Prisons put offenders out of sight, so it’s easy to forget not only that more than 2 million people are locked up in the U.S., but also that they’re still part of the economy. And what happens in prisons touches those of us outside — sometimes even in the food we eat.
Farming used to be a much bigger part of prison labor. But thousands of inmates still grow vegetables or feed crops to sell. In the Montana prison system, they tend cattle. And while producing food products, inmates receive job training and life skills.
The Montana State Prison dairy is a noisy place where inmates milk cows three times a day. Twenty cows at a time walk into individual stalls where inmates dip the cows’ teats in iodine and place suctioned milkers on them.
“Average cow takes between three and six minutes to milk,” said Dave Miller, the dairy manager.
Miller said 32 inmates run the dairy and its processing plant where the milk travels by vacuumed tubes to be homogenized, pasteurized and made it into yogurt, cottage cheese and ice cream. But around 85 percent of the milk is sold to a national wholesale dairy company, slipping into our cereal bowls and coffee mugs alongside milk from regular dairies.
The dairy is just one part of Montana Correctional Enterprises’ cattle operation. Prisoners also raise beef cattle. Inmates herd some 2,000 cows grazing on 30,000 acres of alfalfa, rye and other cover crops.
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