When prison labor fueled a scientific field station

I’ve been sitting with a particular injustice for a few years. I’m not sure what to do with it, if anything. It’s not a secret, but it’s a matter that has been perennially overlooked and I imagine most folks are glad to think of it as forgotten and move on. But to make progress, we sometimes need to come to understand the past to learn how to move forward. In this case, I’m not sure how to do that.

A scene from the field station.

I am currently the faculty director of a field station for my university system. The field station is about 15 minutes away from a remote desert town with a population of maybe 500 people. Until 2009, this town was the home of a small Community Correctional Facility, which is the friendly way to say “private for-profit low-security prison.”

As I was learning about the background of this organization, I learned that our facility used to regularly bring over the people incarcerated in this prison and have them do work for the field station. This wasn’t a one-off arrangement, it happened for an extended period of time.

I don’t know the details of this situation, as it predates me by several years, and folks rarely talk about it. I’ve not made a point to do any formalized fact-finding. What I know is that, on the regular, a van of encarcerated people was filled at the prison “Community Correctional Facility” and brought to the field station to perform a wide range of tasks that included cleaning and various kinds of manual labor. The staff would instruct to them what to do, and the then they’d do it. From what I have gleaned, this went on for well over ten years, and perhaps much longer.

I don’t know if this arrangement stopped because the prison stopped sending out folks for this labor, if our university system decided to back out, or if it was precipitated by the closure of the prison.

The prison housed about 250 people and was permanently shut down on Christmas Day in 2009. While California remains to be an extremely carceral state, the press reported that the prison closed because of reduced demand for low-security prisons, as incarcerated people were shifted into facilities with higher levels of security. While it was a low-security facility, it wasn’t roses and puppies, judging from reports on how private prisons operated then (and now). There was a major riot at this prison in 2003, that was subject to reporting by the Los Angeles Times. Several people were hospitalized with major injuries. (I was a little surprised to learn that during this incident, the County Sheriff’s Department enlisted the help of three park rangers from the nearby unit of the National Park Service to assist with security at the prison. Huh.)

Anyhow, it was a prison. And our field station was using the people who were incarcerated there for labor. In my opinion, this was exploitative, wholly inappropriate, and unethical, albeit legal. I don’t know if this work was wholly uncompensated, or merely undercompensated. I haven’t seen any paperwork to indicate any financial transactions in the archives that I’ve sifted through. I don’t think it’s possible to send prison laborers to do work in a wholly voluntary fashion, and I don’t know the extent of the involuntary nature of this servitude. I think the legal term of art for this situation might be “coercion,” based on the court briefs I’ve read while prepping this post.

Nowadays, we hire an external contractor to do the kind of cleaning work that used to be done by prison labor, and there also there is a variety of deferred work on site that would have been conducted by prison labor. Now that I have an inside view of our organization, it’s clear to me that this source of labor made an impact on the bottom line. It looks to me that the growth of this place was partially made possible because of the exploitation of incarcerated people. The cost of the contractors that that are now performing the work that used to be done by imprisoned laborers is a non-trivial part of our budget. I imagine that field station today would have been substantially different without this legacy of prison labor.

I don’t know what should be done to best address this legacy. I suppose the first step in righting historical wrongs is to acknowledge the reality of the past. I’m doing this here on my personal newsletter. The next step, I think, would be to go through institutional and organizational channels to do so in an official capacity. I think this matters. My only reluctance to do this is that it would occupy administrative bandwidth that is being directed towards other high-priority items. Of course, that’s what folks always say when they avoid doing the hard stuff, I realize.

I am sure that some folks will spin a yarn about how this kind of arrangement could be seen as a win-win situation and didn’t harm anybody. But I can’t agree with that. The labor exploitation of people who have been put into prison has always been problematic. We are currently seeing an increased increased attention to the harm caused by involuntary servitude and there is a movement afoot to change our state’s constitution to remove language that allows “punishment to a crime” as a legitimate reason for “involuntary servitude.”

This is not a unique or rare situation. For example, in the state of California, our response to wildfires is dependent on imprisoned laborers, and it’s been that way for half of a century. And, as you might suspect, the incarcerated firefighters are doing riskier work and more likely to get injured than those who are not imprisoned and being paid more money to fight the same fires.

There is no shortage of for-profit companies that are making avail of coerced labor, and the breadth of this phenomenon makes it nigh but impossible to avoid doing any business with companies with a history of engaging in this practice, including Whole Foods, Target, Walmart, Aramark, Starbucks, and more.

The breadth of this phenomenon doesn’t absolve us from engaging in the practice on a more localized scale. Though it’s wholly in our past, I have continued to be uncomfortable with it, and at the very least, speaking the truth helps us be consistent with communicating our values and priorities. I’m not sure where I’m going next with this, but I thought sharing here is better than not sharing at all.