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In the back of a nondescript industrial park on the outskirts of Montgomery, Ala., past the corner of Eastern Boulevard and Plantation Way, there is a manufacturing plant run by Ju-Young, a car-part supplier for Hyundai. On a Tuesday in May, about half of the workers there — roughly 20 — were prisoners.
They were contracted to the company by the Alabama Department of Corrections as part of a “work-release” day labor program for inmates who, according to the state, have shown enough trustworthiness to work outside prison walls, alongside free citizens.
The inmates bused there by the state make up just one crop of the thousands of imprisoned people sent to work for private businesses — who risk disciplinary action if they refuse.
Sitting against a chain-link fence under the shade of a tree in the company parking lot, commiserating over small talk and cigarettes with fellow assembly workers, one of the imprisoned men, Carlos Anderson, argued that his predicament was simple. 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 face working for nothing at the prison.
Under Alabama prison rules, there are thin lines between work incentives, forced labor and “involuntary servitude” — which reforms to the Alabama Constitution in 2022 banned. From the viewpoint of Mr. Anderson and more than a dozen other Alabama inmates interviewed by The New York Times, the ultimate message, in practice, is straightforward: Do this, or else.
“You have no choice,” said Mr. Anderson, 43, who has served 15 years of a 20-year felony sentence for a marijuana trafficking conviction in 2009, and has been contracted out to Ju-Young for about a year.
“If you don’t,” he added, “they’re going to send you on back to the camp and you get rolled up with a disciplinary charge” — like denial of parole, having “good time” revoked, which prolongs incarceration, or being made to work without pay at prison facilities.
The men hanging out with Mr. Anderson in the parking lot — who live with him up the road at a low-security corrections facility for work-release-eligible inmates — nodded in agreement. Most declined to speak on the record out of fear of retaliation.
An employee at the Ju-Young plant, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Anderson’s description of the work environment for inmates, including the implicit threat of punishment, was correct. Representatives of Ju-Young did not respond to requests for comment.
Work-release inmates housed at the lower-security camps generally live in fear of being sent back to the state’s 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. A trial is expected to begin in May.
Qualifying for the lower-security prison facilities is a ticket out. And the nominal hourly wage is comparable to what the plant pays outside workers. Yet life on work-release has its own trade-offs. And the incentive system for all parties involved is clear.
Businesses get laborers who cannot organize for better pay or conditions and cannot quit without risking a greater loss of their freedom.
The Department of Corrections’ 40 percent cut of work-release workers’ pretax gross earnings — which it says is meant “to assist in defraying the cost” of incarceration — gives an estimated $450 million annual boost to state coffers, on top of the taxpayer dollars allocated to the prison system. This helps shore up the fiscal budget of the low-tax state.
Kelly Betts, a representative of the Department of Corrections, said, “The work-release programs are instrumental to the success of inmates preparing for release back into the community.”
But critics say the system perpetuates the racist legacy of “convict leasing,” which lasted in Alabama from 1875 until 1928. It forced state prisoners to do uncompensated work for private companies, which then kicked back lease payment fees to the state.
‘It’s an Illusion of Choice’
For centuries, a penal exception clause in the U.S. Constitution has played a substantial role in labor markets and prison networks. 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.” That language became the legal foundation for “convict leasing” systems across Alabama and the nation, which have been technically eliminated since the end of the Jim Crow era in the 1960s.
Prison labor, however, remains common, from California to Texas to New York, with various rules and regulation regarding pay. Across the country, state and federal prisoners earn 13 to 52 cents per hour on average, producing about $11 billion worth of goods and services each year, according to an estimate from the University of Chicago Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Unpaid labor for inmates is still allowed in Alabama and a few other states. In Alabama, unpaid internal prison work can be assigned to those who have not qualified for or been assigned to work-release: yard work, janitorial services, cooking and laundry duty. Some inmates work for state and local entities, at tasks like road maintenance, for about $2 a day — the rate Alabama set for prison laborers in 1927.
“I don’t think we have gotten rid of convict leasing,” said Darrick Hamilton, an economist and the director 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.”
During the 2022 election cycle, Alabama was one of four states that tightened their bans on involuntary servitude to remove exceptions for convicts. It is now banned without qualification.
But that has not ended the legal and philosophical battle over inmate labor.
A lawsuit filed in May by the Center for Constitutional Rights, representing people incarcerated in Alabama prisons, argued that inmates were “forced by the State of Alabama to labor against their will” and that the new state ban on involuntary servitude has rendered the current prison labor system unconstitutional.
