The plaintiffs, who are all Black, are current and former Alabama prisoners. They say prisoners are forced to work for about $2 an hour, sometimes $2 a day, and are often denied parole in order to keep supplying cheap labor to private businesses and local governments.

More from The New York Times:

According to the lawsuit, the system effectively resurrects Alabama’s notorious practice of “convict leasing,” in which Black laborers, from 1875 until 1928, were forced to work for private companies, who in turn paid substantial fees to state and county governments.

Since 2018, about 575 companies and more than 100 public agencies in Alabama have used incarcerated people as landscapers, janitors, drivers, metal fabricators and fast-food workers, the lawsuit states, reaping an annual benefit of $450 million.

“They are trapped in this labor trafficking scheme,” the lawsuit states. “Although they are trusted to perform work for the state, local governments, and a vast array of private employers, some of the same people who profit from their coerced labor have systematically shut down grants of parole.”

Plaintiff and former Alabama prisoner Lakiera Walker provided details to The Washington Post that sure sound like slavery to me:

She described a “job board” at the prison where work would be assigned. “There is no way around going to the job board,” she said. “If you don’t go [to work], you’ll go into solitary.”

So she worked long hours, typically seven days a week, she says. Her jobs inside the prison included uncompensated work stripping floors, helping in the prison’s hospice unit and unloading chemical trucks, according to the complaint. A work release program landed her with a job in industrial freezers and later at Burger King, where she served burgers alongside teenagers and other free “civilians.”

To take a sick day, “you had to go through the officers, and it was like you’re taking money out of their wallet if you didn’t go to work that day,” Walker said in an interview.

HuffPost noted that last year, “thousands of the state’s incarcerated workers went on strike to protest inhumane living conditions and the low parole release rate of about 10%.” Shortly afterward, Alabamans voted to amend the constitution to eradicate involuntary servitude. “The measure was a landslide success, with 76% voting in support,” HuffPost reported. “But in the year since, Alabama’s prison labor practices have remained in place.”