Denver Post -- David Harsanyi and Prisoners on Farms

This was so good I had to post the whole thing..

By David Harsanyi

Have you heard about this brilliant proposal to allow state prison inmates to work as farmhands?

Prison officials claim that the plan would offer local farmers the help they need while teaching inmates new beneficial real-world skills.

The first question that comes to my mind is this: Why are farmers the only ones being offered this magnificent new opportunity?

For instance, there's plenty of grunt work to be done around the Harsanyi household. An offender could learn the priceless skill of alphabetizing an eclectic CD collection or opening a bottle of Guinness with nothing more than a butter knife.

Surely you have your own pressing needs. An extra pair of hands can never hurt. I mean, if government is giving out slaves and all.

If this preposterous plan hatched by state Rep. Dorothy Butcher, D-Pueblo, and endorsed by new Colorado corrections executive director Ari Zavaras moves forward, the state would be creating a workforce that would be paid an arbitrary income, determined by farmers and government rather than the market.

By "arbitrary," I mean "cheap."

What's most bizarre about the plan is that the inmates would be bailing out farmers who find themselves in this predicament because - more than likely - they've been breaking the law for decades.

Listen to their complaint: Farmers maintain that immigrants have been scared away from working in Colorado - and crops have been left to rot in the fields - because of harsh new immigration laws. What they mean, of course, is that illegal immigrants have been scared away because of enforcement.

As a person who believes in a remarkably liberal immigration policy, I'd like to see those migrants return to work in Colorado. Then again, I'd like to see polygamy and hashish made legal. Sadly, we don't choose the laws we follow.

Farmers are grousing about how tough life is now that immigration policy is sporadically enforced. I hope they weren't under the impression that using illegal immigrants to pick tomatoes was legal before last year.

Though you do have to begrudgingly admire a farmer who not only has the chutzpah to complain that he can't break the law anymore ... but actually goes out and finds a state representative to help circumvent the market price for labor by unearthing some poor schmoes willing to work for the same low price.

If a business struggles to find employees at a certain pay rate, don't they offer more dough? And if paying that amount puts a company in the red, doesn't the owner come to the conclusion that the business is no longer viable?

If you're a farmer, I suppose, you just ask for more subsidies.

At the very least, Colorado should allow other industries to bid on the services of these inmates. See who brings in the best price. Surely, busboy and landscaping concerns would be interested.

Since I enjoy peppers and tomatoes as much as the next guy, I will beseech Colorado's congressional delegation - specifically Tom Tancredo - to confront this shortage of workers and come up with a munificent guest-worker program that allows the movement of people and products across our borders.

But until Tancredo gets that done, I have some alternative suggestions for inmates. Why not use this labor force in the public sector?

This way, we could save Colorado taxpayers millions of dollars and teach inmates the vital skill of doing shoddy work at an excruciatingly slow pace.

Off the top of my head, I've compiled a short list of some tasks that inmates could help us with:

Shoveling snow.

Mowing lawns.

Filling in potholes.

Collecting garbage.

Sifting out my recyclables.

Manning the 311 line.

Sure, it'll be somewhat awkward with security officers with shotguns milling about, but I'm sure you'd be willing to live with it.