AP PHOTOS: A lens on prison labor

When Bruce Jackson was allowed into Texas prisons in the 1960s with a camera, he documented how little had changed from the past with men working in the heat on former slave plantations. He’s struck by how those images remain relevant today — more than six decades later.

Jackson’s searing black-and-white photos documented not just work in the fields, but life inside Southern prisons during the Civil Rights Movement — a time when the country was deeply divided.

“Now, I look back and just think how fortunate I was to be able to bear witness to something that few people got to see then,” said Jackson, 88, a professor of American culture at the University at Buffalo. “And hardly anybody gets in now.”

Jackson went on to photograph prisoners working in Arkansas prisons in the 1970s. He said it’s hard to imagine that some of these same farm lines still exist in some states where prisoners are forced to work for pennies an hour or nothing at all or face punishment.

During a two-year investigation, The Associated Press found major companies like Tyson Foods and Cargill, America’s largest privately owned company, were buying crops and livestock directly from prison farms or were linked through third-party suppliers such Walmart. The reporting showed how a spiderweb of brands and products tied to prison labor ends up in grocery stores and ultimately in most Americans’ kitchens through everything from Cheerios and Coca-Cola to Gold Medal flour. It also helped expose how incarcerated workers, who are often given dangerous jobs — from working in poultry plants to fighting wildfires — are typically excluded from the same rights and protections given to other American workers.

New Orleans-based photographers Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick have been documenting life inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola, since the 1980s. A former slave plantation, the sprawling 18,000-acre property is America’s largest maximum-security prison and still has men working in the fields.

“Once I got there, it was like so many guys I grew up with and people that we communicated with. I kept going … and built a relationship,” Calhoun said. “We lived on both sides of the lens.”

McCormick said in addition to documenting the prisoners’ lives behind bars, she and Calhoun helped bring cultural events to the prison, including musical performers. And even today, they continue to follow the lives of some of the men they first photographed nearly a half-century ago — some who are finally being released as elderly men. She said she’s also amazed at what they captured.

“It’s just mind-boggling because it really looks like slavery,” she said. “It really looks like stuff that you see on these movies that are old.”

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