US Farmers Using Prison Labor --
With Tightening Restrictions on Migrant Workers
Some Farmers are Turning to the Incarcerated
by Nicole Hill
© 2007 The Christian Science Monitor
Picacho, Arizona, USA -- Saturday, August 22, 2007 -- Near this dusty
town in southeastern Arizona, Manuel Reyna pitches watermelons into the
back of a trailer hitched to a tractor. His father was a migrant farm
worker, but growing up, Mr. Reyna never saw himself following his
father's footsteps. Now, as an inmate at the Picacho Prison Unit here,
Reyna works under the blazing desert sun alongside Mexican farmers the way
his father did.
"My dad tried to keep me out of trouble," he says, wearing a bandanna to keep the sweat out of his eyes. "But I always got back into the easy money, because it was faster and a lot more money." He's serving a 6-1/2 year sentence for possession and sale of rock cocaine.
As states increasingly crack down on hiring undocumented workers, western farmers are looking at inmates to harvest their fields. Colorado started sending female inmates to harvest onions, corn, and melons this summer. Iowa is considering a similar program. In Arizona, inmates have been working for private agriculture businesses for almost 20 years. But with legislation signed this summer that would fine employers for knowingly hiring undocumented workers, more farmers are turning to the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) for help.
"We are contacted almost daily by different companies needing labor," says Bruce Farely, manager of the business development unit of Arizona Correctional Industries (ACI). ACI is a state labor program that holds contracts with government and private companies. "Maybe it was labor that was undocumented before, and they don't want to take the risk anymore because of possible consequences, so they are looking to inmate labor as a possible alternative."
Reyna and about 20 other low-risk, nonviolent offenders work at LBJ Farm, a family-owned watermelon farm, as part of ADC's mission to employ every inmate, either behind prison walls or in outside companies. The idea is to help inmates develop job skills and save money for their release. "It helps them really pay their debt back to the folks who have been harmed in society, as well as make adequate preparation for their release back onto the streets." says ADC director Dora Schriro.
If it weren't for a steady flow of inmates year-round, says Jack Dixon, owner of LBJ, one of the largest watermelon farms in the western US, he'd have sold out long ago. Even so, last year 400 acres of his watermelons rotted on the ground -- a $640,000 loss -- because there weren't enough harvesters. Mr. Dixon had applied for 60 H2-A guest worker visas, but only 14 were approved because of previous visa violations.
"We are in desperate need for hand labor," says Dixon, who started working on the farm when he was 9, alongside mostly migrant workers. "It's hard to get migrant workers up here anymore, with all the laws preventing them. It's not what it used to be," Dixon says. "It's dangerous for them with all the coyote wars and smuggling."
Other farmers wonder if inmates could be their solution. Dixon has received calls from a yellow-squash farmer in Texas inquiring about how to set up an inmate labor contract as well as from another watermelon farmer in Colorado seeking advice on how to manage inmate crews.
For labor-rights activists, federal immigration reform is the only viable solution to worker shortages.
Marc Grossman, spokesman for the United Farm Workers of America, says inmate labor undermines what unionized farmworkers have wanted for years: to be paid based on skill and experience. "It's rather insulting that the state [Arizona] would look so poorly on farm workers that they would attempt to use inmates," Grossman says. There is also the food-safety aspect, he says: Experienced workers understand sanitary harvesting.
"Agriculture does not have a reliable workforce, and the answer does not lie with prison labor," says Paul Simonds of the Western Growers Association, a trade association representing California and Arizona. "This just underscores the need for legislation to be passed to provide a legal, stable workforce." A prison lockdown would be disastrous, he points out, with perishable crops awaiting harvest. Other crops, like asparagus and broccoli, require skilled workers.
Although the ADC is considering innovative solutions -- including satellite prisons -- to fulfill companies' requests for inmate labor, prison officials agree that, in the end, the demand is too high. "To go into a state where agriculture is worth $9.2 billion and expect to meet a workforce need is impossible," says Katie Decker, spokeswoman for ADC. At any given time, only about 3,300 prisoners statewide (out of a prison population of about 37,000) are cleared to work outside.
