Worker Cooperatives Might Improve Prison Life — and the Food System

This article was originally published at The Bittman Project.

The first time Kelton O’Connor approached the gates of a prison, he saw the glinting barbed wire and the surveillance tower gunmen against the blue California sky, and his heart pounded in anticipation. Just a toddler, he hadn’t seen his mother for a year—not since she was taken at gunpoint from their apartment by federal agents—and now, peering through his grandmother’s car window, he could finally see where she’d been living. Parking and passing through the gates, a guard led him and his grandmother to a visitation room door where his mother stood. O’Connor absorbed her embrace and felt the charge of joy, safety, freedom, and love pulse through him again. They spent that day together, coloring with crayons on butcher paper. When the visit was over, he sobbed. In a recent personal journal entry, he wrote, “I couldn’t describe my feelings then, but looking back, it was the feeling of incarceration. My mother’s prison was my home, and my grandmother’s car was like a prison.”

In the following years, his mother had another baby boy while her hands were cuffed to a medical table. Two years later, she was released, and the family of three retreated to a little cabin insulated by a forest of California ferns and redwoods. O’Connor wrote in another entry: “Intoxicated with the air and the green, I ran not to our little cabin but to the woods, my brother trailing and my mother calling after, as I sought to conquer and claim every boulder and log, oblivious to the fact that it was the land that had claimed me.” 

O’Connor wants inmates to form cooperatives, wherein they can start businesses and share revenue among themselves rather than being subjected to doing work they dread for between 8 and 74 cents per hour.

Thirty years later, O’Connor is working to bring dignity and agency to California inmates by connecting them with the land. Three years ago, he co-founded Earth Equity, a program that teaches inmates about kelp forest restoration and “food as medicine.” Moving forward, as the director of the Let Us Contribute Initiative (LUCI), he wants inmates to form cooperatives, wherein they can start businesses and share revenue among themselves rather than being subjected to doing work they dread for between 8 and 74 cents per hour. In his vision, inmates and former inmates would be expert regenerative farmers, sea urchin foragers, and kelp forest restorers working on prison land in California’s prime Mediterranean climate. The kelp, the uni from the sea urchins, and the produce from the farm would be sold to Bay Area food purveyors on the outside and prison canteens on the inside, replacing some of the junk food options. Forty percent of revenue would go to community-based job programs, and the rest would go to the inmates, enabling them to save for discharge or send money home to their families who otherwise face a steep loss of income when their breadwinners are jailed. 

O’Connor is passionate about this work, not just because of his mother’s history. As he told me over the phone, “the evidence is quite strong, based on a large longitudinal study…” He sounded like many non-profit leaders I’ve spoken with—all the thoughtful messaging and data—except his sentence was interrupted by a recording: “This is a collect call from San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. You have 60 seconds left.” O’Connor has been an inmate there since 2013. 

I haven’t asked him about his charges because they aren’t the point. San Quentin recently changed the last half of its name from State Prison to Rehabilitation Center. Improving prison conditions (or, at least, spending money to improve conditions for criminals) still seems counterintuitive for much of the American voting public. Still, it makes sense from fiscal and humanitarian perspectives. Since last March, California has been using Norway—where the nicest prison cells would be better described as dormitories—as a model for reducing recidivism. Norway’s rate is 20 percent compared to our 76 percent (the world’s highest). They spend three times as much per prisoner, but according to a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), they spend less in the long run because they only pay for one sentence.

O’Connor says, “[Worker cooperatives] create a humane acculturation process where, at discharge, you can reenter the workforce, make a meaningful wage, stop participating in criminality, and get back to a normal way of life.”

