A year after they filed a federal lawsuit to end “a modern-day form of slavery,” the plaintiffs representing prisoners in Alabama and their advocates are pushing for reforms in how the state governs the work that incarcerated people do for extremely low pay inside and outside of prison walls, which they call illegally “forced labor.”
The complaint filed by ten men and women prisoners and three labor unions in December of 2023 contends that state officials, the prison and parole systems, and hundreds of municipal and private employers are knowingly forcing prisoners to work in difficult conditions at substantially lower pay than “free” workers, and conspiring to keep them locked up by reducing their access to parole.
Black inmates fare the worst in this system, they argue.
“Labor coerced from Alabama’s disproportionately Black incarcerated population is the fuel that fires ADOC’s [Alabama Department of Corrections’] extremely lucrative profit-making engine,” the complaint says.
The lawsuit challenges the reliance by many state prison systems on the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except for people convicted of crimes.
In 2022, Alabama voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that eliminates that exception, as have voters in eight U.S. states.
The complaint notes that many prisoners in Alabama earn nothing for work performed inside prisons, such as housekeeping and maintenance work, while others are paid only two dollars a day by local governments for work such as mowing lawns and picking up trash on busy roadways.
Prisoners hired by private employers contracting with the state often receive the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour for labor including flipping burgers, warehouse work and manufacturing car parts, with no control over where they work or for how many hours a day.
The state then takes a cut of up to 40 percent of their gross pay, and tacks on more fees for transporting prisoners to their jobs and laundering their work clothes.
The complaint argues that labor by prisoners in Alabama is coerced and not voluntary, as prisoners can be and often are punished for refusing to work or complaining about their working conditions. Some have been put in solitary confinement, lost years of accrued “good time” off their sentences, or were transferred to higher security prisons or more violent areas of prisons when either government employers or private employers reported to the Department of Corrections that they wouldn’t or didn’t work as required.
A state lawsuit filed on behalf of five more Alabama prisoners in May brought into sharper focus how changes to parole board operations through both executive orders and a new law signed by Gov. Kay Ivey in 2019 are impacting Black inmates, who are allowed to work in public-facing jobs such as McDonald’s and KFC restaurants, but are increasingly deemed by the state too dangerous to be released.
Both lawsuits claim that the Alabama pardon and parole system violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by disproportionately denying the release of Black inmates as compared to white inmates.
In 2018, the parole grant rates by race were about the same: 50.7 percent of Black candidates and 54.4 percent of white candidates were approved for parole. By 2023, white parole candidates were more than twice as likely to be granted parole as Black candidates, according to the federal complaint.
The total number of parole approvals also plummeted during that time. In 2018, 54 percent of parole applications were approved. By 2023, the overall parole approval rate fell to just 8 percent. According to the board’s data, in fiscal year 2023, there were 3,583 parole hearings. Just 297 paroles were granted, reported al.com.
What changed? Since 2015, Alabama had relied on the Ohio Risk Assessment System, an objective, data-based system for assessing parole applications that took into account an offender’s behavior while incarcerated, as well as their socioeconomic background, peer groups, family support and job prospects. The new system was part of the Justice Reinvestment Act (JRA) passed by the Alabama legislature to relieve prison overcrowding and to reduce spending on corrections operations.
In 2019, a new state law, HB380, restructured the pardons and paroles system and revised the process for early parole consideration, emphasizing public safety as a factor in releasing prisoners, according to the Alabama Political Reporter. Ivey and state Attorney General Steve Marshall told the parole board that parole should now be denied to applicants who had been convicted of a violent crime.
The plaintiffs argue that the governor, attorney general and parole board members “agreed to and did in fact abandon the objective, evidence-based framework required by the JRA.” As of August 2023, the parole board had followed the parole guidelines’ recommendation only 6 percent of the time, the complaint says.
The new ad hoc risk assessment system is disproportionately impacting Black inmates, regardless of their work histories, conduct in prison and demonstrated low propensity for violence, the lawsuit claims.
Arthur Ptomey, 58, one of ten current and former prisoners among plaintiffs in the federal class-action case, told The Associated Press he was denied parole in 2022 after losing his job as a cook at KFC, where he had complained about low wages. He has worked at various private work-release jobs over the past six years, and currently works at Progressive Finishes, which serves as a supplier to auto companies including Honda, General Motors and Ford.
“For a lot of these jobs, the attitude is the same,” said Ptomey while on a 48-hour home pass at his mother’s house. “If you don’t meet our expectations, we’ll just call for somebody else. I’m grateful to come out and work, but I ain’t come in here to be a slave.”
Many prisoners work 40 hours a week outside their facilities and then get weekend passes allowing them to go home without any supervision or electronic monitoring, AP reported. So when prisoners are told they’re too dangerous to be permanently released, it looks like “another way to create a cheap labor force that is easily exploited and abused,” said Chris England, an Alabama lawmaker pushing for reform of the state’s criminal justice system.
“You have no choice” about where to work, said Carlos Anderson, 43, a prisoner who works in a day-labor program for auto-part supplier Ju-Young in a plant outside Montgomery, according to The New York Times. He has served 15 years of a 20-year sentence for a marijuana trafficking conviction in 2009 and has been leased out to Ju-Young, which makes fenders for Hyundai, for about a year, earning $12 an hour before state prison system deductions.
