Inmates walk the halls in formation at Tutwiler Prison for Women, Sept. 23, 2013, in Wetumpka, Ala. On Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2023, current and former inmates announced a lawsuit challenging Alabama’s prison labor program as a type of “modern-day form of slavery,” saying prisoners are forced to work for little pay — and sometimes no pay — in jobs that benefit government entities or private companies. (AP Photo/Dave Martin, File)
A group of current and former Alabama prisoners filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday saying that they were forced into “a modern-day form of slavery” by working at fast-food chains for next to nothing.
The complaint, which seeks class-action certification, alleged that the prisoners “have been entrapped in a system of ‘convict leasing’ in which incarcerated people are forced to work, often for little or no money,” all while Alabama and its corporate partners reap millions in profits.
Inmates, according to the complaint, “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 plaintiffs said they are regularly forced to work at McDonald’s, KFC, Wendy’s, and Burger King franchises, Anheuser-Busch distributors, and meat processors.
The 129-page complaint alleges it is “no accident” that the people “caught in a labor-trafficking scheme” are Black, comparing it to “like individuals who were enslaved and forced to work Alabama’s cotton fields, and those forced to participate in the sharecropping and convict leasing schemes that followed the end of the Civil War.”
The complaint noted that while 26.8% of Alabama’s population identifies as Black or African American, double that percentage comprises the Black incarcerated population.