The plaintiffs requested the nullification of an executive order and a bill signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey in 2023, saying it was “in defiance of the newly ratified constitution.” The two measures collectively tightened definitions of “good time” violations, clarified the Department of Corrections’ authority to directly revoke good-time credits for “refusal to work,” paid or unpaid, and roughly doubled the time it takes for a prisoner to build such credits.
The executive order followed an informal labor strike inside the state prison system that ended shortly after nonprofits working with the prisoners reported that strikers were facing retaliation. (The prison laborers had various demands, including the establishment of parole criteria that would mandate release from prison if met.)
In a motion in June to dismiss the lawsuit, an assistant attorney general for Alabama said unpaid labor at prison facilities constituted “mandatory chores,” reasserting that “slavery and involuntary servitude do not exist” in the state’s prison system.
“True, prisoners may have some privileges temporarily suspended for shirking their duties,” the motion said, “but the law is clear that the threat of losing a privilege does not transform normal housekeeping work into involuntary servitude.”
On Aug. 1, a judge granted the dismissal, ruling that “the court lacks subject-matter jurisdiction due to sovereign immunity” — a legal doctrine that protects governments from lawsuits without their consent.
“Our clients intend to appeal the dismissal order,” said Emily Early, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights. The group filed a notice of appeal in the Alabama Civil Court of Appeals on Sept. 9.
Separately, the center joined in sending a complaint to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on Sept. 30 that requests “immediate attention” to the “coercion” of imprisoned U.S. laborers and that calls on the body to “investigate, and visit, the Alabama Department of Corrections and Louisiana Department of Safety and Corrections.”
A ‘Question for Debate’
Several legal scholars worry that broad applications of “sovereign immunity” doctrines could make constitutional law subservient to the will of states’ governors. But some lawyers and criminologists believe that “modern slavery” arguments about prison labor remain a stretch.
“It seems like a question for debate rather than one where you caught someone doing something illegal,” said Shawn Bushway, an economist and criminologist at the RAND Corporation.
Characterizing prison work as forced labor is wrongheaded, he said, because most inmates who qualify for paid work earn that classification based on positive credits for behavior. “In other words, it’s a privilege,” he said, better than some of the other alternatives behind bars.
“And from the perspective of the inmate,” he added, “if they don’t do it, they’re going to get nothing.”
Mr. Bushway’s view is widely held among lawyers and judges throughout the country, which is why the legal path remains unclear for those who hoped that Alabama’s constitutional change would prompt immediate labor reforms.
The state court’s reasoning in its August ruling, for instance, may not bode well for a separate federal lawsuit against Alabama filed in December.
The plaintiffs in that case — current and former inmates, labor unions and a civil rights group — seek an injunction that would end “forced labor,” release inmates who they say have met parole qualifications, and require the state to end wage garnishments, allowing workers to keep what they earn working in the prison system.
The labor union plaintiffs — the Union of Southern Service Workers, the Service Employees International Union and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union — argue that the use of prison labor also undermined the legal right of unions to bargain and organize workers.
Specifically, they argue in the lawsuit that union organizing drives at corporations using prison labor were stymied by prison labor “because work-release employees could not enter into binding contracts” like free colleagues who work by their side. And they add that “not being able to represent all workers” at a given plant or other workplace depresses wages and working conditions and harms the interests of union members.
The state has moved to dismiss the federal lawsuit. A judge’s decision is pending. The Department of Corrections said it did not comment on ongoing litigation.
According to the federal lawsuit, over 100 public agencies and about 575 companies in Alabama have used imprisoned people for labor since 2018.
Along with food processors, auto parts companies are among the most prominent users of work-release prison labor in the state.
Ju-Young, which makes fenders for Hyundai Motors, is not the automaker’s only supplier reliant on prison labor. Another is SL Alabama, in Elba, which provides Hyundai with “lamp systems” — parts for high beams, brake lights and taillights.
According to the Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit, as many as 83 state inmates have worked for SL Alabama, with at least 53 working for the company in the 2023 fiscal year. As many as 97 Alabama inmates worked for Ju-Young between Jan. 1, 2018, and Sept. 7, 2023, the lawsuit said, with at least 61 working for the company in the 2023 fiscal year.
The Department of Corrections declined to provide The Times with its own estimate.
An Injury Toll
Mark Anthony Miller, 58, has served 20 years of a life sentence triggered by a “three strikes” law — for felony charges including marijuana possession, burglary and receiving stolen property. He is a contract worker for Ju-Young. Assigned to handle heavy machinery and objects, he was injured on the job in the spring, and says he now can’t sleep on his back.
“If you get hurt out here, you’re screwed,” Mr. Miller said, speaking on his break near the parking lot of a Ju-Young plant. Usually injured prisoners are told, by either correctional staff members or plant supervisors, to “get back out there and be quiet,” he said. Two other inmates, standing nearby while on their break, agreed.
