'Don't have to pay for prisoners.' That one's rich.
Prisoners are expensive, according to the Bureau of Prisons own internal reporting they cost some 34 700 USD per inmate in 2016 and 36 300 USD in 2017. And that's just the incarceration, not counting the entire judicial system around the prisons themselves like courts and police.
This while the average farm worker according to Indeed.com costs some 9.89 USD per hour as of this post. Let's round that to 10 dollars an hour for ease of calculation, and presume an average working week of 40 hours a week (the seasonal nature of much agricultural work tends to mean working long days in summer and no to very limited work during winter), and an average working year of 48 weeks. This would mean 400 dollars a week, and 19 200 USD per year.
This means that, on average, the US economy would save about 50% of the cost of agricultural labour if it used freeman labour instead of prisoner labour. Not that this cost is necessarily immediately apparent to the customer mind you, because much of the cost of prisoner labour will be unloaded on the taxpayer rather than the customer.
Prisoners are expensive, according to the Bureau of Prisons own internal reporting they cost some 34 700 USD per inmate in 2016 and 36 300 USD in 2017. And that's just the incarceration, not counting the entire judicial system around the prisons themselves like courts and police.
This while the average farm worker according to Indeed.com costs some 9.89 USD per hour as of this post. Let's round that to 10 dollars an hour for ease of calculation, and presume an average working week of 40 hours a week (the seasonal nature of much agricultural work tends to mean working long days in summer and no to very limited work during winter), and an average working year of 48 weeks. This would mean 400 dollars a week, and 19 200 USD per year.
This means that, on average, the US economy would save about 50% of the cost of agricultural labour if it used freeman labour instead of prisoner labour. Not that this cost is necessarily immediately apparent to the customer mind you, because much of the cost of prisoner labour will be unloaded on the taxpayer rather than the customer.