How Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Could Fuel a Prison Labor Boom

Food-processing jobs aren’t necessarily safer, either. Hickman’s Family Farm, the largest egg producer in the Southwest, has long employed incarcerated workers through the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reentry, sometimes under allegedly dangerous conditions. “There are cases of injury with that particular company,” Sbicca notes, “but there’s cases of incarcerated folks being leased out to Tyson, which has notorious labor abuses, and poor workplace conditions.”

A bombshell report by the Associated Press in 2024 unveiled a complex web linking prison labor to private food corporations, among them Tyson Foods—which owns Hillshire Farms, Jimmy Dean, and Aidells—and a chicken processor tied to Cargill, the largest private company in the U.S. The exact number of incarcerated individuals working in poultry processing is difficult to determine, but an investigation by the Marshall Project counted 24 incidents of incarcerated workers being injured at poultry plants in Georgia and North Carolina between 2015 and 2018. Poultry-processing work can also prove fatal: In 2017, 33-year-old Frank Dwayne Ellington, who had served nearly eight years of a life sentence for robbery, was working at a poultry plant in rural Alabama when he was pulled into a carcass rehanger and killed instantly.

“This new reliance, or attempt to rely, on incarcerated labor is sort of a deepening of patterns that we’ve seen in other points in time,” says Carrie Freshour, a professor of geosciences at Georgia State University who studies the connections between race, incarceration, and low-wage food and agricultural labor in the South, particularly in poultry processing.