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Beneath the blazing summer sun on a former slave plantation, Lamont Gross and fellow prisoners stooped in long rows, picking vegetables by hand under the watchful eyes of armed guards on horseback. He said breaks were short and infrequent, with nothing to protect workers from the heat.
“I saw guys collapse,” Gross said of his days on the so-called farm line at Louisiana’s state penitentiary, where men work for pennies an hour or nothing at all and face punishment if they refuse. “There were dudes that got heat stroke. There were dudes with underlying conditions, older or had some sort of disability, but they had to go out there, too.”
As daily temperatures hit record highs across much of the South, a federal judge took an unusual step, challenging the treatment of mostly Black incarcerated workers in the fields.
America’s largest maximum-security prison, known as Angola, sits on […]
There clearly needs to be a Federal law against involuntary work in prison. But nobody should be forced to work in this heat and it’s only getting worse. What is really terrible that here in Florida there are a number of prisons that have no air conditioning!!! In Florida!!!! I’m sure that other Southern states (the usual culprits) also do not air condition their prisons. We do nothing for reform in this country, only punishment and do everything we can to keep them in prison, given that so many prisons are not privately owned and only trying to make money. We need to look at the Finnish system of prisons. So much better than ours and with wonderful results!