“If you don’t,” said Anderson, “they’re going to send you back to camp and you get rolled up with a disciplinary charge,” which either prolongs incarceration or results in being made to work without pay at prison facilities.
In 2024 AP analyzed 24 years of Alabama corrections department monthly statistics to calculate the amount of money generated via contracts with private companies and deductions from prisoners’ paychecks.
It found that more than 500 businesses, including Best Western, Budweiser and Burger King, lease incarcerated workers from Alabama, which has one of the most violent, overcrowded and unruly prison systems in the U.S.. That cheap, reliable labor force has generated more than $250 million for the state since 2000 through money garnered from prisoner paychecks.
Alabama earned $13 million in work release fees in fiscal year 2024, according to AP. And the lawsuit estimates that the state corrections department receives about $450 million in benefits from prison labor annually, including money saved by not having to hire civilians to maintain the prison system or work for other government agencies.
Most jobs are inside facilities, where inmates, who are disproportionately Black, can be forced to work for free, mopping floors and doing laundry. More than 10,000 inmates have racked up a combined 17 million work hours outside Alabama’s prisons since 2018, for local governments such as the cities of Troy and Montgomery, as well as for fast food restaurants, meat-processing plants, car part manufacturers and distribution centers for major retailers such as Walmart.
Prisoner advocates don’t want the jobs outside prisons to be abolished, since they offer prisoners a chance to gain work experience, some money, and respite from the violent conditions inside prisons. But they want incarcerated workers to be paid fair wages, given choices to work without threat of punishment, and granted the same workplace rights and protections guaranteed to other American workers, including the right to complain about working conditions without reprisal.
In June, U.S. District Judge Corey Maze denied the plaintiffs’ request for an injunction to force the state to revert back to its pre-2019, race-neutral standards for parole decisions, the Political Reporter reported.
Maze found that the decline in the parole grant rate could not be directly attributed to the 2019 amendments, as the largest decline in grant rate was between fiscal year 2018 and fiscal year 2019, a period which began on Oct. 1, 2017 ended on Sept. 30, 2019. He said this made it unlikely for the plaintiffs to prove at trial that the 2019 changes constituted ex post facto punishment, which refers to criminal statutes that punish actions retroactively, thereby criminalizing conduct that was originally legal.
Regarding alleged violations of the Equal Protection Clause, Maze further wrote that while Black inmates in all four categories (convicted of violent offenses, convicted of non-violent offenses, housed in work-release facilities, housed in work-center facilities) were significantly less likely to be granted parole than white inmates, the categories and the data used by plaintiffs didn’t persuade him that the inmates being compared are “similarly situated in all material respects.”
Attorneys for the plaintiffs said the ruling “lays out a clear roadmap” to gather more evidence to prove to the court that “Alabama’s parole board since 2020 has denied parole and extended sentences compared to any point in the last 50 years, and specifically and intentionally denied parole to Black Alabamians.”
“The case is already having an impact on the parole board’s practices, as the board is aware of increased scrutiny,” said attorney Lauren Fairano, who is executive director of The Woods Foundation, one of the plaintiffs in the federal case.
“Since the filing of this lawsuit in December [of 2023], the parole rate has quadrupled from what it was before. It’s not where it needs to be yet, but it shows that the sunshine brought to this dark corner of Alabama’s parole board’s operation is starting to work.”
The lawsuit and the media attention it has generated may also have influenced some private employers who have opted out of partnering with Alabama Department of Corrections and other state prison systems for inmate labor this year.
McDonald’s, Trader Joe’s, Cargill’s and other companies either cut ties with correctional departments or indicated they were in the process of doing so, AP reported.
A Hyundai spokesman told The New York Times that it was against company policy to employ prison labor directly and that it “does not condone or tolerate violations of labor law,” and mandates that its suppliers and business partners “strictly adhere to the law” and do not source parts made with the use of “forced labor.”
Hyundai declined to say whether the labor of work-release inmates constituted “forced labor,” the Times reported.
In September a judge dismissed the state lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of five Alabama prisoners who have allegedly been punished or threatened with punishment for not working within Alabama prisons or for public or private employers that contract with corrections department. The judge ruled that the court “lacks subject-matter jurisdiction due to sovereign immunity,” which protects local governments from lawsuits.
In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, besides the claims of immunity, an assistant attorney general for Alabama had argued that unpaid labor at prison facilities constituted “mandatory chores,” not slavery and involuntary servitude.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the state case appealed to the Alabama Civil Court of Appeals in November.
“The trial court got it wrong — the law is clearly on our clients’ side, and their case should be allowed to go forward,” said Jessica Vosburgh, senior staff attorney at the center, in a statement. “The Alabama courts must rise to their obligation to enforce the state constitution’s command that ‘No form of slavery shall exist in this state; and there shall not be any involunary servitude.’ No exceptions.”
Meanwhile, Judge Maze has yet to rule on multiple defendants’ motions to dismiss the federal lawsuit.
