With the foreign workers who have long done the dirty work in Maryland's seafood industry held up by red tape, desperate owners of the Eastern Shore's processing plants are investigating a new source of crab pickers: state prisoners.
This week, 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.
A 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.
Logistics could stand in the way. 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.
But Maryland law would allow it; inmates already do jobs that include making furniture and butchering meat in the state's prisons.
"Picking crabs is not rocket science," said Jack Brooks, who owns the J.M. Clayton Co. processing facility in Cambridge. Experience helps though, he said. "The quality has to be perfect - no shell."
Still, he said, 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."
"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," said prison system spokesman Mark Vernarelli.
At issue is finding workers willing to spend their days picking the meat from pile after pile of steamed crabs so the product can be packaged for sale in little plastic tubs.
Local women did the work for decades. But changing times meant women had opportunities for employment beyond the crab house. Few men have sought the jobs.
For more than a decade, the processors have relied on workers from Mexico who travel to the Eastern Shore for six months or so to pick crabs, entering the country on H2B visas issued to foreign workers in a variety of seasonal industries. At the end of the season, they go home.
