Inmates on a chain gang in Arizona in 2011. Eduardo Barraza/Demotix. All Rights Reserved.
Prisoners in the United States produce a vast array of products bought and sold in supermarkets. They roast coffee beans, farm trout and catfish, milk cows and goats for artisanal cheeses sold at Whole Foods, and pick and process Idaho potatoes and other fruits and vegetables. Corporations both large and small have called upon prisoners to make clothes, shoes, and other department store goods, such as American flags or Prison Blues jeans.
The US prison system is characterised by staggering racial and class-based disparities. For instance, in 2008, the US Bureau of Justice reported that one in three black men would go to prison in his lifetime. Of the one in 35 adults in America currently under correctional control, most are from poor and working class backgrounds. Reflecting on the fact that most prisoners are arrested for poverty-related crimes like theft or selling drugs, while prison time perpetuates their poverty, Harvard sociologist Bruce Western has called US prisons ‘the new poverty trap.’
