01/30/2024

U.S. Prisoners Comprise Part of a Hidden Workforce Linked to Many Popular Food Brands

Their labor is linked to foods from McDonald's, Target and Cargill

A hidden path to America's dinner tables begins in Angola, Louisiana, at an unlikely source – a former Southern slave plantation that is now the nation's largest maximum-security prison.

Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work, for pennies an hour or, sometimes, nothing at all. After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then followed by The Associated Press another 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald's, Cargill and Walmart.

Intricate, invisible webs, just like this one, link some of the world's largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to a sweeping two-year AP investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Associated Press.