The South Carolina Post & Courier has had a couple of articles this week about a working prison farm. I have to admit to being unfamiliar with this concept. How many prisoner farmers do we have in America? Are many prisoners across the country growing their own food?

Journalist Yvonne Wenger reports on the addition of a $7 million dairy to the Wateree River Correctional Institution. Purportedly the dairy is intended to save money for the prison.

Wateree River Correctional Institution is the largest prison farm in the state. Inmates milk the cows and tend to their needs, run a sawmill and gristmill and grow soy, corn and sweet potatoes, among other crops.

Ozmint said the crops produced at the farms, which feed inmates across the state, help the Corrections Department keep the cost of feeding inmates low. South Carolina spends $1.51 a day on food per inmate, the lowest among all state prison systems.

Another article in the series describes the prison farms this way:

Two inmates, dressed identically in tan prison-issued uniforms, sit atop a machine Monday in the farm’s gristmill. They use the machine to grind up the corn kernels while another pair of inmates package the grits in heavy brown paper bags. They produce a bag of grits valued at $35 for just $4.70. The grits will be shipped across South Carolina to feed the state’s 24,000 inmates.

Jon Ozmint, director of the state Department of Corrections, said the prison’s three farms are key to keeping the cost of feeding state inmates at $1.51 a day each, the lowest in the country. The farms produce all the milk, eggs and grits the prisons use, saving the Corrections Department almost $600,000 a year.

The article continues:

The Wateree farm, once segregated, has been in operation since the late 1800s. South Carolina inmates also produce license tags and their own bedding.

Ozmint said inmates in state prisons don’t get paid for their work, but South Carolina’s prison industries provide the inmates with a form of rehabilitation through job training and they can get “good-time credit” to shorten their sentence. [EMPHASIS MINE]

Duane, a St. Matthews man serving an 11-year sentence for a fatal car crash he caused while driving drunk, said he’d rather work in the heat than sit on his duff waiting for the last four years of sentence to run out. Inmates can have little interaction with the media, and they are not authorized to share their last names.

He is a handyman, at one time owning his own contracting business, who is working on the construction of the new dairy. Duane said he is grateful for the opportunity to keep his skills sharp while in prison.

“I enjoy doing this,” he said Monday, as the temperature in Rembert climbed toward 100 degrees.

I have blogged before about my conflicted feelings regarding prison labor. On the one hand, I want to take prisoners like Duane and others at their word that they “enjoy” working because it provides a diversion from their incarceration and in some cases provides some meager but needed funds. On the other hand, I continue to see prison labor as exploitative and as fundamentally unjust. Additionally it serves to further depress the wages of marginalized groups of individuals on the outside. How should anti-prison activists address the issue of prison labor? Obviously if we could abolish prisons then the issue would not exist, however since abolition is not imminent what do we advocate for in the meantime?