Call me pretentious if you like, but I decided to include an excerpt of my undergraduate thesis – Food, Farming & Freedom: Promoting a Sustainable Model of Food Justice in America’s Prisons.
To date, it is still some of the most fascinating firsthand research I have ever conducted. It entailed calling countless correctional food service directors and prison reform activists, going down a rabbit hole of lawsuits against foodservice providers, and even a stint volunteering with a rehabilitative gardening program for ex-inmates of Rikers Island.
If you’re a nerd like me and you enjoy some light sociological reading from time to time, I invite you to read on. Heck, you can even shoot me a message with your thoughts. I’d love to hear them.
From Industrial Ag to the Prison Industrial Complex
Prison farms date back to the origins of America’s penitentiaries. Though initially the farms were meant to discipline and reform prisoners through hard labor, after abolition the farms became a means to harness newly liberated black labor power. Despite this exploitative intention, prisoners that worked outdoors were healthier, and less aggressive.
Throughout the next century and the major prisons that came with it, many states maintained farms as cost-effective means to feed prison populations and as vocational programs with proven success. However from the 1970s to the 1980s, prison farms suffered the same fate of small-scale agriculture across the nation. Reagan’s policies brought both the death and rebirth of rural America.
While deindustrialization produced serious economic decline in rural towns and independent agriculture, the War on Crime promised America’s redemption: a rural prison industry.
A mass prison construction boom swept through the American countryside. While prison farms vanished due to the disappearance of local farming infrastructures with deindustrialization, former independent farms became prisons in a self-perpetuating cycle that wiped out deeply rooted generational and agricultural traditions.
In this context agribusiness was born. Corporations bought up excess farmland to produce the mass agribusiness farms we see today. Corporatization of agriculture fueled greater corporate monopolies on food and foodservice, and subsequently, these very foodservice corporations have come to serve the prison populations that were once entirely self-reliant and sustainable.
Not to mention, the disappearance of these prison farms further depleted the few educational and vocational programs that genuinely rehabilitated prisoners.
Privatized Foodservice ≠ Food Security
The UN defines food security as a universal human right. Food security means both physical and economic access to healthy food, as well as long-term access. Privatized prison foodservice is neither: it severely constrains prisoners’ access to healthy food (and actively encourages consumerism of unhealthy food), and the mode by which this prison food is produced is entirely unsustainable.
Furthermore, privatized foodservice neglects individual agency in food choice, production, and preparation as inherent aspects of an individual’s self-identification and social embodiment processes, both of which are integral to human dignity.
This paper examines how the prison industrial complex has transformed the prison food system to serve its own economic interests in violation of prisoners’ human rights, and how food and sustainable farming within the prison can undo this transformation in order to promote an empowered and rehabilitated prison population, and an autarkic American food system.
