Red tape leads the shortage of foreign workers who have long done the dirty work in Maryland’s seafood industry. Desperate owners of the Eastern Shore’s processing plants are investigating a new source of crab pickers: state prisoners. Members of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association toured facilities – the women’s prison in Jessup and the prerelease unit for women in Baltimore – to see whether there is a way to have inmates do the low-paying work, potentially saving one of the state’s signature industries.
It is informed that few weeks ago, corrections officials toured a pair of crab houses on Hoopers Island in Dorchester County, where the majority of the state’s crab is processed for supermarkets and restaurants. But transporting prisoners 2 1/2 hours each way every day seems too difficult, and quality-control issues could arise if crabs are shipped to Central Maryland to be picked. There also are sanitation questions that would need to be answered.
Jack Brooks, who owns the J.M. Clayton Co. processing facility in Cambridge, said that the industry needs to look at all the options and turn over every rock. The crab season’s here, and the Congress has not acted and the places can’t open. Corrections officials – who approached the processors with the idea – say the discussions are “very preliminary.”
Prison system spokesman Mark Vernarelli informed that if any inmate labor would ultimately be involved in crab picking, formal regulations and rules would have to be developed, health guidelines observed and significant logistical hurdles surmounted. Industry officials say they aren’t expecting many local residents to seek the jobs, despite the down economy and rising unemployment.
