The day after Trayveka Stanley’s mother died, she was devastated. She was having trouble coping with her loss and needed time to grieve, but her plea for a day off from her prison job at Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka, Alabama, didn’t persuade its officials.
The 32-year-old was still required to show up to work as a member of an unpaid garbage crew that emptied bagged and unbagged trash cans throughout the prison.
“My brain was stuck. I couldn’t think straight,” Stanley told Capital B over the phone, recalling that day in February. “I was 21 when I went to prison; before that, I was always working. I like to work and earn my own money — not doing this,” she added, speaking from Montgomery Women’s Facility in Montgomery.
Alabama is one of four states that in 2022 adopted measures to outlaw the unpaid, forced labor of incarcerated people. But there and in the other states, inmates and their advocates say, people are still being forced to work — often for private companies — or face punishment, effectively enslaving them.
The state is estimated to have earned “more than $450 million annually” off the backs of prison labor inside and outside of prison walls, according to a federal lawsuit filed in December.
Incarcerated people who receive pay from working jobs inside their prisons typically get less than the minimum wage, though in Alabama, and four other states, they get nothing. Currently, those who earn money receive between $0.86 to $3.45 per day, according to a report released by the Prison Policy Initiative in March. And they lack benefits such as bereavement, sick, or personal days.
Refusing to work subjects them to punishment such as solitary confinement, transfers to another prison further away from loved ones, denial of phone privileges, and loss of credit for good behavior, which prolongs their prison time.
The American Civil Liberties Union estimated that over 65% of incarcerated people across the country work. Even as advocates for prison reform have persuaded voters or lawmakers in seven states to make changes to their constitutions to prohibit forced labor, it remains prevalent.
“Practices of forced labor nearly equate to another form of sentencing that is imposed against individuals who are on the inside,” said Emily Early, an attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights based in New York. “People are not sentenced to forced labor when they go to prison. They are sentenced to time in prison and to serve that time.”
Early represents Stanley and five Black men incarcerated in prisons throughout Alabama in a lawsuit filed in May that challenges forced labor. The plaintiffs are asking a state court judge to declare unconstitutional an executive order and two policies that authorize prison officials to punish prisoners who refuse to work.
The plaintiffs also want the judge to order the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) to authorize them to work inside and outside of prison without the threat of punishment if they “cannot work or decline to do so, including for reasons such as illness or unsafe working conditions.”
Alabama’s governor, Kay Ivey, issued the contested executive order in 2022. She is named as a defendant along with John Hamm, the commissioner of the state’s Department of Corrections, who implemented the order.
A spokesperson for the ADOC directed questions about the pending litigation to the Alabama attorney general’s office. Capital B has reached out to that agency for comment and received no response.
An assistant attorney general representing Ivey and Hamm filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in June. The motion said that “slavery and involuntary servitude do not exist in the state’s prison system” and that incarcerated individuals are doing chores.
“Every able-bodied inmate contributes to the maintenance of prison facilities with mandatory chores. No prisoner’s basic rights are threatened for refusing to perform these communal tasks,” according to their motion. “True, prisoners may have some privileges temporarily suspended for shirking their duties, but the law is clear that the threat of losing a privilege does not transform normal, housekeeping work into involuntary servitude.”
Stanley and the five men on the lawsuit — Reginald Burrell, Dexter Avery, Charlie Gray, Melvin Pringle, and Ranquel Smith — say otherwise.
Convict leasing
Stanley, who is serving a 20-year sentence for first-degree robbery, has been imprisoned for nearly 11 years and has worked at “free-world jobs” — on the outside — for private employers such as Burger King, Wendy’s and McDonald’s.
Her wages ranged from $7.25 to $14 per hour, with prison officials deducting at least 40% of her pay “to assist in defraying the cost of … incarceration,” according to the lawsuit. Additionally, Stanley pays ADOC $5 per day for transportation as well as $15 per month for laundry, according to Stanley and the lawsuit.
“Even though I know I’m still incarcerated, going out for work makes me feel like I am one step closer to home,” Stanley told Capital B.
If she’s late to work or takes a later van because her schedule changed, Stanley said that she has received citations for “refusing to work/failing to check out for work.” She has been punished by having to do extra work duty at the prison such as “sweeping, mopping, and emptying cigarette butt receptacles” for no pay, according to the lawsuit.
