The Alabama Solution
is Modern-Day Slavery

In Alabama, incarceration is a business—and prison labor is at its center. In pursuit of cost-cutting and profit-making, government agencies, fast food chains, and manufacturers alike have knowingly participated in and perpetuated a modern-day forced labor scheme through the state’s carceral system. Under the scheme, the state of Alabama coerces incarcerated people into working for as little as $2 per day—and sometimes nothing at all—while their parole is frequently denied or delayed to keep them on the job. Meanwhile, those on the other side of the equation are seeing an annual benefit of over $450 million.

Alabama’s forced labor scheme is ruthless and quite simple: incarcerated people must work or suffer violent consequences, and a discriminatory parole system keeps them within the system in order to further exploit their labor for the financial benefit of others. The Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) oversees one of the most brutal and deadly prison systems in the U.S. The incarcerated people within the walls of ADOC facilities can work or be beaten, sometimes to death. The imbalance in power gives employers every advantage. Forced prison laborers arrive at their worksites with the carceral boot on their necks, with no leverage to bargain or protest working terms and conditions. 

From the era of chattel slavery to the post-Civil War convict-lease system to the Jim Crow era—the state has built its economy on the back of a commodified, coerced, and racist labor system. Today’s prison labor scheme is the most recent iteration in that long history.

In December 2023, Justice Catalyst Law filed a class-action lawsuit, Council, et al. v. Ivey, et al., on behalf of current and formerly incarcerated Alabamians, two of the largest labor unions in the U.S., and a civil rights organization — who allege that Alabama operates a system in which incarcerated people are coerced into working for state and private actors under threat of violence in order to benefit government agencies and private corporations. The suit further argues that the scheme targets those with good disciplinary records, or those most eligible for parole, creating a perverse system in which incarcerated people are punished for doing everything in their power to earn their freedom.

The result is a system that deems incarcerated people too “dangerous” to be set free, but “safe” enough to work for a pittance in a fast food chain, or a poultry processing plant, or a car parts factory—all while the ADOC takes a 40% cut from their gross wages. And when those incarcerated people work for the ADOC itself inside its facilities, they work for no wages at all. Those involved benefit by $450 million annually.

The plaintiffs accuse defendants, which include Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, Attorney General Steve Marshall, and the state’s BPP, in addition to private actors like Burger King and Bama Budweiser, of violating trafficking, racketeering, and equal protection laws, among others.

The lawsuit takes a big swing at the system. Unprecedented in its scope and aim, it connects the dots between the physical and psychological violence of Alabama’s carceral system, and the financial exploitation of a disproportionately Black incarcerated population. It aims to dismantle Alabama’s forced labor scheme and return all profits to incarcerated individuals. The stakes are life and death, and the results could set a precedent not just for Alabama but the rest of the nation.