June 23rd 2020

By Walter Einenkel 

Daily Kos

On Thursday, University of Florida president Kent Fuchs released a statement with the title “Another step toward positive change against racism.” One of the important takeaways from the statement was that the university would end the practice of using unpaid inmate labor. “There are agriculture operations where UF has relied on prison and jail inmates to provide farm labor. The symbolism of inmate labor is incompatible with our university and its principles and therefore this practice will end.”

Florida is one of a handful of states that uses unpaid inmate labor. This is slightly more obscene than states like California that use inmate labor for pennies on the dollar. It is equally as obscene as private companies that use detained immigrants as “a readily available, captive labor force.”

Last year, Ben Conarck of The Florida Times-Union wrote an exposé on the force labor camps that Florida uses to get much of its labor done. Everyone from state officials to private businesses take advantage of the incredibly cheap labor that our country’s high incarceration rates allows. But, on top of the questionable morality of using cheap labor provided by a racist and flawed incarceration system, the lack of transparency of the actual working conditions of this workforce is terrifying.

Florida, and the University of Florida has been using unpaid inmate labor for decades. By Conarck’s estimation “The University of Florida uses more prison labor than any other college in the state, much of it at its agricultural research centers. The flagship university has used at least 156,684 hours of state prison labor since 2015.” That’s well over 6,500 days worth of free labor over a four-year span.

Ending the use of unpaid inmate labor is a very important step in de-incentivizing our current incarceration system which has been set up to recreate the racist slave labor our country was built on.

Posted with permission