Posted on 03/04/2007 1:24:23 PM PST by backtothestreets
DENVER, March 3 — As migrant laborers flee Colorado because of tough new immigration restrictions, worried farmers are looking to prisoners to fill their places in the fields.
In a pilot program run by the state Corrections Department, supervised teams of low-risk inmates beginning this month will be available to harvest the swaths of sweet corn, peppers and melons that sweep the southeastern portion of the state.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
We just have too many people on welfare and sitting in prison eating on the government dime to have to import cheap labor.
Tie it in with parole hearings. Hard work + good behavior cuts your time.
And our own president didn't think it could get done without his precious illegals.
Another untapped labour source are the people sitting on their butts collecting welfare checks. They could catch a bus from the inner city to fields and I'd be willing to pony up tax money to pay for the bus.
I wonder how many of the prisoners are illegal aliens?
>> Inmates Will Replace Migrants in Colorado Fields
Or...
"Individuals Under Rehabilitation Will Replace Illegal Immigrants in Colorado Fields"
Oh my, what'll they think of next? Teenagers?
Remind me again why the school year is as it is. Couldn't be because it revolves around the agricultural growing seasons, huh?
We've got 2 prisons locally and I farm. I could use them. My father had German POW's help pick potatoes back in the mid 1940's. Why not now? Should have been done for years.
My Norwegian friend did this as a teen, but says that nowadays the Norwegian kids don't want to do it and the farmers have to hire eastern Europeans.
Yeah, teens aren't taught the value of a day's hard work. It's not the teens' fault but their pampered parents who don't want junior to get too hot and dirty and who knows what sort of germs might be found in the soil.
Where do you think your food comes from? Oh, the grocery store, that's right. I busted my butt on the farm BEFORE I was a teenager, and thank GOD I did.
Aren't a lot of illegals in prison? So what's the difference; except they will try to escape and nothing will be done.
"Inmates Will Replace Migrants in Colorado Fields"
What took them so long?
We have millions in prison in this country. Time to make 'em work for their keep , instead of them just eating free food, and sleeping.
Works for me. Solves at least two problems.
And here I thought summer vacation was in the UNION contract...
They should've been doing this anyway.
It happened here too:
The sleepy farming community of Aliceville, Ala., was almost 5,000 miles from the front lines in World War II. But when 300 stone-faced German prisoners of war marched into town on June 2, 1943, the residents of Pickens County turned out in droves to see the “devils” who had terrorized Europe and plunged the world into conflict.
Oddly enough, many of the prisoners also recalled their time in Aliceville as some of the happiest days of their lives. The camp is where many of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, Germany’s elite troops, spent their captivity after being thoroughly defeated by the Americans and English at Tunis.
About 1,000 U.S. military and civilian workers were employed at the Aliceville camp. Its existence and the workers who lived in the town pumped much-needed cash into the local economy. As for the prisoners, many worked at various jobs outside the camp under strict military supervision. Local employers could apply to the camp for POW labor.
The camp ran like a city within a city. POWs gardened, held classes and even ran their own printing press and published a camp newspaper titled “Fenced Guests.” Many were outstanding artists, sketching and painting scenes of camp life and memories of their homeland.
"That's the sound of the men...working on the chain gang..."
As someone who worked in the Colorado corrections system as a counselor, I can say this program is long overdue. Prison inmates in most jurisdictions have far too much idle time on their hands. Many become so physically and cognitively lazy that upon release they can not hold down a simple job or accept the smallest responsibilities. This is part of the institutionalization most modern prisons foster. Parolees tend to re-offend on the street so they can go back to the joint, eat, watch TV, call their families collect, and vegetate. Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi still have farm work programs. If it was up to me, every inmate who was not physically handicapped would work at least 40 hours a week at manual labor. That way, when the day is done most convicts are too tired to assault each other, set fire to their cells or throw urine at the staff.
>I wonder how many of the prisoners are illegal aliens?<
In Kalifornia it is 33.4%
And all the clowns doing hard time for growing weed will finally learn about crop rotation!!! :-) LOL!
Southern Michigan used to farm thousands of acres around here. Basically they supplied their own food plus food for the county and city jails. Today the taxpayers pick up those tabs.
But have no fear, our governor is closing 3 of the 5 facillities in this county, releasing well over 1000 prisoners and putting several hundred prison employees out of work.
What we had here was a failure to communicate....
Make that "Southern Michigan Prison". D'oh
If one truly cares about the plight of those living in Third World countries (and yes, Mexico IS a Third World country), use political pressure (combined with the real threat of loss of funds, not merely touchy feely "proposals")to change the political climate of those countries.
We have tied $$$ in Foreign Aid, to democratic actions in other countries, why not also in Mexico, instead of treating them like our poor relatives, whom we occasionally donate clothing, cars, etc.
Excellent post!
If this is successful as a pilot program for minimum security inmates, then they should expand the program for medium security inmates. Not picking vegetables, but out in the more rural parts of the State, doing ecological reclamation work.
