100 years ago in The Record
Thursday, April 11, 1918
The Rensselaer County board of supervisors is considering using prisoners to relieve a local farm-labor shortage, The Record reports. Farm labor is scarce across the country now that much of the typical workforce has been drafted into the military or taken jobs in war-related industries. “There is a public demand, in these times of stress and war, that every available resource of the state and nation be utilized,” Sheriff Buddington Sharpe notes in a communication to the supervisors. Now that county law permits prisoners to be employed outside the jail, Sharpe believes that “the prisoners confined in the Troy jail should be employed in agricultural pursuits during the spring and summer months, if such a scheme can be made practicable.” The sheriff estimates that no more than ten men in his average summer-months prison population of 25 would be available for farm work. Using them as a work gang would be neither practicable nor profitable, since Sharpe estimates that at least four guards to keep them from escaping, and both prisoners and guards would have to be transported back and forth daily to a local farm, not to mention fed. A better option would be hiring individual prisoners out to farmers who would take responsibility for their board, but Sharpe advises the supervisors that this course of action would be unconstitutional.
“Personally I am very strongly in favor of employing prisoners to add to the food production of the country and to lighten the load of the taxpayers,” the sheriff writes, “I am heartily in accord with the proposition, but the details puzzle me somewhat.”
Later, the supervisors hear from George McLoughlin, a state prison inspector who supports farm labor for prisoners. He notes that on average, 882 people occupy the county jail each year, “and of that number many might profitably have been put to work on a farm.”
McLoughlin notes that some counties have made prison labor pay. In Madison County, six prisoners worked a 14-acre farm and raised $1,993 worth of produce at an expense of only $445. Similar successes have been reported in Broom, Essex, Franklin and Jefferson counties.
“It is the patriotic duty of all to help increase the food supply, as upon that depends in great measure the winning of the war,” McLoughlin argues.
If Sheriff Sharpe is right, McLoughlin’s estimate of the convict workforce doesn’t take into account the number of female prisoners presumably ineligible for farm labor, the number of men serving short-term sentences, and the labor needs of the jail itself. It’s up to the supervisors’ sheriff’s committee to sort out the pros and cons.