A new federal lawsuit claims inmates inside Alabama prisons are the victims of a “labor-trafficking scheme” that denies them parole and forces them to work in fast food establishments.
The complaint was filed on Dec. 12, according to NPR, and includes 10 men and women as plaintiffs. The lawsuit “seeks to abolish a modern-day form of slavery” and claims the prison-forced labor scheme generates $450 million annually for the state.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall are named in the suit. A beer distributor and several fast food companies, including KFC, Wendy’s, Burger King, and McDonald’s. Bama Budweiser, a distributor of Anheuser-Busch products, Gemstone Foods and Koch Foods are also defendants.
The plaintiffs claim that the restaurants and companies named in the suit received a steady supply of inmates through “convict leasing” while the prison earned percent 40 percent of the inmates’ gross earnings by deducting fees from their wages.
Roughly 20 percent of their earnings was also taken for federal and state taxes with more garnishment for medicine, doctors visits, or “high prices charged to buy a sandwich from the canteen or snack line upon returning to the ADOC facility after a long shift outside of normal eating hours.”
The lawsuit also notes that the plaintiffs are Black and are “treated 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 lawsuit also notes that the state incarcerates a grossly disproportionate number of Black men and women in its prisons and compares it to the racial subjugation perpetuated before and after the Civil War. According to the Alabama Appleseed Center, Black inmates account for 56 percent of the state’s prison population despite them only being 27 percent of the population in Alabama….
Read the full article here
