Whole Foods’ decision to cut ties a loss for inmates
Fellow foodies, here’s a question for your conscience: Do you wonder whose hands helped bring your meal to the grocery?
As you dollop the farmfresh goat cheese on top of your microgreens and remove the antibiotic-free tilapia from under the broiler, would you lose your appetite if you found out that workers who helped produce it earn in a year what you make in a week?
Whole Foods worried that you might.
So the company announced that it was severing relationships with suppliers that use prison labor to bring fish and cheese to some of the more than 430 Whole Foods stores. Yes, prisoners herd and milk some of those goats and peel the scales from that fish. And their pay is reportedly between 74 cents and $4 a day.
At first blush that sounds appalling, but is it?
According to NPR, Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy in Longmont, Colo., and Quixotic Farming, a sustainable seafood company with facilities in Missouri and Colorado, partnered with Colorado Correctional Industries (CCI), a divi- sion of the state’s Department of Corrections, to put prisoners to work. It’s a way to teach inmates skills, give them valuable work experience and reduce recidivism — all good things, to be sure.
But a handful of well-meaning reform advocates in Texas, End Mass Incarceration Houston, staged a protest outside a Houston Whole Foods store.
By the following Monday, Whole Foods said it would stop carrying the inmate-labor products by April 2016, a decision reported widely by The Associated Press.
That’s a loss for inmates.
It’s tricky to pitch fairwage arguments on behalf of inmates. After all, they are being housed, fed and cared for by the public, at considerable expense. The opportunity costs to inmates are negligible, but society has a huge stake in helping them become employable once they leave prison.
Are companies solely motivated by lower-cost labor, or is there a social goal as well that fits the company’s values? Given Whole Foods’ hasty retreat, one has to wonder.
This is not an isolated case. The term “prison-industrial complex” is not just a conspiratorial myth.
Given that a massive bipartisan prison reform package was introduced in Congress the same week as the Whole Foods imbroglio, I wish the controversy would have been spun differently. The Sen- tencing Reform and Corrections Act should have offered the perfect opening to discuss how we can help inmates leave prison and lead more productive lives.
America is in dire need of prison reform. We have 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s inmates.
Most dismaying is that many will be locked up again due to a new offense or a parole violation. Imagine if more had a skill, a trade or a work history upon which to rely. Yes, companies will make a buck off of giving inmates that chance — and perhaps we should discuss some regulatory guidelines — but it can certainly be a fair exchange.
Quixotic Farming, the company working with inmates in Colorado, described its philosophy on its website: “We believe in teaching a man to fish and giving him a second chance.”
If that ever becomes the ethos of America’s corrections system, we’ll all be better off.