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Prison Goat Farm: Is Prison Labor Exploitation or Rehabilitation?

posted by martyb on Friday July 21 2017, @01:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the say-"cheese!" dept.

takyon writes:

NPR visits a prison goat farm that was the subject of an activist's ire back in 2015:

Whole Foods loved [Jim Schott's] cheese. His company [Haystack Mountain] grew. It also changed. Ten years ago, Haystack Mountain started buying milk from a farm in a prison. Schott doesn't recall telling Whole Foods or his other customers about that change in the Haystack Mountain story. In any case, Schott felt that it was a good thing — "a model of good prison management."

Then, in 2015, a prison reform activist named Michael Allen sent a letter to John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods. Allen demanded that Whole Foods stop selling Haystack Mountain's cheese because it was made, in part, using the labor of prisoners earning pennies per hour. The way Allen sees it, Haystack was "taking advantage of helpless, powerless individuals. They're fair game for corporations to make money off of. And I just told [Mackey] that we wanted him to get out of that business."

Many things besides cheese are made in prisons. Across the country, tens of thousands of inmates work for businesses that have set up operations inside prison walls. They make flags and furniture. Most of the time, they attract little attention. People may feel differently about something they eat, though, especially a boutique food like goat cheese. To Allen's amazement and delight, Whole Food caved to his demands. In a statement, the company said that some of its customers weren't comfortable with products made by prisoners, so it would no longer sell them.

The inmates are still milking those goats, though. I was curious about this farm, and set up a visit.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 22 2017, @06:44AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 22 2017, @06:44AM (#542783)

    That's cute. You think the dollar the inmate gets paid is how much the goat company spends on them. No retard, the goat company pays a market wage to the prison, which then throws a bone to the inmate after using the money to pay for about 20% of their expenses associated with that prisoner. Knowledge is power. Before posting your little theories, get some.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 22 2017, @07:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 22 2017, @07:17AM (#542791)

    the goat company pays a market wage to the prison,

    Right, the goat farm will gladly pay the going wage to have prisoners employed. Like there's a shortage of workers in this booming economy.

    Knowledge is power. Before posting your little theories, get some.

    So is the grid. Feed some though you brain, it's not like is going to male the brain worse than it is now.

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 22 2017, @07:26AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 22 2017, @07:26AM (#542797) Journal

    Here's the bit of knowledge you are after. If this is the power you are after, feel free to feed it to your flashlight then.
    TFA:

    Whole Foods loved his cheese. His company grew. It also changed. Ten years ago, Haystack Mountain started buying milk from a farm in a prison.
    ...
    The goat dairy sits inside a vast complex of incarceration, with several different prisons, near Cañon City, Colo. ... Joey Grisenti runs this farm. He works for Colorado Correctional Industries — a state agency that operates businesses inside Colorado's prisons. Those businesses are supposed to make money to help fund the prison system and also provide work opportunities for prisoners.
    ...
    In the years after Haystack Mountain started making cheese, one of the company's biggest problems was finding a reliable source of goat milk. Jim Schott's small farm couldn't produce enough on its own, and every outside supplier eventually went out of business.

    In 2007, the company reached a crisis. Another supplier had decided to shut down his goat dairy, and Haystack had no other options. "A couple of weeks, and we weren't going to be able to supply our customers with cheese," says Chuck Hellmer, who by that time had replaced Schott as Haystack's CEO.

    At the moment, Hellmer got a call from one of the top managers at Colorado Correctional Industries. He'd heard about Haystack's problem, and proposed a solution. CCI was ready to set up a goat dairy inside the Cañon City prison.

    "Nobody wants to have a big goat dairy, so we did it," Joey Grisenti says. This farm, with its guaranteed supply of low-cost workers, can survive when other farms cannot. "A lot of people just can't afford to have the manpower that we have here," he says.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford