BP Hires Prison Labor to Clean Up Spill While Coastal Residents Struggle

In the first few days after BP's Deepwater Horizon wellhead exploded,
spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, cleanup workers could be
seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with
the words "Inmate Labor" printed in large red block letters. Coastal
residents, many of whom had just seen their livelihoods disappear,
expressed outrage at community meetings; why should BP be using cheap or
free prison labor when so many people were desperate for work? The
outfits disappeared overnight.

Work crews in Grand Isle, Louisiana, still stand out. In a region
where nine out of ten residents are white, the cleanup workers are
almost exclusively African-American men. The racialized nature of the
cleanup is so conspicuous that Ben Jealous, the president of the NAACP,
sent a public letter
to BP CEO Tony Hayward on July 9, demanding to know why black people
were over-represented in "the most physically difficult, lowest paying
jobs, with the most significant exposure to toxins."

Hiring prison labor is more than a way for BP to save money while
cleaning up the biggest oil spill in history. By tapping into the inmate
workforce, the company and its subcontractors get workers who are not
only cheap but easily silenced-and they get lucrative tax write-offs in
the process.

Known to some as "the inmate state," Louisiana has the highest rate
of incarceration of any other state in the country. Seventy percent of
its 39,000 inmates are African-American men. The Louisiana Department of
Corrections (DOC) only has beds for half that many prisoners, so 20,000
inmates live in parish jails, privately run contract facilities and
for-profit work release centers. Prisons and parish jails provide free
daily labor to the state and private companies like BP, while also
operating their own factories and farms, where inmates earn between zero
and forty cents an hour. Obedient inmates, or "trustees," become
eligible for work release in the last three years of their sentences.
This means they can be a part of a market-rate, daily labor force that
works for private companies outside the prison gates. The advantage for
trustees is that they get to keep a portion of their earnings,
redeemable upon release. The advantage for private companies is that
trustees are covered under Work Opportunity Tax Credit, a holdover from
Bush's Welfare to Work legislation that rewards private-sector employers
for hiring risky "target groups." Businesses earn a tax credit of
$2,400 for every work release inmate they hire. On top of that, they can
earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to "target
group workers."

If BP's use of prison labor remains an open secret on the Gulf Coast,
no one in an official capacity is saying so. At the Grand Isle base
camp in early June, I called BP's Public Information line, and visited
representatives for the Coast Guard Public Relations team, the
Department of Homeland Security, and the Louisiana Fisheries and
Wildlife Department. They were all stumped. Were inmates doing shore
protection or oil cleanup work? They had no idea. In fact, they said,
they'd like to know-would I call them if I found out?

I got an answer one evening earlier this month, when I drove up the
gravel driveway of the Lafourche Parish Work Release Center jail, just
off Highway 90, halfway between New Orleans and Houma. Men were
returning from a long day of shoveling oil-soaked sand into black trash
bags in the sweltering heat. Wearing BP shirts, jeans and rubber boots
(nothing identifying them as inmates), they arrived back at the jail in
unmarked white vans, looking dog tired.

Beach cleanup is a Sisyphean task. Shorelines cleaned during the day
become newly soaked with oil and dispersant overnight, so crews shovel
up the same beaches again and again. Workers wear protective
chin-to-boot coveralls (made out of high-density polyethylene and
manufactured by Dupont), taped to steel-toed boots covered in yellow
plastic. They work twenty minutes on, forty minutes off, as per
Occupational Safety and Health Administration safety rules. The limited
physical schedule allows workers to recover from the blazing sun and the
oppressive heat that builds up inside their impermeable suits.

During their breaks, workers unzip the coveralls for ventilation,
drink ice water from gallon thermoses and sit under white fabric tents.
They start at 6 AM, take a half-hour lunch and end the day at 6PM,
adding up three to four hours of hard physical labor in twenty-minute
increments. They are forbidden to speak to the public or the media by
BP's now-notorious gag rule. At the end of the day, coveralls are
stripped off and thrown in dumpsters, alongside oil-soaked booms and
trash bags full of contaminated sand. The dumpsters are emptied into
local HazMat landfills, free employees go home and the inmates are
returned to work release centers.

Work release inmates are required to work for up to twelve hours a
day, six days a week, sometimes averaging seventy-two hours per week.
These are long hours for performing what may arguably be the most toxic
job in America. Although the dangers of mixed oil and dispersant
exposure are largely unknown, the chemicals in crude oil can damage
every system in the body, as well as cell structures and DNA.

Inmates can't pick and choose their work assignments and they face
considerable repercussions for rejecting any job, including loss of
earned "good time." The warden of the Terrebonne Parish Work Release
Center in Houma explains: "If they say no to a job, they get that time
that was taken off their sentence put right back on, and get sent right
back to the lockup they came out of." This means that work release
inmates who would rather protect their health than participate in the
non-stop toxic cleanup run the risk of staying in prison longer.