Civil rights groups argue that a lack of proper medical care is common in the Alabama Department of Corrections system.
Thirty-seven Alabama inmates (not including Mr. Miller) filed an unsuccessful motion in 2022 to join the Justice Department’s lawsuit against the state prison system regarding unsafe conditions. They asserted that after the 2022 prison labor strike, inmates “became subjected to limited food provision, both in quantity and quality, and change in medication” and “medical equipment policy.”
The judge ruled that adding litigation over medical and food issues, which were not central to the 2020 lawsuit, would “unduly delay” the proceedings.
Hyundai and its suppliers faced previous scrutiny from the U.S. government over labor practices — though for child labor, not prison labor violations. In 2022, the Department of Labor ruled that three of Hyundai’s direct suppliers, including SL Alabama, had violated child labor provisions.
Still, the tension between the Alabama Constitution and Hyundai’s indirect use of prison labor has created an awkward balancing act for the company — which says in its mission statement, “We partner with like-minded suppliers to help us grow.”
Regarding the lawsuits questioning the constitutionality of Alabama prison labor, a spokesman for Hyundai told The New York Times that “while Hyundai is not a party to the lawsuits, we are aware of the allegations,” adding: “Hyundai does not condone or tolerate violations of labor law. Consistent with the standards and values to which we hold ourselves as a company, we mandate that our suppliers and business partners strictly adhere to the law, and we take reports of alleged violations very seriously.”
The spokesman added that it was against company policy to employ prison labor directly but said that “employment decisions are up to the suppliers as long as they adhere to the law and our supplier code of conduct.”
That Hyundai code of conduct dictates that “suppliers should ensure that they do not source raw materials, parts or components for their manufacturing process that are in turn manufactured, at any point in their supply chain, directly or indirectly, with the use of forced labor.”
The company spokesman declined to comment on whether Ju-Young or SL Alabama might be in violation of that internal code in the company’s view, or whether the labor of work-release inmates constituted “forced labor.” But he added that Hyundai planned to avoid prison labor in the supply chain for its “metaplant” in Georgia for electric vehicles and E.V. batteries, which was announced in 2022 and began production this month.
Like Ju-Young, SL Alabama did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, the White House declined to comment in detail on pending legal cases, but expressed concern about Alabama’s prison labor networks as they were presented in the state and federal lawsuits.
“These reports are alarming and we strongly condemn any use of involuntary labor,” a White House spokeswoman said.
Incentives and Alternatives
Mr. Bushway, the economist and criminologist at RAND, said a demonstrated history of reliable work in prison can help “lead to better outcomes” including improved employment prospects if they are released.
But he added that “there is a potential for corruption and abuse.”
He noted that Alabama had a multimillion-dollar economic incentive to keep inmates working and earning the state a 40 percent share of their gross pay, and a possible disincentive to grant parole to those up for release.
The upside for private companies is also not lost on the imprisoned.
“It’s beneficial for the employer, for sure,” said George Garth, 41, an inmate who works in quality control for Ju-Young. “Whatever they put you on, you’re pretty much stuck on.”
Mr. Garth dislikes the system but said that at times he felt fortunate because “guys in the facility” — those without work-release status — “make nothing at all.” He has served 14 years on a robbery conviction and is due for release in 2030.
Will Tucker, the Southern director at Jobs to Move America in Birmingham — a pro-labor group that has been documenting the prison labor system — concedes that prison labor is not without nuance, and says his group is in favor of reforming it, not banning it.
Several reform groups agree that expanding options for prisoners could make for a more humane system. More choices between work and participation in education and rehabilitative programs could be offered to eligible inmates in some states, for instance.
But broadly, Mr. Tucker argues, the for-profit system in most jurisdictions using work-release programs, in which “corporations get access to a labor force that is easy to coerce,” is an inappropriate “sweetheart deal for employers.”
The companies contracting prison labor “should commit to hiring practices with strong protections against exploitation,” he said.
What that would look like in practice underscores some of the social tensions surrounding prison labor. Unwinding a profitable enterprise at taxpayer expense tends to be unpopular in any state.
In 2022, the California Department of Finance announced that paying minimum wage to inmates would cost taxpayers an estimated $1.5 billion a year. Elected officials balked. A proposal to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot to ban involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime failed in the State Senate.
It was a reminder of the struggle communities across America have as they balance competing concerns: the allocation of public money, cost savings for consumers and companies, and the ideals encoded — with some exceptions — in the law.
Read by Talmon Joseph Smith
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.
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