Probably the best work they could do is in the southwest corner of the State, on the Ute Reservation. They could improve the standard of living for the tribe many fold, and in a way the tribe appreciated.
But they could do all sorts of projects out in the wilderness, from forestry to soil conservation, to reclamation projects.
Thanks.
Bring back the old chain gang!
Sounds like a subsidy for farmers to me?
Doing the jobs that un-incarcerateds won't do.
Are the Ute incapable of work?
This is one of the best ideas I've heard yet! Now we will hear the illegals complaining, the prisoners are taking thier jobs, in steps the America Criminal Liberties Union to protcet thier rights as illegals under the American constitution, and a good Idea goes bad!
It's called "supply and demand". Economics 098.
Give them a choice..
sw
Indians are in a bad way for several reasons. The first is that they are on generally cruddy land. The second is that the BIA manages the federal responsibility like the Haitian government would.
Third is what I mentioned before--a *lack* of federal law that keeps non-Indian business off the reservation. There are corporations that would love nothing better than to move there, provide jobs, and integrate them into the economy, but without law that lets them do this, they can't make the first move.
And fourth is a brain drain, in which anyone who can gets off the Res, to get out of the fourth-world poverty and degradation, beats feet. It ties with traditionally rotten and corrupt tribal government, both official and traditional.
In any event, sending down a bunch of convicts to work on the Res. might actually get the ball rolling to economic development. By doing huge amounts of manual labor, they could actually set up conditions for the Indians to improve themselves.
Believe me, there are some Indian towns so forsaken that you almost wish they had a bomb dropped on them, just to put the poor damned souls out of their misery.
Even if everything you say is true, so what?
We've had decades and decades of experience of just giving stuff away, and it doesn't work.
Remember all the government housing, and how that would magically change things for the inner city savages? Well, they're all being torn down now because they’re nothing more than huge drug sales centers with the accompanying rapes, murders, and child abuse.
Remember Johnsons Great Society? Never mind, bad example. Johnson wanted that to destroy the Black Family. He got what he wanted.
I drive through Reservations from time to time, and it's a sad scene. However, until they grab their own bootstraps there's nothing to feel sorry about. Like most homeless, this is their chosen life.
Most of government can either be done wisely or foolishly. Look at the defense budget under democrat and republican administrations, for example.
You can effectively help out the really awfully poor, as long as it is done sensibly. For example, rural India got a major boost just by giving them the idea of a pottery wheel turned by foot, not by hand. It made all the sense in the world to them, and boosted their pottery productivity by several hundred percent. It was just the baby step they needed to really improve themselves.
Just that one idea accomplished more than any number of handouts or higher technologies thrown at them for decades before.
As far as the (US) Indians go, the biggest help that we could give them isn't money, it's *law*. Federal law, written by Congress is not something they can give themselves. As I said before, the *lack of business law* just strangles the tribes. It is why there aren't any chain stores on the Res.
How well off would your neighborhood be if corporations wanted to, but couldn't set up shop within dozens of miles from there? Maybe one locally owned one-room general store, and that was it? Nobody would want to live there, or be able to live very well at all. It would probably turn into a ghost town overnight, no matter how much people wanted to work.
But until that law is written, they are boned. So the best they can hope for is that somebody, like prisoners, could come in and at least muck up the place. Maybe plant trees, or prepare some area so that a small Indian business could take over and make improvements.
And remember that it is a two sided coin. By that I mean that it reduces "brick" prison overcrowding, eliminates the need for early release, and sets the prisoners to doing something useful instead of just idling and making mischief.
Sounds like a win-win, not like welfare. It's not the best, but it helps out a little.
Agreed............by definition that excludes any government 'assistance'.
That opens the most gigantic can of worms imaginable.
To start with, the only real apparatus for the US government to deal to the Indian tribes are individual treaties, many of which, literally, make no sense, being composed of unrelated boilerplate 19th Century text having nothing to do with anything. Large sections are almost random text. Some indigenous people, like the Hawaiians, have no treaty and a weird and most likely illegal pseudo government.
So to deal with this nightmare, the government created a worse nightmare, the BIA, whose mismanagement is legendary.
However, legally, if you get rid of the BIA, you have to renegotiate more than 200 treaties, which would most likely need a cabinet level office and a national Indian Congress elected to negotiate on behalf of all of the tribes.
To put that into perspective, some inter-tribal land disputes have been tied up in federal courts for decades, and those are just a small part of the tribes entire treaties.
The morass, to your satisfaction, is entirely due to government involvement. However it is an ocean compared to the pond that any form of welfare could entail.
And while even if it worked marvelously, it would be a band-aid over a shotgun hole. But I suppose it would be the thought that counts.
In other words, they couldn't find Americans to do the jobs voluntarily?
Is there some reason we can't pull for more jobs for Americans who haven't committed a crime?
LOL
I wrote a paper in high school advocating the same thing. This was in 1992.
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