Prisoners are already subject to well-documented health care
deprivations while incarcerated, and are unlikely to have health
insurance after release. Work release positions are covered by Worker's
Compensation insurance, but pursuing claims long after exposure could be
a Kafkaesque task. Besides, there is currently no system for tracking
the medical impact of oil and dispersant exposure in cleanup workers or
affected communities.

"They're not getting paid, it's part of their sentence"

To learn how many of the 20,000 prisoners housed outside of state
prisons are involved in spill-related labor, I called the DOC Public
Relations officer, Pam LaBorde, who ultimately discouraged me from
seeking such information. ("Frankly, I do not know where your story is
going, but it does not sound positive," she said on our third phone
call.)

Going to prison officials directly didn't help. The warden of a South
Louisiana jail refused to discuss the matter, exclaiming, "You want me
to lose my job?" A different warden, of a privately-owned center
admitted, on condition of anonymity, that inmates from his facility had
been employed in oil cleanup, but declined to answer further questions.
Jefferson Parish President Steve Theriot and Plaquemines Parish
President Billy Nungesser, and Grand Isle Police Chief Euris DuBois
declined interview requests.

Transparency problems are longstanding with the Louisiana DOC. There
is also scant oversight of private prison facilities. Following
Hurricane Katrina, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a
140-page report
that documented abuses and botched prison evacuations, as well as the
numerous times its requests for official information were rejected. "It
appears that you are standing in the shoes of prisoners, and therefore
DOC is exempted from providing any information which it might otherwise
have to under public records law," DOC lawyers told the ACLU National Prisons Project.

Some officials have been more forthcoming. A lieutenant in the
Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's Office told me that three crews of inmates
were sandbagging in Buras, Louisiana in case oil hit there. "They're not
getting paid, it's part of their sentence," she said. "They'll work as
long as they're needed. It's a hard job because of the heat, but they're
not refusing to work." In early May, Governor Bobby Jindal's office
sent out a press release
heralding the training of eighty inmates from Elayn Hunt Correctional
Center in "cleaning of oil-impacted wildlife recovered from coastal
areas." DOC Spokesperson Pam LaBorde subsequently denied that any
inmates participated in wildlife cleaning efforts.

Offering an exception to this policy of secrecy is Lafourche Parish
Work Release Center, the only one in the state that is accredited by the
American Correctional Association. It is audited regularly and abides
by national standards of safety and accountability, which is perhaps why
I was able to simply walk in on a Thursday afternoon and chat with the
warden.

Captain Milfred Zeringue is a retired Louisiana state police officer
with a jaunty smile, powerful torso, and silver hair. His small, gray
office is adorned with photos of many generations of his Louisiana
family and a Norman Rockwell print picturing a policeman and a small
runaway boy sharing a meaningful look at a soda fountain counter. A
brass plaque confers the "Blood and Guts Award" upon Zeringue. Of 184
men living under the Captain's charge, 18 are currently assigned to oil
spill work. The numbers change daily and are charted on white boards
that stretch down the hallway.

Captain Zeringue says that inmates are glad for any opportunity they
can get, and see work release jobs as a step up, a headstart on
re-entry. "Our work release inmates are shipped to centers around the
state according to employer demand," he explains, describing the
different types of skilled and unskilled labor. "I have carpenters, guys
riding on the back of the trash trucks, guys working offshore on the
oil rigs, doing welding, cooking. Employers like them because they are
guaranteed a worker who's on time, drug-free, and sober."

"And," he adds, "because they do get a tax break."

Inside the center, men sit around long plastic tables watching TV, or
nap on thin mattresses under grey wool covers. The windowless
dormitories hold twenty to thirty men each in blue metal bunk beds. Hard
hats hang off of lockers, ceiling fans circle slowly, and each bunk has
a white mesh bag of laundry strung from one rung. An air of dejection
and fatigue permeates the atmosphere, but the facility looks safe and
clean. It's surrounded by chain link fence and staffed by former police
officers. One long shelf stacked with donated romance and adventure
novels serves as a library. GED classes and Alcoholics Anonymous
meetings gather weekly. Individuals are free to walk around the halls,
use pay phones, shoot pool, or sit and watch cars pass on the highway
from a small outdoor yard. A doctor visits once a week. Inmates greet
the captain as we walk and jump to hold doors open for us.

Zeringue exudes a certain affection for the workers in his center.
"To me, I'm kind of like Dad here. The inmates come to me and talk about
their problems. They get antsy and nervous when they're close to
getting out-how am I going to survive, how's my family gonna be with
me?"

