It turns out that Taylor Farms, the agricultural company widely believed to be behind the cyclospora outbreak currently raging throughout the US, is also heavily involved in modern-day forced labor.

In reporting from 2023 that was resurfaced this week on social media, the publication Prison Legal News revealed that Taylor Farms was contracting labor from the Arizona Department of Correction, Rehabilitation, and Reentry for the low, low price of just $4.75 an hour — far below the cost of a non-incarcerated worker the federal minimum wage. (And to be clear, that’s not the hourly wage paid to the inmate, which is capped at $1.50 in Arizona.)

Taylor Farms is just one firm involved in the practice in Arizona. Others include Hickman’s Egg Farms, NatureSweet, and Televerde, each of which contracted labor from Arizona DCRR’s for-profit arm, Arizona Correctional Industries. That company’s job is basically to churn out bulk goods for the state of Arizona, like license plates, though it also makes quite a bit of money selling the labor-hours of incarcerated people to private companies.

Worse yet, some of those incarcerated workers may have been here as non-citizens — meaning it would be illegal to employ them in the same low-wage jobs if they weren’t being held in detention. As Prison Legal noted at the time, at least 26 prisoners employed by these companies had been detained by ICE, meaning that outside of incarceration, hiring them would have been illegal. To put it bluntly: their status as prisoners was the only thing that made the arrangement legal.