Convicts replace immigrants on Colorado farms

A decline in the number of immigrant labourers willing to work in Colorado following the introduction of stringent new laws has led authorities to explore an untapped labour pool: prison inmates.

Under a pilot programme to be launched in the early summer in Colorado's Pueblo county, farmers hope to pay inmates 60c a day to gather the watermelons, pumpkins and onions grown on the region's farmland.

But the plan has stirred up controversy on both sides of the immigration debate. "If they can't get slaves from Mexico, they want them from the jails," Mark Krikorian, of the Centre for Immigration Studies, told the Los Angeles Times.

Farmers in the area say that while they are not happy with the proposal to use inmates to replace the absent immigrant labour, they face little choice.

"Because agriculture has been in the decline in a lot of areas, the workload just piled up on the owners, on the families," Kathleen Curry, a farmer and state legislator told the Pueblo Chieftan. "We can't get the workers that we need, and a lot of folks just end up going out of business."

The new law was introduced to crack down on undocumented migrants receiving state benefits they were not entitled to by making it harder to get a driving licence. But the effect has been to scare away both documented and undocumented migrants.

Few cases of undocumented migrants receiving state aid have been uncovered since the legislation came in to force.

In a meeting with the state's prisons chief, farmers said that both legal and undocumented immigrants were too scared to come to Colorado.

"They've just given up and gone to other states that don't have these new laws," one farmer, Joe Pisciotta, said. "They just don't want to deal with it."

Another farmer, Phil Prutch, said: "We're aware there was a problem, but you just created another problem."

Five farms will be involved in the pilot plan, employing around 100 inmates. The farmers will pay the minimum wage plus any transport costs, although the inmates will only receive the standard prison wage. It is thought to be the first time that inmates will leave prison to work in private industry.

The state's prison authorities hope that the experiment will help to reduce recidivism. "We think that we can provide an opportunity for employment for people in the prison system, and help them to develop some work skills," said representative Dorothy Butcher, who initiated the plan.