Inside Job: Private industry in beginning to realize there is plenty of cheap labor in the U.S.--prison labor

This article was originally published Dec. 13, 1995 in Moon Magazine, a Gainesville, Fla. newsmonthly.

Three prisoners in white scrubs and masks spray rows of dangling green loofahs with a pesticide. Twenty rows away, three inmates in prison blues inspect the struggling sprouts, making sure crows haven't pecked away their labor.

The future of prisons may be growing on these ten acres of mucky soil 35 miles north of the Florida Everglades.

The Hendy Correctional Institute near Immokalee is a sprawling 3,850 acre compound whose razor wire-enclosed landscape includes orange groves and cattle range, a catfish pond and tanks, a station for the work camp and the main prison building. The state started a program here in August that employs a few low-risk inmates to grow loofahs, the mammoth cousin of the cucumber that can be eaten if picked young enough or used a scrubber when dried and bleached.

"This is not the menial task usually associated with prisons," Clarence White, Hendry's assistant supervisor of operations, said. It is hard work, though. Inmates work six hours a day, five days a week, inspecting budding plants, making sure the vegetables have room to grow along a wire, trying to keep water from rotting the plants off the vine and spraying pesticides. Of 1,300 inmates at Hendry, only a dozen or so work on the farm.