Captive labor and the Katrina agenda

The South has more of its population in prisons or jails than any other part of the country. It's also the region where workers have the fewest rights. Put these elements together, and you have the modern-day equivalent of the convict leasing system, as described in a revealing story in the New York Times this week:

LAKE PROVIDENCE, Louisiana - At barbecues, ballgames and funerals, cotton gins, service stations, the First Baptist Church, the pepper-sauce factory and the local private school - the men in orange are everywhere.

Many people here in East Carroll Parish, as Louisiana counties are known, say they could not get by without their inmates, who make up more than 10 percent of its population and most of its labor force. They are dirt-cheap, sometimes free, always compliant, ever-ready and disposable.

You just call up the sheriff, and presto, inmates are headed your way. "They bring me warm bodies, 10 warm bodies in the morning," said Grady Brown, owner of the Panola Pepper Corporation. "They do anything you ask them to do."

It is an ideal arrangement, many in this farming parish say.

"You call them up, they drop them off, and they pick them up in the afternoon," said Paul Chapple, owner of a service station.

National prison experts say that only Louisiana allows citizens to use inmate labor on such a widespread scale, under the supervision of local sheriffs. The state has the nation's highest incarceration rate, and East Carroll Parish, a forlorn
jurisdiction of 8,700 people along the Mississippi River in the remote northeastern corner of Louisiana, has one of the highest rates in the state.

As a result, it is here that the nation's culture of incarceration achieves a kind of ultimate synthesis with the local economy. The prison system converts a substantial
segment of the population into a commodity that is in desperately short supply - cheap labor - and local-jail inmates are integrated into every aspect of economic and
social life.

The practice is both an odd vestige of the abusive convict- lease system that began in the South around Reconstruction, and an outgrowth of Louisiana's penchant for stuffing state inmates into parish jails - far more than in any other state.
Nowhere else would sheriffs have so many inmates readily at hand, creating a potent political tool come election time, and one that keeps them popular in between.

These were the social arrangements in Louisiana and the South before Katrina, and which were aggravated by the storm. Yesterday, the New Orleans Worker Justice Coalition and Advancement Project released an eye-opening report on the condition workers have faced in the Southern Gulf:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, several hundred thousand workers, mostly African American, lost their jobs. Since the storm, these workers have faced tremendous structural barriers to returning home and to finding the employment necessary to rebuild their lives. Without housing, they cannot work; without work they cannot afford housing. As these pre-Katrina New Orleanians fight to return, the city has experienced a huge influx of migrant workers - citizen and non-citizen-who have been wooed to the area with promises of steady, good paying jobs. Yet, these workers, like their local counterparts, are finding barriers to safe employment, fair pay, and affordable housing that are driving them further into poverty. The study reveals that many workers are finding themselves exploited, homeless and harassed by law enforcement. Both newly arrived workers and former residents, mostly people of color, recognize that New Orleans is being rebuilt by them, but not for them.

To read more about the report and worker's rights in the Gulf, read Jordan Flaherty's excellent piece at Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch. We still have an opportunity -- for example, with the one-year anniversary of Katrina -- to push worker's rights and racial justice to the top of the national agenda.