ACI provides inmates to nine private agricultural companies in Arizona, ranging from a hydroponics greenhouse tomato plant to a green chili cannery. Unlike other sectors where federal regulations require that inmate workers be paid a prevailing wage and receive worker compensation, agricultural companies can hire state inmates on a contract basis. They must be paid a minimum of $2 per hour. Thirty percent of their wages go to room and board in prison. The rest goes to court-ordered restitution for victims, any child support, and a mandatory savings account. Private companies are required to pay for transportation from the prison to the work site and for prison guards.
For Reyna, his work on farms over the past couple of years has added $9,000 in his savings account and given him a renewed respect for his Mexican father's lifetime of stoop labor.
At Dixon's farm, it's 103 degrees Fahrenheit. The inmate crews, wearing orange jumpsuits, work in a rhythmic line, calling out the number of the watermelons, and alongside the trailer. Just a few yards away, Mexican workers also work in a line. The inmates will quit at 4 p.m., while the immigrant laborers may work 13-hour days. "We go back, they stay out here," Reyna says. "It really isn't the same."
In the farm's office, watermelons line the counter, and photos of migrant workers hang in dusty frames. When asked why he doesn't sell the farm, Dixon says, "the inmates, the migrants, these people are part of the family -- that's why I keep this darn place."
Dixon says he supports the idea of a reformed, guest-worker program that would employ migrant workers during the harvest and return them to Mexico in the winter. But until that happens, he's willing to fight for the workers he's shared the land with for most of his life.
"People are crossing the border because they are starving to death,"Dixon says. "I don't care what their status is. If they are hungry and thirsty, I am going to feed them."
"I could sell this and quit," he continues. "But I believe in supporting the American farming industry."
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Unofficial Fascism vs. Official Fascism
This Alternet article shows the US with 1,200,000 slaughtered Iraqi men, women, and children citizens. It suggests the US rivals Rwanda with it's 900,000 murdered citizens; and with the Cambodian killing fields at 1.7 million human bodies and souls.
So, how many hundreds of thousands of slaughtered Iraqi citizens does it take to qualify the US as "Official Fascists"? What are the slaughter qualifications necessary to become "OfficialFascists"?
The ratio of 3,800 dead American soldiers to 1,200,000 dead Iraqi Citizens is now 1/316 and rapidly growing. Is it this kill ratio that qualifies America out of the "unofficial" and into the "Official Fascist" ranks?
Since Official or Unofficial Fascism exists with this death rate and other significant human, citizenship and labor rights violations, a second question is "How to Stop these violations and deaths?"
Short of open revolution, a National Strike, a National Work and Commerce Strike, combined with the Nationalization of Oil companies might work. Meanwhile, it is suggested to everyone from the top down to us lowly citizens that we must wait until after the National Presidential Election and the new Democratic President is in office before the war is stopped. So, after another 16 additional months the war MIGHT end. That's no guarantee. It's just a "maybe". With this time frame we will have another 1,200 American soldiers killed and another 800,000 Iraqis slaughtered. This will bring the new totals of 5,000 dead American soldiers to 2,000,000 dead Iraqi citizens, for a kill ratio of 1/400. Would that number of dead and that kill ratio qualify as Official or Unofficial Fascist?
Towards Abolition,
Lee
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62728/?page=2Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda
Genocide, CambodianKilling FieldsBy Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted September 17,2007.
According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces -- al-Anbar and Karbala -- were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent.
Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors "actually living on [their] street" had fled the carnage, with around half of those having left the country.
In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.Before the study's release, the highest estimate of Iraqi deaths had been around 650,000 in the landmark Johns Hopkins' study published in the Lancet, a highly respected and peer-reviewed British medical journal.Unlike that study, which measured the difference in deaths from all causes during the first three years ofthe occupation with the mortality rate that existed prior to the invasion, the ORB poll looked only at deaths due to violence.
The poll's findings are in line with the rolling estimate maintained on the Just Foreign Policy website, based on the Johns Hopkins' data, that stands at just over 1 million Iraqis killed as of this writing.
These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century --the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia's infamous "Killing Fields" during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.
While the stunning figures should play a major role inthe debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won't. That's because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq -- the bloody criminal nightmare that the "reality-based community"has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation's last supporters have conjured up out of thin air.Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties. There's the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions,there's the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there's the clean and antiseptic blood-free war theadministration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own).
Here's the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn't even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That's less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.
Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism -- the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don't launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred. Never mind that that's exactly what the data show; acknowledging as much creates intolerable cognitive dissonance for most Americans, so as a nation, we won't.
A new study estimates that 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since Bush and Cheney chose to invade.:
But there's more to it than that. The dominant narrative of Iraq is that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility. That's wrong morally -- we chose to go into Iraq despite the fact that public health NGOs warned in advance of the likelihood of 500,000 civilian deaths due to "collateral damage."It's also factually incorrect -- as Stony Brook University scholar Michael Schwartz noted a few months ago, the Johns-Hopkins study looked at who was responsible for the violent deaths it measured and found that coalition forces were directly responsible for 56 percent of the deaths in which the perpetrator was known. According to Schwartz's number crunching, based on the Lancet data, coalition troops were responsible for at least 180,000 and as many as 330,000 violent deaths through the middle of last year. There's no compelling reason to think the share attributable to occupation forces has decreased significantly since then.
Like the earlier study in the Lancet -- one that relied on widely accepted methodology for its results-- this new research is already being dismissed out ofhand. The strange thing is that common sense alone should be enough to conclude that the United States has killed a huge number of Iraqi civilians. After all, it's become conventional wisdom (based on severa lstudies) that about 90 percent of all casualties in modern warfare are civilians. We know that the military, in addition to deploying 500 missiles and bombs in the first six months of this year alone, hashad trouble keeping up with the demand for bullets in the Iraqi theater. According to a 2005 report by Lt. Col. Dean Mengel at the Army War College, the number of rounds being fired off is enormous (PDF):
[One news report] noted that the Army estimated it would need 1.5 billion small arms rounds per year,which was three times the amount produced just three years earlier. In another, it was noted by the Associated Press that soldiers were shooting bullets faster than they could be produced by the manufacturer.
1.5 billion rounds per year … more bullets fired than can be manufactured. Given that the estimated number of active insurgents in Iraq has never exceeded 30,000-- and is usually given as less than 20,000 -- that leaves a lot of deadly lead flying around.
Everyone agrees that the U.S. soldier is the best-trained fighter on earth, so it's somewhat bizarre that war supporters believe their shots rarely hit anybody.
If it weren't for the layers of denial that have been dutifully built up around the American strategic class, these figures might put to rest the notion that U.S. troops are preventing more deaths than they cause.
Recall that the stated reason for the invasion was to reduce the number of countries suspected of having anillicit WMD program from 36 to 35. Amid all the talk of troop deaths and the billions of dollars being thrown away in Iraq, it's important to remember that it is the Iraqis that are paying such a dear price for achieving that modest goal.
With a Congress frozen into inaction, all that remains to be seen is what the final death toll from the Iraqwar will be. The sad truth is that we may never know the full scope of the carnage.
So, how many hundreds of thousands of slaughtered Iraqi citizens does it take to qualify the US as "Official Fascists"? What are the slaughter qualifications necessary to become "OfficialFascists"?
The ratio of 3,800 dead American soldiers to 1,200,000 dead Iraqi Citizens is now 1/316 and rapidly growing. Is it this kill ratio that qualifies America out of the "unofficial" and into the "Official Fascist" ranks?
Since Official or Unofficial Fascism exists with this death rate and other significant human, citizenship and labor rights violations, a second question is "How to Stop these violations and deaths?"
Short of open revolution, a National Strike, a National Work and Commerce Strike, combined with the Nationalization of Oil companies might work. Meanwhile, it is suggested to everyone from the top down to us lowly citizens that we must wait until after the National Presidential Election and the new Democratic President is in office before the war is stopped. So, after another 16 additional months the war MIGHT end. That's no guarantee. It's just a "maybe". With this time frame we will have another 1,200 American soldiers killed and another 800,000 Iraqis slaughtered. This will bring the new totals of 5,000 dead American soldiers to 2,000,000 dead Iraqi citizens, for a kill ratio of 1/400. Would that number of dead and that kill ratio qualify as Official or Unofficial Fascist?
Towards Abolition,
Lee
http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/62728/?page=2Iraq Death Toll Rivals Rwanda
Genocide, CambodianKilling FieldsBy Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted September 17,2007.
