I just wanted to quibble with the statement, "Over the last century, Americans abandoned their kitchens nearly as quickly as they abandoned farms. In 1929, Americans spent 17 percent of their food budgets away from home. Today, that number approaches 50 percent."  

I don't think that the food budget is really a fair measure to conclude that "Americans abandoned their kitchens."  When I look at my own spending, I see that I spend way more than 50% of my food dollars at restaurants - yet I only eat only eat about 10% of my meals away from home, and prepare the rest myself.  The trouble with measuring dollars is that I can buy $40 worth of groceries (lentils, flour, fresh vegetables) at the grocery store, coop, or farmers market and eat well for a week on food that I prepare myself.  Or I can go to a restaurant and blow $50 on dinner for two. (Not to mention the vegetables I grow myself all summer, which further skews my food budget toward the restaurants.)  Does that mean I've abandoned my kitchen?  Hardly.

- dean

Oil dollars are being spread around the world.  China and India are growing a middle class and domestic industry.   At some point people will not want to immigrate to the US -- because they can get just as good a deal at home.

Who is the big loser?   Well, without immigrants America would be a shrinking country populated by geezers.   I mean, I went to march at the immigration rally in Seattle, and everyone was under 30.   Strip away the immigrants and all you got is geezers, aging b-boomers and graying 30ish GenXers.

Not a pretty sight.

So the inmates doing this hard labor will receive
60 cents per day, but the farmers have to pay the
state about $9.00 per hour for this contract labor. Hmmm, does anyone besides me think this
is blatantly unfair? Is the state trying to subsidize prison expenses or solve the labor problem?  They can easily up the rate of pay to
$1.00 per hour at least.

Im wondering how big of an influence on immigration reform  the private prison industry has had.I seem to recall a news story a few months back regarding prisoners in georgia(?) being used to fill the vacant spots at meat packing plants left empty by immigration raids.

This all seems to be a bit to convenient.

Big Agribuisness has been using illegals workers for decades with a blind eye being turned by all administrations and it seems to me that it is only now, with the huge privatization push ,that the prison industry has come up with a solution that would get these corporations(and their bought and paid for politicians) off the legal hook.

What I see coming is a HUGE pool of virtual slave labor being created in this country.I say "virtual" because they are being paid a few cents a day, just enough to keep it from being legally called slavery.

The private prison industry will have to keep busy pushing for new and varied laws that would increase the numbers of their stock(prisoners) but they seem to be pretty good at it now.

If this doesnt worry you...

Personally I agree in full with the colorado legislation.  If the construction, and agribusiness industry now has a labor shortfall they will have to do what any employer does during labor shortages.  Raise wages!  

Of course then the consumers will join in the lamenting as their chemically grown food costs more, as well as their housing.  To hit the nail on its head, prices for consumer goods are artificially low because of low wage immigrant labor and the correction is higher wage local labor.  Still crying that labor cannot be found?  Maybe assembly line abbatoirs, row cropping, and other inhumane business practices so go extinct.

Ya know,the only prison in the US that had halved the cost of inmate cost per year was in the Carolinas,North or South I dont recall,but at an average of 55 thousand a year per inmate,those guys and gals that provide all of their own food is a great thing and everyone should task their state to do the same,no matter how hard they complain.Theyre just lazy and we all know it.Inmates to work in the fields,I think half of the wage paid to the state would be a perfect blend and if the inmates family was on any type of state assistance,that could be helped out with the inmates labor.Why pay and pay and pay when we can have common sense alternatives that reduce our costs so we keep our programs whole that make sense.The spanish farm workers are less willing to work for farm wages these days or we wouldnt be dragging them from our industries.

And nobody believed me when I said that doing something about immigrants is going to cost more than leaving things how they were.
Since it was obviously illogical for me to have said that last May (at least thats what I was told), clearly this article proves that I am clairvoyant.

Big business is so corrupt and greedy and often without conscience that I would shudder at the thought of them conning our court system into frivilous convictions.

   BUT...............
    doing very bad things shouild not be rewarded. A MANDATORY hard days work would not make prison such a cake walk and a burden on society.
  To take care of only one prisoner takes more cash than many whole families have to live on for a year with two people working. Do you think that everyone works because they WANT to? Think hard....they do it to earn their keep. They do it because they have to. Prisoners are certainly no better than the rest of us.
  Prisoners want to build muscles? Work them doing something productive. If a person is tired from a good days work.........their minds have less energy to plot the awful things that happen in prisons. A tired body will need to take the evenings to rest and not be plotting drug  deals and sexual battery . Think about it.........
   

It is troubling to see the commentary on this that suggests that a hard day's work is fair punishment. The punishment is being in prison, separated from community and family - it's not a "cake walk" or a "burden on society". The burden is allowing those who break laws to go free, not the costs of keeping inmates penned up. This is a SEPARATE issue from that discussed in this article, in which prison populations become a ready last resort of cheap labor for agricultural producers when nativist and xenophobic feelings become the basis for policy and drive out the already existing (and already poorly paid and largely unprotected) immigrant labor force. Retroactively saying that harveting and processing food for as little as 60 cents per day is good for prisoners because they will learn the value of a hard day's work is ridiculous. If this kind of work - which exposes laborers to dangerous chemicals and machinery - is so virtuous and good for the soul, then it should be self-evident that we'd all want to do it and there would be nop problem. But it's not - industrialized agriculture of the sort discussed in this article is some of the worst work available in the US and Canada, and the idea that prisoners are a good option when shortsighted nativist factiosn drive out those who already do the work just doesn't fly. We need better and more just immigration policies in the US (AND in Canada), and we need to understand the fulle extent and cost of our food production system to get that. Rlying on cheap, unprotected prison labor is not the solution to these issues.