CSU’s Prison Agriculture Lab researches the roots, impact of the prison agriculture industry
Contact for reporters:
Stacy Nick
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Note to journalists: CSU Prison Agriculture Lab Co-directors Joshua Sbicca and Carrie Chennault are available for interviews. More information can be found at https://col.state/9VjWz. All assets — including photos and podcast audio/transcripts — are also available for media use.
Going back as far as the Civil War era, agricultural programs had been part of the American prison system. Whether it was touted as a source of cheap labor or a form of restorative justice, providing fresh food for programs in need, or as vocational training to aid prisoners in finding work after their sentence was served.
But with more than 600 current programs throughout the country, there’s little data looking at the how, what and why of these programs. Colorado State University’s Prison Agriculture Lab, housed within the College of Liberal Arts, is looking to change that.
The lab’s co-directors, Joshua Sbicca and Carrie Chennault, recently published a landmark dataset analyzing the different types of current prison agricultural programs, as well as the underlying historical, political and economic drivers behind them.
“There’s not always a benign intent behind having people farm,” said Sbicca, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology. “So, peeling back several of the layers of the intent is really one of the goals of our research in order to paint a more critical representation of what’s going on and also a more historically accurate representation that doesn’t bifurcate between good and bad, but rather sees the power structures and dynamics that are involved in this entire practice and enterprise.”
The lab’s research looks beyond motivations such as idleness reduction, vocational education and prisoner rehabilitation, and into the structures of racial capitalism embedded in the prison system.
“One of the critical questions that we’re raising in our research — and that we found in our study of prison agriculture nationwide — is this question of rehabilitating ‘to what,’” said Chennault, a feminist geographer and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Geography. “Because we found, as with many prison industries, prison agriculture is not unique in purporting to provide vocational training and education to incarcerated people so that they will have job opportunities after incarceration. I think that as far as actual evidence goes, it’s unclear that that actually happens.”
Even if these programs do lead to employment after incarceration, Chennault said it’s important to look at the types of employment they offer.
“We think that there’s not enough questioning critically about whether these programs are designed to funnel people into labor situations that may be more dangerous, may lack benefits (and have) decent wages,” she said.
Sbicca and Chennault recently spoke about the Prison Agriculture Lab and their research on CSU’s podcast The Audit. More information about the lab — including the podcast, a full transcript of the interview and high-res photos — can be found here.