Hidden US prison workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands

An investigation found that goods linked to prisoners wind up in the supply chains of everything from Frosted Flakes cereal to Coca-Cola.

A hidden path to America's dinner tables begins at an unlikely source: a former Southern slave plantation that is now the country's largest maximum-security prison.

Unmarked trucks packed with prison-raised cattle roll out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, where men are sentenced to hard labor and forced to work for pennies per hour, or sometimes nothing at all. 

After rumbling down a country road to an auction house, the cows are bought by a local rancher and then brought 600 miles to a Texas slaughterhouse that feeds into the supply chains of giants like McDonald's, Walmart and Cargill.

Intricate, invisible webs like this one link some of the world's largest food companies and most popular brands to jobs performed by U.S. prisoners nationwide, according to The Associated Press' sweeping two-year investigation into prison labor that tied hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of agricultural products to goods sold on the open market.

The goods these prisoners produce wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes cereal and Ball Park hot dogs to Gold Medal flour, Coca-Cola and Riceland rice. They are on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor, like China.