Like all Gulf Coast residents, inmates have good reason to feel
anxious about the future. BP has received almost 80,000 claims for lost
revenue in the wake of the spill. Scores of people are out of work, the
offshore drilling industry is in limbo and the age-old fishing and
shrimping professions are looking death in the face. In the towns and
bayous of the gulf, anxiety and post-traumatic stress are taking hold.

In some places, the desperation is palpable. I met Randy Adams, a
construction contractor from Grand Isle, on the sidewalk outside of a
local bar. "This BP spill is turning me into an alcoholic, because I
don't have anything to do," he says. "That, that, thing-that thing they
did-" He points to the beach. He's unable to say "spill" or label it in
any way. He points to the water again and again. "That thing has taken
everything away from me. I have a gun under the front seat of my truck,
and every day I decide, do I want to put a bullet in my skull? Live or
die, that's my choice here, every day. My life is gone, do you
understand?"

Scott Rojas of the Jefferson Parish Economic Development Commission
suggests that for all the work to be done, finding local labor to do
oil-spill cleanup jobs is trickier than it would seem. "These are really
hard, and really low-paid jobs-I know agencies have put effort into
finding locals to do the work. But they may not always have an easy time
of it. As for reports of inmates being hired, I can't confirm or deny.
The people down in Grand Isle swear to it, but you're going to have to
talk to them."

The Louisiana Workforce Commission, the state unemployment agency, is
advertising hazardous waste removal oil spill cleanup positions as
"green jobs." They pay $10 per hour, so these jobs might seem like an
attractive opportunity. But Paul Perkins, a retired Angola Prison deputy
warden who owns and operates five for-profit inmate work release
centers, says that even as the agency is "overflowing with applications
for oil spill jobs," the work force is inconsistent. "They might hire
400 people on Monday, and after one day of work, only 200 will come back
on Tuesday."

Hiring prison labor might prove more reliable, but it evokes
understandable rage among Gulf Coast residents. According to Perkins,
the Louisiana Secretary of Corrections, James LeBlanc, met with disaster
contractors in early June and asked them to stop using inmate labor
until all unemployed residents found work. But as the spill has so
dramatically demonstrated, in this new environment, the government seems
only able to make polite requests. BP calls the shots, and its private
contractors, like ES&H, are the sole clean-up operators. From there, subcontractors, such as Able Body Labor, decide whom to employ.

Working for BP: "This isn't what I would like to be doing."

Anna Keller relocated to Grand Isle in May to work with Gulf Recovery
LLC, to help develop community-based responses to the oil disaster.
Also a member of Critical Resistance New Orleans,
Keller says, it is "common knowledge" that prisoners are doing cleanup.
"If you talk to anyone working on the beach they'll tell you, yes,
prisoners are working here." She describes a shipping container that
sits at the turn-off for the Venice Boat Harbor, advertising "Jails to
Go." Such containers work as contract labor housing for work release
prisoners, with bunks inside, bars on the windows, and deadbolts on the
doors.

According to Keller, the use of inmate labor takes recovery one step
further away from those people who are most intimate with the ecology,
culture and landscapes of the area. In her view, they should be hired
first, and not just for the grunt jobs. "Community members should be
hired in the planning stages, and paid for their expertise. The local
people are the true experts here."

Up the road at A-Bear's Restaurant in Houma, an elderly man in
overalls describes his son's financial dilemmas to the room of locals
over dinner. The son is 40, married with children, and was laid off from
an oyster shucking factory shortly after the BP leak began. He's now
walking door-to-door with a lawnmower, looking for grass to cut. The man
holds his head in both arthritic hands. The waitress hands him a paper
napkin to blot his eyes. I ask him if his son would work for BP in the
cleanup and he grimaces. "Maybe, no, I don't think so," he says. "That
would be hard for his pride, you know? For that little money? No."

Beach cleanup workers do make the lowest wages in the recovery
effort. Others on the BP payroll have it slightly better, but the jobs
they are doing are a daily reminder of what they have lost. Chris
Griffin is a French-speaking Cajun shrimper whose father and grandfather
also captained shrimp boats. After oil contamination closed the gulf
waters, Griffin was hired to captain airboat tours of oil-impacted
marshlands for BP. Three times a day he steers a slim four-seat boat
with a deafening engine into the waters he's known all his life, while
Coast Guard officials give media tours and answer the same grim
questions again and again.

"This isn't what I would like to be doing," Griffin says, "but I'm
glad I have a job so I can take care of my family. I'm not worrying
about the money. Not everybody has that. Me, I'm worrying about the
years in the future here. Will we keep cleaning it up? Will they take
care of everybody?"