According to a new study, 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion, the highest estimate of war-related fatalities yet. The study was done by the British polling firm ORB, which conducted face-to-face interviews with a sample of over 1,700 Iraqi adults in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Two provinces -- al-Anbar and Karbala -- were too dangerous to canvas, and officials in a third, Irbil, didn't give the researchers a permit to do their work. The study's margin of error was plus-minus 2.4 percent.
Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. One in three Iraqis also said that at least some neighbors "actually living on [their] street" had fled the carnage, with around half of those having left the country.
In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.Before the study's release, the highest estimate of Iraqi deaths had been around 650,000 in the landmark Johns Hopkins' study published in the Lancet, a highly respected and peer-reviewed British medical journal.Unlike that study, which measured the difference in deaths from all causes during the first three years ofthe occupation with the mortality rate that existed prior to the invasion, the ORB poll looked only at deaths due to violence.
The poll's findings are in line with the rolling estimate maintained on the Just Foreign Policy website, based on the Johns Hopkins' data, that stands at just over 1 million Iraqis killed as of this writing.
These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the great crimes of the last century --the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia's infamous "Killing Fields" during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.
While the stunning figures should play a major role inthe debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won't. That's because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq -- the bloody criminal nightmare that the "reality-based community"has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation's last supporters have conjured up out of thin air.Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties. There's the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions,there's the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there's the clean and antiseptic blood-free war theadministration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own).
Here's the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn't even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. That's less than a third of the number of civilian deaths confirmed by U.N. monitors in 2006 alone.
Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism -- the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don't launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred. Never mind that that's exactly what the data show; acknowledging as much creates intolerable cognitive dissonance for most Americans, so as a nation, we won't.
A new study estimates that 1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since Bush and Cheney chose to invade.:
But there's more to it than that. The dominant narrative of Iraq is that most of the violence against Iraqis is being perpetrated by Iraqis themselves and is not our responsibility. That's wrong morally -- we chose to go into Iraq despite the fact that public health NGOs warned in advance of the likelihood of 500,000 civilian deaths due to "collateral damage."It's also factually incorrect -- as Stony Brook University scholar Michael Schwartz noted a few months ago, the Johns-Hopkins study looked at who was responsible for the violent deaths it measured and found that coalition forces were directly responsible for 56 percent of the deaths in which the perpetrator was known. According to Schwartz's number crunching, based on the Lancet data, coalition troops were responsible for at least 180,000 and as many as 330,000 violent deaths through the middle of last year. There's no compelling reason to think the share attributable to occupation forces has decreased significantly since then.
Like the earlier study in the Lancet -- one that relied on widely accepted methodology for its results-- this new research is already being dismissed out ofhand. The strange thing is that common sense alone should be enough to conclude that the United States has killed a huge number of Iraqi civilians. After all, it's become conventional wisdom (based on severa lstudies) that about 90 percent of all casualties in modern warfare are civilians. We know that the military, in addition to deploying 500 missiles and bombs in the first six months of this year alone, hashad trouble keeping up with the demand for bullets in the Iraqi theater. According to a 2005 report by Lt. Col. Dean Mengel at the Army War College, the number of rounds being fired off is enormous (PDF):
[One news report] noted that the Army estimated it would need 1.5 billion small arms rounds per year,which was three times the amount produced just three years earlier. In another, it was noted by the Associated Press that soldiers were shooting bullets faster than they could be produced by the manufacturer.
1.5 billion rounds per year … more bullets fired than can be manufactured. Given that the estimated number of active insurgents in Iraq has never exceeded 30,000-- and is usually given as less than 20,000 -- that leaves a lot of deadly lead flying around.
Everyone agrees that the U.S. soldier is the best-trained fighter on earth, so it's somewhat bizarre that war supporters believe their shots rarely hit anybody.
If it weren't for the layers of denial that have been dutifully built up around the American strategic class, these figures might put to rest the notion that U.S. troops are preventing more deaths than they cause.
Recall that the stated reason for the invasion was to reduce the number of countries suspected of having anillicit WMD program from 36 to 35. Amid all the talk of troop deaths and the billions of dollars being thrown away in Iraq, it's important to remember that it is the Iraqis that are paying such a dear price for achieving that modest goal.
With a Congress frozen into inaction, all that remains to be seen is what the final death toll from the Iraqwar will be. The sad truth is that we may never know the full scope of the carnage.
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