By C1 Staff
NEW YORK — Two suppliers of the products Whole Foods plans to stop selling at its stores defended their practice of using prison labor.
ABC News reports that Whole Foods will no longer stock tilapia from Quixotic Farming and cheese distributed by Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy, two private companies that partner with the Colorado Department of Corrections.
A spokesman for Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy said that inmates actually earn nearly twice minimum wage in the state, once all the services they receive in jail are added to the total.
“Depending on their schedule, inmates can earn anywhere from $1,000 per year to over $2,500 per year,” the company said in a statement. “Most people don’t consider that it costs the Colorado tax payer $35,800 per inmate, per year for room and board, clothing, medical care, educational programs, counseling services and required supervision. When factoring in these benefits, inmates are actually earning more than double the Colorado minimum wage.”
Spokeswoman Claire Constant said that the majority of Quixotic’s tilapia is raised on the company’s Missouri farms and processed in Colorado by civilian employees.
“Quixotic is proud of the work we do with Colorado Correctional Industries,” Quixotic said in a statement. “We enjoy the opportunity to help the inmates who voluntarily apply for jobs at our CCI facility to learn a job skill that they can use when they are released. We appreciate the inmates who work hard to help raise our fish in Colorado, and if they excel and are interested in continuing the work once they are released, we try to help those inmates with job placements either at our facilities outside of CCI or in other seafood industries.”
Prison reform advocates protested Whole Food’s sale of inmate labor-made products, saying that the corporations were profiting off the misery of others.
“In order to impact the prison system, we have to try to take out if we can the profit-money motive,” Michael Allen, one of the protestors involved with the push against Whole Foods, said.