A storm loomed when Alabama inmate Jake Jones, serving 20 years for armed robbery, was assigned to drive six fellow prisoners to jobs at manufacturers supplying companies like Home Depot and Wayfair. It didn’t matter that Jones had escaped or that he had failed two drug and alcohol tests while in lockup. The rain was heavy when Jones was driving back to the work release center. The speeding van hit a dip and swerved on the wet pavement, slamming into a tree, killing two men and critically injuring Jones. “They knew he had a propensity to drink,” said Shawn Wasden, who survived. “And they put him behind the wheel of a van anyway.” No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private firms than Alabama, the Associated Press reports. With a sprawling labor system dating back 150 years — including the brutal convict leasing era that replaced slavery — it has built a template for commercializing mass incarceration.
Best Western, Bama Budweiser and Burger King are among 500 businesses to lease incarcerated workers from one of the most violent, overcrowded and unruly U.S. prison systems. The cheap, reliable labor force has generated $250 million for the state since 2000 garnished from prisoners’ paychecks. Most jobs are inside lockups, where inmates — who are disproportionately Black — can be sentenced to hard labor and forced to work for free doing everything from mopping floors to laundry. More than 10,000 inmates have logged a combined 17 million work hours outside prison walls since 2018, for entities like city and county governments and businesses that range from car-part manufacturers and meat-processing plants to distribution centers for major retailers like Walmart. Those inmates can earn money, but they face possible punishment if they refuse, from being denied family visits to being sent to dangerous higher-security prisons. Though they make at least $7.25 an hour, the state takes 40% off the top of all wages and levies fees, including $5 a day for rides to their jobs and $15 a month for laundry. 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. So when prisoners are then told they’re too dangerous to be permanently released, a state legislator said it looks like “another way to create a cheap labor force that is easily exploited and abused.” Alabama’s lockups are chronically understaffed. It’s not unusual for prisoners to work outside their facilities without state oversight.
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