Thread: Fresh from the farm, hand-picked by felons?

http://www.aurorasentinel.com/main.asp? ... leID=15507

3/7/2007 11:35:00 PM

David Zalubowski/AP

Fresh from the farm, hand-picked by felons?
With immigrant labor scarce after crackdown, state considers convicts

By The Associated Press

VINELAND, Colo. | Farmer Phil Prutch isn't sure about putting Colorado convicts to work in his fields this summer. But then again, he says, he doesn't have much of a choice.

Somebody has to pick the crops. Prutch has 15 acres of rotting peppers to show what happens if someone doesn't.

Faced with a severe shortage of migrant farmworkers that many blame on Colorado's crackdown on illegal immigrants, state officials are considering an experimental program that could have prisoners laboring on a half-dozen farms by May.

The idea has horrified some activists, who see it as a return to the plantation system.

"It's just chain gangs and slave labor. It's been tried before," said Ricardo Martinez, co-director of Denver-based Padres Unidos, an immigrant rights organization. "It's not like there's mental giants at the state Capitol developing solutions here."

Colorado has enacted one of the nation's toughest crackdowns on illegal immigrants, denying most nonessential services to people in the country illegally, requiring more identification to get driver's licenses, and putting pressure on state and local law enforcement officers to cooperate with federal immigration agents.

Normally, perhaps 10,000 migrant farmworkers - some legal, some illegal - come through Colorado each year, planting, cultivating and harvesting such crops as onions, peppers, melons and pumpkins, said Larry Gallegos, an advocate for farmworkers in the state Labor Department. But he predicted their numbers will be down as much as 40 percent this year.

Prutch, like other small farmers, said the labor shortage is dire. The five to 20 migrant workers he and his family typically counted on for decades have disappeared, and his peppers went unharvested last fall because he couldn't find anyone to pick them.

"Our problem in Colorado is we chased them off," said Prutch, who farms 250 acres. "Legal or illegal, we made them feel unwanted. These people just want to work."

Migrant farmworkers in Colorado are typically paid $8 to $9 an hour. Under a plan under consideration by prison and agricultural officials, farmers would pay the state an hourly wage for each inmate.

The inmates would get the state's standard 60-cents-a-day credit for prison labor, while the rest of the money would go toward their housing, food, transportation and guards while they are working.

Some worry that many convicts are city dwellers who lack the know-how to work on a farm. Prutch, for one, said he fears he will constantly have to train convicts how to recognize a ripe pepper, how to distinguish a pepper from a weed, and how to wield a hoe correctly.

Some worry that many convicts are city dwellers who lack the know-how to work on a farm. Prutch, for one, said he fears he will constantly have to train convicts how to recognize a ripe pepper, how to distinguish a pepper from a weed, and how to wield a hoe correctly.

It's not brain surgery. How long can it take to learn? Quit your whining and git 'er done!