Corporate America Never Really Quit Forced Labor
Inmates do billions of dollars of work for companies and governments each year. A landmark lawsuit alleges many are being kept in prison because the business is just too good.
Lakiera Walker was lying in her bunk bed a year ago, sick with flu and too weak to stand, when a prison supervisor came in to chastise her for missing the afternoon van to work. Walker’s job was on an assembly line at Southeastern Meats Inc., a supermarket supplier. The 12-hour shifts on her feet in 30-some-degree cold made her body ache and turned her fingers a deep red. Southeastern Meats paid about $13 an hour for Walker’s work packaging its frozen peas and corn, but the state pocketed most of that, including two-fifths for the Alabama Department of Corrections to “assist in defraying the cost” of her incarceration.
That afternoon, a fellow inmate would need to carry Walker to a medical ward. But when the ADOC officer found her in her room, she says, her health wasn’t his concern.