“Forced prison labor becomes another means of controlling the bodily movement, the bodily autonomy” of Black folks, Early told Capital B. She added: “It’s just another extension of systems of exploitation and control and domination and subjugation of Black people that we have seen for centuries.”
The referendum measure that Alabama voters passed in November 2022 required, in part, for the state to remove from its constitution a provision — called the exception clause — that said incarcerated people could be forced to work and punished if they refused. That clause was used for over 50 years to justify Alabama’s lease of convicts to private companies.
Read More: Five States Are Voting Whether to Outlaw Slavery (Yep, You Read That Right)
In 1866, prison officials began brokering deals with private companies such as Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, the Sloss Iron and Steel Company, Koch, and Tyson Foods to lease incarcerated people, some of whom were sentenced — and others who weren’t — to forced labor. Alabama was the last state, in 1928, to formally end the practice. But the provision remained in the constitution until the 2022 amendment.
The same year, three other states — Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont — voted to remove or amend their state constitution’s exception clause. They joined Colorado, Nebraska, and Utah, which had already taken similar steps.
Alabama’s exception clause and those of other states were based on a similar provision in the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery except in the case of incarceration.
There also has been a push by federal lawmakers and advocates to amend the federal exception clause, found in the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. A joint resolution was proposed by Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee last June.
“To urgently stop these systemic abuses, now is the time for Congress and President [Joe] Biden to enact laws that protect incarcerated workers’ safety, health, well-being, and dignity, in state as well as federal prisons,” the Center for Constitutional Rights wrote in a statement to Congress ahead of a hearing in May on prison labor.
Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, said he took offense to the comparison of prison labor systems to slavery during the May hearing.
“There’s nothing illegal or unconstitutional about prison labor, even for little or no pay,” he said. “Nor is there anything immoral about it. Prison labor is a way for inmates to give something back to the society they wronged.”
He added that “criminals owe our society restitution. And if that means scrubbing toilets, mopping floors, or picking up the garbage, then so be it.”
The shift that voters in several states have made — agreeing to close the exception clause, especially in a Southern state like Alabama — can be seen as a testament to a slow societal shift in the perceptions of people in prison.
Twelve states introduced anti-slavery-loophole bills last year. But most failed to become laws. Bills failed in Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Only in Nevada and California will voters face the ballot measure this election cycle, according to the Abolish Slavery National Network.
In the states that have repealed or amended the exception clause, the impact on incarcerated people has been mixed. When Utah voters decided in 2020 to amend their state’s constitution, those incarcerated in Utah gained coverage under worker’s compensation insurance, according to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office. And in Utah and Nevada, which also amended its constitution in 2020, job training opportunities increased for prisoners, but the pay remained low, advocates said.
Colorado voters became the first in the country to vote to remove the exception clause from their constitution, in 2018, but it has not led to changes in labor policies within their prison system, according to a lawsuit filed by A. Mark Lamar, a Black man incarcerated in the state.
Lamar filed the lawsuit in December 2020 against the Colorado State Penitentiary, challenging its prison labor program as unconstitutional forced labor. A lower court ruled in favor of the state, saying the labor program wasn’t a form of involuntary servitude. Lamar appealed the ruling, and in August 2022 an appellate court panel dismissed his lawsuit.
Ranquel Smith, one of the plaintiffs in the Alabama lawsuit, is confined at Elmore Correctional Facility in Elmore, Alabama, according to the lawsuit.
While serving a 15-year sentence for unlawful breaking and entering a vehicle, his labor status has cost him credits for good behavior twice in his three years in Alabama prisons. His second offense was being a few minutes late to catch the van to his free-world job, the lawsuit said.
Because of that, ADOC concluded that he refused to work and took away his privileges to have a free-world job, one day of credit for good behavior, and denied him visitation access, according to the lawsuit.
Smith, 26, earned between $10 to $19 per hour at various jobs outside of prison, and like Stanley, he also had to give over 40% of his paycheck to ADOC.
Stanley has received training as a welder while in prison and has aspirations to open a sports bar and restaurant when she gets out. She said she wants to work and earn a living that can benefit her and her 13 nieces and nephews, all under 12 years old.
Back in April, Stanley woke up late for her garbage duty shift. She was given a citation and transferred to another prison. That additional citation will be turned over to the state’s parole board when she has a hearing in August and could further delay her release. Stanley’s sentence ends in November 2033. She says she has come to terms that her early release is unlikely.