Incarcerated men at the Cummins Unit, Arkansas’ oldest maximum-security prison, are speaking out. They report being forced to work for free under armed guards on horseback in conditions they describe as dehumanizing—mirroring the slave plantation that once occupied the same land.
“We were literally slaves”
Hundreds of incarcerated men at the Cummins Unit work for free as part of the “Hoe Squad”—an agricultural labor program the Arkansas Division of Correction (ADC) calls rehabilitation.
However, the men speaking out describe something very different. Mela-Sidq Supreme, who worked on the Hoe Squad, said:
The Hoe Squad at the Cummins Unit is as close to slavery as any person will ever get in the United States. I’m on my hands and knees, and I’m planting onions in this field. I looked up and the only thing that I could see was white men on horses with shotguns, and as I looked around me, all I could see in my mind were Black men on their knees planting onions. We were literally slaves.
Most of the food harvested is sold to outside companies through contracts worth thousands of dollars. Yet, farm produce is treated as contraband. Officers strip-search and conduct cavity searches on workers leaving the fields to ensure they have not taken any of the food they grew.
The conditions go beyond humiliation. In December, Kip Tate died at the Cummins Unit while allegedly working unsupervised on farm machinery. His daughter Kiarra, 27, had visited him every other Sunday since she was two years old.
Kiarra told Prism:
They said that the machine malfunctioned, and he got down off of the tractor to see what was going on, and he fell in. I don’t even understand how could he just fall into something? It doesn’t make sense.
The prison gave Kiarra her father’s glasses. They were among the few remains of her dad.
Men who refuse to work face solitary confinement. When workers are bitten by snakes, they are sent back to the fields with ibuprofen. Some have eaten lunch in extreme heat with little water. When people die, one incarcerated man said the response is the same: “Keep on pushing.”
A plantation economy with corporate customers
The Cummins Unit has operated as a prison farm since 1902. From its opening until the 1930s, it held only Black Americans, who were forced to pick cotton. Before that, the land was the site of two slave plantations. Arkansas codified a convict-lease system in 1873—just eight years after slavery ended—allowing companies to pay the prison to lease incarcerated workers. The workers received no compensation.
That model persists today. There are more than 660 prisons across the US with agricultural operations. Between 2019 and 2023, ADC earned more than $36 million from corporate contracts for its produce and livestock. One of its buyers is Tyson Foods—one of the largest meat processors in the world, valued at around $20 billion.
Joshua Sbicca, director of the Prison Agriculture Lab, is direct about what drives the system:
Rehabilitation can be used as a buzzword to justify really harsh prison conditions and really harsh labor conditions. In the case of [Cummins Unit], the Hoe Squad is infamous, and prisoners have been writing about their experience as akin to slavery for a really, really long time.
Amend the 13th amendment—end prison slavery now
The reason all of this is legal comes down to this: The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery—except as punishment for a crime. That exception is why Arkansas, and states like it, can force incarcerated people to work for nothing.
Eight states have now ended that exception, beginning with Colorado in 2018 and most recently Nevada in 2024. But the federal exception remains. The Abolition Amendment, led by formerly incarcerated people, would strike it from the Constitution entirely.
Freedom United has been campaigning to amend the 13th Amendment and end prison slavery once and for all. Sign the petition and demand Congress strip the legal cover that makes slavery at Cummins possible.
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