Under the blazing summer sun on a former slave plantation, Lamont Gross and fellow inmates hunched over in long lines, picking vegetables by hand under the watchful eyes of armed guards on horseback. He said breaks were short and irregular, with no protection for the workers from the heat.
“I saw guys collapse,” Gross said of his days on the so-called farm line at the Louisiana State Prison, where men work for pennies an hour or nothing and are punished if they refuse. “There were guys who got heat stroke. There were guys with underlying conditions, older, with some kind of disability, but they had to get out, too.”
As daily temperatures reached record highs across much of the South, a federal judge took an unusual step by challenging the treatment of mostly black inmates who worked in the farms.
America’s largest maximum-security prison, known as Angola, sits on 18,000 acres. It was once a patchwork of cotton fields where, historians note, even enslaved pregnant women and young children worked from sunrise to sunset during the busiest, hottest harvest months. Prisoners have toiled on the same farm lines since emancipation, often without shade, adequate breaks, or even sunscreen.
In September, several inmates teamed up with the New Orleans-based advocacy group Voice of the Experienced filed a class action lawsuit calling for an end to the farm line and accusing the state of cruel and unusual punishment. But as temperatures soared in May, the men filed an emergency petition asking the court to stop working during the extreme heat.
U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson a temporary restraining order was issued earlier this month. It said corrections officials showed “willful indifference” to the risks of injury or death to inmates by sending them to the fields even though they had serious health problems, including some with heart disease, high blood pressure and histories of prediabetes or AIDS.
He ordered the state to quickly remedy what he called “clear shortcomings” in the heat policy.
The Louisiana Department of Prisons challenged the order, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the judge. Prison officials have already taken steps to improve conditions, providing inmates with sunscreen and pop-up tents for shade, state attorneys said. And when heat warnings are issued, as is common in the summer months, they have agreed to give the men five-minute breaks every half hour.
The state previously warned that closing the farm line once the heat index reaches 88 degrees Fahrenheit (31.1 degrees Celsius), as requested by the plaintiffs in their emergency filing, would “open the floodgates” to halt work “at every facility in the South.”
Several other southern states also operate vast penal farms on former slave plantations. Modern equipment is typically used to tend and harvest row crops that are sometimes sold on the open market and exported, although the U.S. prohibits the import of goods made with prison labor abroad. But in some places, such as the Louisiana Penitentiary, rudimentary tools and the bare hands of prisoners are used to harvest fruits and vegetables that feed the inmates.
“If we can get similar rulings here in Arkansas, that’s a blessing,” said Kaleem Nazeem, an organizer with that state’s grassroots coalition decARcerate. He spent 28 years behind bars and said he was routinely sent to solitary confinement for refusing to join the lines of men forced to pick cotton, scenes he compared to those from “Roots.” Alex Haleys moving book, and later mini-series, about slavery.
“The general public does not know the history of the country,” he said, “because we as a society have chosen to be trained in turning our heads.”
As part of a two-year studyThe Associated Press found that some prison farms across the country have supplied millions of dollars worth of crops — including soy, corn and wheat — to major global corporations such as Tyson Foods, Louis Dreyfus, Consolidated Grain and Barge and Riceland Foods in recent years. Agricultural products produced by prison labor end up in the supply chains of popular brands such as Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, Ballpark hot dogs and Pepsi, reporters found.
While many companies did not respond to questions about their ties to prison farms, others, including Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland, said they were investigating the AP’s findings and had either severed ties or were considering next steps.
Prison labor is legal in the United States because a loophole in the 13th amendment of the United States Constitution, which prohibited slavery except for people convicted of crimes.
But elsewhere, there is a different view. A UN investigator is expected to submit a report to the body’s human rights council in September, calling it a form of modern slavery.
Meanwhile, U.S. prison officials tout the benefits of their work programs, saying they reduce recidivism, teach skills that can be used outside of prison and keep inmates out of work.
The issue of extreme heat has become more concerning in recent years due to the effects of global warming. The Biden administration proposes heat index limits for millions of farmworkers and others who work outdoorsHowever, most inmates would be excluded from this because they are typically not covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which sets the guidelines.
Some prisoners say heat is used as a form of punishment, not only on the field but also inside the facilities. Many units in the country do not have air conditioning, and some prisoners resort to flooding their cells and lying nearly naked on wet floors to try to stay cool.
“If it’s 103 degrees outside, it could be 107 to minus 8 degrees inside your cell,” said Christopher Scott, who worked in the fields while incarcerated in Texas. “So you’re going to make me work hard for nothing in this heat, and then you’re going to put me back in my cell and expose me to even more heat?”
“I often saw men having heat strokes or heart attacks because they just couldn’t stand the heat,” he said.
According to the Texas prison system, no inmate has died from heat-related illness since 2012.
The Louisiana class action lawsuit is expected to go to trial in September.
One claimant called the work on the farm line “grueling,” saying, “We had to crouch down and pick grass with our fingers.” Others said they had trouble walking or standing in the heat and that drinking water was often dirty. Some said they fainted while working and were punished for it.
The Louisiana Department of Corrections told the court it follows its “constitutionally appropriate” policies to protect employees from heat-related illness while working outdoors, including checking temperatures every two hours and providing regular rest and water breaks when a heat warning is issued.
But the judge wrote that many of the prisoners’ complaints were valid, noting that an independent expert had found that some were taking medications that affected their bodies’ ability to regulate temperature. And a court review of sick reports confirmed that some of the men sent to the fields without restrictions had serious health problems.
The judge also questioned the validity of some of the Angolan staff’s claims, including that workers “can rest whenever they want” and that closing the farm line would result in losses of more than $8 million a year — a figure Jackson disputed. He said that figure likely referred to the overall farming operation, not just food picked by a small group of prisoners on the farm line.
“The Court has no doubt that the prisoners sent to the Farm Line work diligently,” he wrote, “but this would be a feat of Herculean proportions.”
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Contact AP’s global investigative team at [email protected] or https://www.ap.org/tips/
