"Three-hundred-sixty-five days a year, you're forced to keep that farm being productive," he said. "You're doing backbreaking work, you're working in the sun, working in the cold, you're working every season, but you're not receiving anything from this."

“The labor is described by attorneys as “pointless” — picking rotten watermelons, weeding grass by hand, watering crops with Styrofoam cups (The Appeal, 2024).

The pointlessness is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.

The labor does not need to produce anything except the experience of being forced to labor. The message is delivered in the doing, not in the product. You are here to be broken. Not to produce. To submit.”

“At Louisiana’s Angola prison, incarcerated workers are forced to pick crops in dangerous heat. A federal judge ruled last month that a recent Fifth Circuit decision took away his power to help them.”

Image: msppmoore/Flickr

“People would rather lose their minds than endure the Farm Line,” Winn said. “To the men still being punished inside Angola: We can’t give up. Our voice is our hope. We have to continue to believe and push. We can end this form of slavery.”

Image: Giles Clarke/Getty Images

Journalist Matt Bruce writes “‘The relief that they’re requesting is going to end the Farm Line. If you end the Farm Line, we’re not going to have any more produce,’” said Andrew Blanchfield, the lead attorney defending the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections and state prison officials against the plaintiffs’ allegations.”

Journalist Bernard Smith writes “The court will determine whether forced prison field labor is unconstitutional and in violation of federal disability law.”