By Sebastian Rotella. Republished from ProPublica.
Central American migrants stand on top of train cars while waiting for the freight train “La Bestia,” or the Beast, to travel north through Mexico to the U.S. border in January 2012. (Jorge Luis Plata/Reuters)

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By Bob Sloan and Mike Elk. Republished from The Nation series on the American Legislative Exchange Council in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. Introduction by John Nichols.
The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”

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