It is a prison. They don't go home after their shift. Calling the cell blocks "dorms" doesn't make it not a prison.

Of course it is, obviously. No dispute there. Lets keep to the point.

That's irrelevant to the bulk of the article which tries to paint 'hard work' as an atrocity of some stripe. That's what I'm calling out.

Other people work in chicken plants without being prisoners. They want to. So the work is hard, admittedly, but not some kind of torture. Hey, the prisoners admit that freely by their actions. The article mentions the guards 'threaten' them with return to prison if they don't work. So they choose to work instead of returning to prison. It's a conscious choice, and clearly they prefer the chicken farm.

Agreed, though the threat of "going back to prison" may not just be "oh you have 3 months left, so the threat is doing those 3 months in prison".

The threat could be doing the entire sentence over. The prison sentence could be longer than the 1 year at the chicken farm. It could include loss of eligibility for deferred adjudication (wiping the record clean). And so on. There's typically strong leverage for diversion programs that's more than just "prison" or "chicken farm".