Granted, the US is not Norway, but Norwegian recidivism and American rates looked a lot alike not long ago. Part of the Norwegian system’s formula is their emphasis on normalization, making incarcerated life as close to free life as possible in order to make the transition easier. For example, they locate prisoners close to home, and some facilities allow up to three visits with family per week. Governor Gavin Newsom’s new “California Model” emphasizes normalization as one of its transformational pillars. O’Connor says, “They’re spending $240 million to build this normalized environment with an auditorium, classrooms, and workspaces,” but he feels worker cooperatives are a vital missing component. O’Connor says, “[In California] there’s a call for the state to give prison employees who make food, wash dishes, and sweep the floors a meaningful wage, and while I’m not saying we shouldn’t, a minimum wage for inmates never has nearly the political support it would need, and on the street, those jobs will still only pay 15 dollars an hour.” He says,  “[Worker cooperatives] create a humane acculturation process where, at discharge, you can reenter the workforce, make a meaningful wage, stop participating in criminality, and get back to a normal way of life.”

For evidence, we don’t have to go all the way to Norway. In Puerto Rico, inmates at the Guayama Penitentiary formed worker cooperatives around art, solar, technology, and sewing. According to an article in Nonprofit Quarterly, “Over the first 10 years, there have been only two cases of recidivism among the over 50 co-op members who were released (and one of them is already back out on parole).” 

“It’s about doing it our way and creating jobs that our citizens find meaningful. We’d like the work to be focused on a socially and ecologically sustainable industry.”

“It’s not just creating similar jobs [to Norway’s or Puerto Rico’s],” says O’Connor. “It’s about doing it our way and creating jobs that our citizens find meaningful. We’d like the work to be focused on a socially and ecologically sustainable industry. Climate change has an immediate impact on our lives. Ecological crises disproportionately harm people of color. We’ll do classes here where we’ll ask, ‘Did anybody here grow up near a refinery, garbage dump, or a hog farm?’ A lot of them raised their hands. I’ll ask, ‘Oh, how did that affect your family?’ and they’ll say someone had cancer, for example. We’ll ask, ‘Did you know that that’s a form of environmental racism?’  When I tell them that people in boardrooms make those decisions and that we can influence them together, some people want to be a part of that movement for the rest of their lives.” 

One afternoon in his cell, on his AM/FM radio, O’Connor heard a news story about sea urchins destroying kelp forests in California since a warm weather event in 2012 killed off their natural predator, the sunflower starfish. He said, “In about eight years, we lost 95 percent of our kelp forests. Kelp is a keystone species in our marine ecosystems, so we’re in a total crisis. Fortunately, money can be made from the urchins by selling them to restaurants for uni.” O’Connor has raised over a hundred thousand dollars and, with the help of his established network of programmatic allies in the region, the design process is underway for programs that connect people with Ocean Stewardship opportunities and what he calls “Green-Worker Co-ops for Return Citizens.”

“We can create jobs, give out business grants where there’s not much opportunity, and hopefully, by reinvesting into the community, we would prevent people from coming to prison in the first place.”

But to create worker cooperatives inside prisons, let alone farm prison land, takes legislative action. So LUCI partnered with the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) and created a legislative draft for which they are working to garner support. Past efforts have failed because they have been conflated with efforts to develop a minimum wage for inmates. O’Connor says, “Our campaign would not incur any state spending; It would generate revenue. It’s not going to solve labor conditions in prison overnight. Still, it would be a meaningful step towards incarcerated people having a living wage. We can create jobs, give out business grants where there’s not much opportunity, and hopefully, by reinvesting into the community, we would prevent people from coming to prison in the first place.” O’Connor and SELC conducted a temperature check and told us that if a vote were held today, the bill would pass, but they are still seeking a lawmaker to sponsor and submit a bill on their behalf before a deadline at the end of the month. If it were to happen, it would make San Quentin, the state’s first prison, built by unpaid inmates living on a prison ship, the first in the 50 states to allow inmates to form cooperative enterprises and generate their own income. 

Recently discharged former inmates are often left with work choices that are miserable or risky, or both. O’Connor wrote in a journal entry of his mother’s work after discharge, “She muscled suede and sheepskin into designer coats and boots on the monstrous industrial sewing machine she had installed in the middle of the cabin’s main room, which was incidentally also her bedroom, the dining room, and any other room it needed to be…she was paid small bucks and a crippling case of carpal tunnel before the pain in her hands and arms grew so bad that she was forced to give up the grunt labor of seamstressing.” Ideally, his co-ops would prepare inmates for a third option—work that is invigorating, meaningful, well-paying, and regenerative.