2) Taylor farms is paying 4.75, the government is the one paying 1/3 of the cost price to the worker.
Have you ever ate prison food? I literally would not feed most of it to my dog.
Good time means you get to exit the prison for things like visiting family.
The prisoners are coerced to work for sub-human wages because, if they don’t, they stay in prison longer and can’t see their loved ones.
Also, if you worked 8 hours you'd be able to buy a lot more than a single pack of ramen.
> While ramen costs about 35 cents at Target, prison commissaries charge between 24 cents to $1.06 nationwide.
https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-c...
Isn't that not the actual choice though?
Like for a prison with monetary advantages to the inmates working don't they actually send you to solitary for refusing work detail?
Prison is not voluntary.
That still is massively undercutting regular wages, it's government price dumping. The ethics of prison labor aside, whoever buys prison labor should be forced to pay fair market wages to the prison.
But, again, that's not a Taylor Farms issue, that's a government issue.
Personally, I think it's a very good thing to let prisoners work as long as the working conditions are the same standards as free people, including any wage laws.
This is because many states are full of people who are both weirdly "Free market" brain, to the point that they believe it's a good idea to tell the warden "Any dollar from this budget that you do not spend feeding inmates, you get to personally keep" is a good idea because they have no knowledge of systems design or perverse incentives, and more importantly, because they genuinely want prisoners to suffer. No, this is not a joke. In some states, the budget for feeding inmates is explicitly a compensation package for the warden.
When people joke about "I should go to jail, at least I will get three square meals a day", that's just false. Most prisons are only required to serve two meals a day. The quality of those meals varies from "Okay for a middle school lunch if you put a gun to my head" to "Fyre festival had better food, and this is not a joke"
This is an incredible claim, so I'm trying to find out where you got that from. Seems like maybe that was just in Alabama and they changed the law already?
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-alabama-prison-meals-la...
https://law.justia.com/codes/alabama/2024/title-14/chapter-6...
These are all right within the USDA's general population daily calorie guidance of 2-3 thousand per day for males.
But I can't source what I said.
What I can source is that prisoners largely report going hungry. That's a completely different problem though.
I cannot remove or edit my comment. Thank you for the push back.
It's definitely an extremely exploitative situation and overall icky, but the people who jump in to compare it to slave labor are kind of embarrassing themselves in unnecessary hyperbole.