A group of current and former inmates are suing Alabama state, claiming they were forced to work at fast food restaurants, meat packing plants and even city offices for “next to nothing” while state officials took in $450 million from their “convict leasing.”
The federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday at Middle District Court, claims the prisoners were forced into “modern-day form of slavery.”
“The forced labor scheme that currently exists in the Alabama prison system is the modern reincarnation of the notorious ‘convict leasing’ system that replaced slavery after the Civil War,” said Janet Herold, legal director of Justice Catalyst Law.
Under the scheme, the class action suit alleges, the prisoners “are forced to work, often for little or no money, for the benefit of the numerous government entities and private businesses that ‘employ’ them.
“They live in a constant danger of being murdered, stabbed or raped that is so profound that the federal government has sued Alabama for inflicting ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ and if they refuse to work, the State punishes them even more,” the suit says. “They are trapped in this labor trafficking scheme.”
Plaintiffs named in the suit said they were forced to work for McDonald’s, KFC, Wendy’s and Burger King franchises, as well as meat processors and even local Anheuser-Busch distributors.
It also names the City of Montgomery, the City of Troy and Jefferson County as agencies that have benefited from inmate labor.
In fact, since 2018, 575 private employers and over 100 public employers have “leased” labor from the state prisons, according to the lawsuit.
At these jobs, the suit claims, inmates are not allowed to refuse work or protest their dangerous work conditions or the long hours.
It also alleges that if prisoners do not comply, they risk being “put behind the wall” in one of the “higher-security ultra-violent facilities.”
Meanwhile, the State Department of Corrections takes 40% of an inmate’s gross earnings, claiming it is “to assist in defraying the cost of his/her incarceration,” the suit says.
The 129-page complaint goes even further, by arguing it’s “no accident” that the people “caught in a labor-trafficking scheme” are black, comparing them to “individuals who were enslaved and forced to participate in the sharecropping and ‘convict leasing’ schemes that followed the end of the Civil War.”
It notes that while 26.8% of Alabama’s population identifies as black or African American, double that percentage compromises the black incarcerated population.
As of September, the complaint says, 1,374 incarcerated people were enrolled in the program.
Among those named in the suit are Lakiera Walker, who alleges she was forced to perform long hours of uncompensated work “upon threat of discipline” in a series of jobs, including housekeeping, stripping floors, providing care for mentally disabled or other ill incarcerated people, unloading chemical trucks, working inside freezers and at Burger King.
She was paid just $2 a day and was subjected to sexual harassment by supervising officers, she claims.
When she was severely ill and could not work, a supervisor allegedly told her to “get up and go make us our 40%.”
“These women need help. They really need a voice,” Walker told Law & Crime of her decision to sue.
“I knew I had to do something,” she said. “I want justice for this forced labor.”
Robert Earl Council, an incarcerated activist who co-founded the Free Alabama Movement — which helped organize a nationwide strike among imprisoned people in 2016 — also says he was “subject to severe and abusive treatment in retaliation for advocating that incarcerated persons refuse to submit to forced labor.”
He allegedly had to spend more than eight years in solitary confinement.
“Alabama seems to be addicted to cheap labor,” he told Law & Crime.
“Each corporation, each fast food company — anybody who participates and has their hand in their cookie jar with the Alabama Department of Corrections — you’re guilty of slavery,” Council asserted.
“You are a slave master.”
A third plaintiff, Arthur Charles Promey Jr., even claims he was denied parole in 2022, when the Department of Corrections allegedly told his family it was because “he was fired from KFC in 2019” — despite the KFC manager writing “a letter to the Parole Board specifically recommending him to parole in light of his strong work performance.”
Some of the more trustworthy prisoners perform unpaid tasks that keep the prison running so prison administrators could dedicate their limited staff to other functions, Almireo English claimed.
“Why would the slave master, by his own free will, release men on parole who aid and assist them in making their paid jobs easier and carefree?” English asked.
The plaintiffs now argue that the Alabama Department of Corrections, as well as over two dozen state officials — including Gov. Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall are violating the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
They also claim that Alabama’s practices are illegal under both the Alabama and the US constitutions and are asking a court to award them compensatory and punitive damages.
Plaintiffs also include two labor unions, who argue the supply of inmate labor puts downward pressure on wages for all workers and interferes with a union’s ability to organize.
The Alabama Department of Corrections declined to comment on pending litigation.
The Post has also reached out to Gov. Kay Ivey’s and Attorney General Steve Marshall’s offices for comment.
But the state has previously maintained that prisons’ work release jobs prepare inmates for life after incarceration.
With Post wires