A prison farm or work camp is a large correctional facility where penal labor convicts are put to economical use in a 'farm' (in the wide sense of a productive unit), usually for manual labour, largely in open air, such as in agriculture, logging, quarrying, etc. Its historical equivalent on a very large scale was called a penal colony.
The agricultural goods produced by prison farms are generally used primarily to feed the prisoners themselves and other wards of the state (residents of orphanages, asylums, etc.), and secondarily, to be sold for whatever profit the state may be able to obtain.
In addition to being forced to labor directly for the government on a prison farm or in a penal colony, inmates may be forced to do farm work for private enterprises by being farmed out through the practice of convict leasing to work on private agricultural lands or related industries (fishing, lumbering, etc.). The party purchasing their labor from the government generally does so at a steep discount from the cost of free labor.
Depending on the prevailing doctrine on judicial punishment and penal harm, psychological and/or physical cruelty may be a conscious intent of prison farm labor, and not just an inevitable but unintended collateral effect.
Convicts may also be leased or enslaved for non-agricultural work, either directly to state entities, or to private industry. For example, prisoners may make license plates under contract to the state Department of Motor Vehicles, or may perform data processing for outside firms. However, these practices tend to be referred to as prison industries rather than prison farming.
Read more about Prison Farm: Legal Framework, Scope, In Fiction, See Also
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of canyoned traffic . . . Confronting the Exchange,
Surviving in a world of stocks,—”
—Hart Crane (1899–1932)
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)