Chinese companies are turning to cheap prison labor to stay competitive in the global exports market. At dawn the gates to the detention center open. A truck laden with several tons of freshly dug garlic bulbs enters, and disappears into the vast complex, which houses both prisoners and people awaiting trial. For three hours, there is no movement apart from the Chinese police practicing their morning drills. Then the same truck emerges from the complex, its load replaced with cloves of peeled garlic. It drives for two hours to a depot in the central-eastern town of Jinxiang — the world’s garlic capital — which packages peeled garlic for export to India, according to a worker inside the facility. Prison labor is common in China, where the law states that prisoners able to work must do so — a system known as “reform through labor.” China is home to around 2.3 million prisoners and pretrial detainees, according to the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, giving it the world’s second-largest prison population after the U.S. | 