In 2006, the Colorado state legislature, which is controlled by the Democratic Party, enacted new repressive laws targeting undocumented workers. Largely because of these laws, there is now a shortage of agricultural workers in the state.
Colorado’s new anti-immigrant laws require everyone to have a state identification to get social services. The laws also
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To meet the needs of the capitalist farmers, the state legislature has partnered with the Colorado Department of Corrections to launch a pilot program this month that will contract with more than a dozen large farms to provide prisoners who will work in the fields. More than 100 prisoners will go to farms near Pueblo, Colo., to start the program in the coming weeks.
Prisoners will earn a miserable 60 cents a day. The prisoners will be watched by prison guards, who will be paid handsomely by the farmers. The practice is a modern form of slavery.
The corporate farm owners and capitalist politicians are defending the program. They claim that business needs to be “protected” for the sake of capitalist production in the agricultural sector.
“The reason this [program] started is to make sure the agricultural industry wouldn’t go out of business,” said state Rep. Dorothy Butcher, a Democrat. Her district includes Pueblo, near the farmland where the inmates will work. (Los Angeles Times, March 1)
Pro-immigrant organizations are denouncing the program, noting the importance of immigrant labor to the U.S. capitalist economy. Ricardo Martinez of the Denver immigrants’ rights group Padres Unidos asked: “Are we going to pull in inmates to work in the service industry, too? You won’t have enough inmates—unless you start importing them from Texas.”
A group calling for changes in sentencing, the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, also has criticized the program. “This feels like the re-invention of the plantation,” said Christie Donner, the group’s executive director. “You have a captive labor force essentially working for their room and board in order to benefit the employer. This isn’t a job training program. It’s an exploitative program.”
Attack on workers
Colorado’s program shows how ruling class attacks on immigrants and the general repressive features of the capitalist state, like prisons, are intertwined. The aim of the capitalists is to drive wages for the whole working class ever lower. Prisons are an essential part of this equation.
Although chain gangs and prison farms have long been used in the United States, the concept of inmates working on private farms is unusual. But other states are ready to follow suit. The Iowa Department of Corrections is considering a similar program because of a migrant labor shortage in that state.
The prison-industrial complex is a billion dollar enterprise in the United States. It includes the profits made by corporations that build prisons and run private prisons, as well as some of the biggest U.S. corporations that exploit prison labor, paying wages less than in many of the most oppressed countries in the world.
The agricultural program in Colorado is a perfect illustration of this harsh, racist reality.
The prison-industrial complex focuses on mass incarceration of working-class people. This provides the capitalists with a way to create a new layer of workers: those who legally work for much less than minimum wage.
Privatizing prisoners’ labor is becoming more common. Including the agricultural program, prisoners work as telemarketers, travel agents, furniture makers and much more, usually earning pennies per hour, while the profits of the capitalist owners skyrocket.
Now that there’s a shortage of immigrant labor in agricultural jobs, the capitalists want to make sure that their profits continue to increase by replacing low-wage undocumented workers with even lower-wage prisoners.
Dividing workers by legal status and shoving millions into prison are some of the tactics that the U.S. ruling class imposes on the working class in order to maximize its profits. As socialist revolutionaries, we should fight for immigrant rights while we also fight to tear down the prison walls.
