Food and Punishment

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http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2007/03/15/inmates/index.html?source=daily

Food and Punishment
Colorado's inmates-as-farmworkers plan says plenty about our food culture
By Tom Philpott
15 Mar 2007

Last summer, the Colorado General Assembly passed some of the nation's most rigorous anti-immigrant policy laws. Debate was fierce -- but only because some GOP lawmakers fumed that the Democratic-engineered crackdown wasn't draconian enough.

How times have changed.

Essentially, the state's political elite -- backed editorially by The Denver Post -- took aim at its low-wage workforce: the people who clean bedpans, prep food in restaurants, harvest vegetables, and perform other "low-value" tasks.

The new code denied most "nonessential" services, including non-emergency health care, to undocumented workers (although it didn't exempt them from paying sales tax). It also upped identification requirements to get driver's licenses, and penalized businesses for not confirming workers' documentation.

While lawmakers congratulated themselves on their foresight -- or deplored their inability to enact harsher sanctions -- immigrants began to flee Colorado. And now the state's large-scale farms, which are almost comically reliant on immigrant labor for profitability, are begging the state government to help them find workers for the growing season.

Nativist dogma notwithstanding, it turns out that U.S.-born workers in Colorado aren't clamoring to spend hours in the hot sun spraying hazardous chemicals or frantically harvesting vegetables from immense rows.

Thus desperate policymakers are turning to another despised population to fix their mess: prison inmates. The state's Department of Corrections recently announced an experimental program to make "low-risk" inmates available for work as farmhands.

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