As of May, 20 Alabama inmates worked at a car-part manufacturing plant neat Montgomery. They were contracted to the company by the Alabama Department of Corrections in a “work-release” program, having , have shown enough trustworthiness to work outside prison, reports the New York Times. Overall, thousands of state prisoners are sent to work for private businesses, and risk disciplinary action if they refuse. Inmate Carlos Anderson said he could work a 40-hour week, at $12 an hour, and keep a small fraction of that after the state charges transportation and laundry fees, and takes a 40 percent cut of pretax wages, or he could work for nothing at the prison. Under Alabama rules, there are thin lines between work incentives, forced labor and “involuntary servitude,” which the Alabama Constitution bans. Inmates say the message is do this, or else. “You have no choice,” said Anderson, 43, who has served 15 years of a 20-year term for marijuana trafficking. Inmates who don't work face possible denial of parole and, having “good time” revoked, which prolongs incarceration.
Work-release inmates at lower-security camps fear being sent back to more dangerous medium- and high-security prisons. The U.S. Justice Department sued the Alabama Department of Corrections in 2020, accusing it of unsafe conditions of confinement, failing to protect prisoners from violence, excessive force by guards, overcrowding and understaffing. Qualifying for lower-security prison facilities is a ticket out. The incentive system is clear. Businesses get laborers who cannot organize for better pay or conditions and cannot quit without risking a greater loss of freedom. Critics say the system perpetuates the racist legacy of “convict leasing” in Alabama from 1875 to 1928. It forced prisoners to do uncompensated work for private firms, which kicked back lease payment fees to the state. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” “I don’t think we have gotten rid of convict leasing,” said Darrick Hamilton of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at the New School. “The very nature of people profiting from prisoners is related to convict leasing. It’s an illusion of choice — there’s no real consent that they can offer.” A lawsuit filed in May for inmates by the Center for Constitutional Rights argued that the state forces inmates "to labor against their will” and that the state ban on involuntary servitude made the prison labor system unconstitutional.