The World of Should and I recommend that you don’t either.
VE has been pretty consistent on the point of modern American aversion to manual labor. VE wasn’t just waxing poetic about this; in lean years, VE ran a restaurant and often lamented that dishwashers and bussers rarely stuck around because Americans don’t want to do those types of jobs. VE would often repeat this line when it came to farm labor as well. VE lived in an isolated farming town for nearly twenty-five years and made this observation quite publicly. The thing is; VE is absolutely right, more so than most of us in polite society want to acknowledge.
There are over a million prison inmates in the United States, however there are only less than 800,000 agricultural jobs here in the country. Prison inmates could hypothetically be used to cover the potential shortfall caused by this mass deportation (assuming that every farm laborer in America is an illegal immigrant, which obviously isn’t true). Mathematically speaking, the healthy vegetables that Americans aren’t eating would still end up on the shelves.
My suggestion and napkin math will clearly sharpen some pitchforks. “Dan, you can’t do that!” an angry Karen would protest, much as VE did. And much like VE on that point, they’d be dead wrong. The 13th amendment has a specific clause literally written into it’s first sentence that reads “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”. In effect, yes, we can absolutely make prison inmates do jobs that nobody else wants to do. In fact, we already do. Not only do they work as janitorial and kitchen staff in the prison itself, they also work low-skill manufacturing jobs for the state, and risk their lives fighting wildfires. Best part? We can subject them to intense working conditions that most Americans would find reprehensible; the lack of empathy towards the convicted is a feature of the American outlook that would easily permit this.
“But Dan, mathematically speaking, not every inmate can be used as basically-free labor Some are so dangerous that they can’t be let out of a cell” is an argument that I’ll get. In fairness, this is accurate but misses the point. My solution wasn’t meant to be a 100% replacement, but a majority-reinforcement to the agricultural sector. But let’s assume that half of these inmates are eligible for farm labor; that leaves less than 300,000 jobs that would need to be filled, and if Am I Racist? (which is absolutely worth the price of admission, #NotAnAd) showed; there’s plenty of down-on-their-luck Americans on Craigslist ready to sign up to suffer through damn near anything for a paycheck. So yeah, produce will still wind up on American shelves (whether we’ll actually eat the vegetables is another matter entirely…).
“Ok Dan, fine; this idea of yours could work on paper. But this is a rather new invention of some coddled tech bros or dystopian futurists” is a talking point that the same Starbucks-chugging Karen from before will spew. Wrong again. The “except as a punishment for crime” clause was used to its fullest effect in the period following the 13th amendment. Freed blacks were often arrested and convicted for frivolous crimes to get them to go back to work on their previous plantations. America has precedent that felons can absolutely be used as cheap labor stretching back hundreds of years.
Speculation on my part, but a potential benefit to this measure is that of reduced prison violence. While working in the hot sun all day performing near back-breaking work for six days per week, 52 weeks per year for the duration of your sentence will inevitably make one a bit testy, it will sap their energy. Inmates would be too tired and sore to start fights, steal, or defy prison staff. Exhausted inmates mean safer prisons.
Honestly, the only reason I’m hesitant to actually put this idea into practice is that it might prove to be a bit too effective. Rather than merely vacuum the warden’s office, inmates having to spend long hours in the grueling sun performing back-breaking manual labor can be used as true anti-crime propaganda; Sherriff Joe Arpaio built a career doing this. It would be nearly as effective of a crime deterrent as the high rates of male-on-male sexual violence that happens in prisons (oops; did I tell a little too much truth?). Videos of inmates performing this grueling work can be played inside every middle school and high school in America. There’s a very real chance that this, along with the alarmingly high instances of prison rape, would become the real reason not to break the law. Over the decades; the chilling effect on crime might actually lead to a reduced pipeline of inmates available to work the fields, thus causing a labor shortage. But hey, there aren’t enough prison inmates because everyone is obeying the law seems like a damn good problem to have, now doesn’t it?
Fuck your Fair Trade…
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