In the back of a nondescript industrial park on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama, past the corner of Eastern Boulevard and Plantation Way, there is a manufacturing plant run by Ju-Young, a car-part supplier for Hyundai Motors. 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% 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.”

“You have no choice,” said 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.

The men hanging out with 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 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% 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.

Inmate labor fight

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.

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 had 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.

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.”

‘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 Corp.

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.

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.

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,” Miller said, speaking on his breakt. 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 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.

Regarding the lawsuits questioning the constitutionality of Alabama prison labor, a spokesperson for Hyundai told the 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 spokesperson 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 spokesperson 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 EV 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 spokesperson said.