Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

Prison labour is deeply problematic for ethical reasons, but I think a lot of commentators here are misunderstanding the economics of it.

Haystack Mountain is not getting subsidised milk; they're paying market rates. The dairy is a profit centre for the prison (which in this case is government operated), used to defray operational costs. The prisoner's get paid a pittance, but that helps out the prison; not Haystack (or the grocery stores or eventual consumers). Nobody in the production chain is going to give their output away below market rate just because they got cheap inputs.

Similarly, people suggesting that the competition is putting other dairies out of business are off the mark, because again, the prison dairy is selling their product at market rates. And in this particular case, the prison dairy was set up after Haystack Mountain's supplier closed, threatening to force them out of business; they didn't close in response to the prison dairy closing.

The deeply troubling issue described in the article is forced labour, where the government can throw you in prison and then force you to work for (basically) free. Cheap cheese (or goat milk) is 1) not an ethical issue and 2) not actually happening.

Imho it's not as simple as that, the article has a paragraph who puts it in some perspective:

"Nobody wants to have a big goat dairy, so we did it," Joey Grisenti says. This farm, with its guaranteed supply of low-cost workers, can survive when other farms cannot. "A lot of people just can't afford to have the manpower that we have here," he says.".

What does this say? That goat diaries seem to be an unprofitable business unless you've got a "guaranteed supply of low-cost workers". So either goat milk products are being sold too cheap or the process of goat milking needs to be made less labor intensive.

Whatever the solution might be, one thing is for certain: These "guaranteed low-cost workers" sure as hell ain't gonna make it easier for any private competition to join the market, at least if said competition wants to pay their labor fair living wages and still stay competitive.

Then there's also the fact that plenty of countries around the world manage to produce goat milk just fine, without having to employ prison labor, among them, even developed EU countries like France, Spain, Greece or the Netherlands. Countries with way higher labor costs compared to the US, yet there seems to be no shortage of goat milk there?

The other side of this coin is that, for these "low-cost workers," the goat farm gig is probably better than their alternatives.

> Workers on this farm get strip-searched. If they're caught with drugs or tobacco, or get in fights, they could lose this job and be sent to a higher-security facility with a lot less freedom. > > And then there's the pay. It varies, depending on the job, but most inmates on the farm earn a few dollars a day. That's better than most prison jobs, which typically pay less than a dollar a day, but still, it's cut-rate labor.

Should that opportunity cost to the prisoners in this program have weight in whether this "cut-rate labor" is ethical or not? If the farm can't sell it's goat milk for ethical reasons and the prisoners wind up in lower-paying or worse jobs, was Whole Foods' righteous action actually ethical? Lots of complex questions here. I don't know the answers here, but it's a little annoying that one letter to Whole Foods taking the moral high ground could handwave so much nuance.

>The other side of this coin is that, for these "low-cost workers," the goat farm gig is probably better than their alternatives.

When you're talking about people who are in prison, "alternatives" can be actual torture. I'd rather work in a stinking pit than be locked in a tiny room 23.5 hours a day, and that last thing is always an "alternative" in prison.

Market rates are not arbitrary numbers that exist in a vacuum. All economic actors contribute to the market, and they are the result of competition and how low the producers are able to get and still make a living. Some are a bit higher, some are a bit lower. If the prison can always go as low as any other producer and out-compete farms that can't use slave labour to stay artificially competitive, then it will eat the market share of these farms, which will progressively go bankrupt, and the only thing that will stop the prison from eventually owning the entire market is the number of people that get convicted of some crime and jailed there.

This is why these corporations lobby/fight so hard to keep the prison industry private. Their profits are obscene, and the only way to keep themselves profitable is to ensure a steady supply of slaves ahem I mean "criminals". The more people we put in jail the better it is for these companies.

Can you imagine that? Your company profits off of human misery, suffering, and destroying families/lives. I hope hell exists..

The prison industry is, overwhelmingly, not private. This farm in particular in run by the Colorado Correction Industry, a division of the Colorado Department of Corrections, not a private company.

A whole bunch of your comments have been badly breaking the HN guidelines by being uncivil and by using the site for political and ideological battle, which is destructive of what HN is for. We ban accounts that do these things, so would you please not do them anymore?

(I'm replying to this one because it's your most recent comment, not because it's the worst of them, though it is the sort of overheated rant we don't want here, regardless of how correct the underlying point is.)

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