Alabama voters banned prison slavery — but prisoners say it hasn’t stopped

As a lawsuit tries to stop a forced prison labor program, a beer distributor is defending its own participation.

By Shaun Traywick, Truthout

Alabama voters already made their decision. They banned slavery. Now it’s time for the courts — and the corporations — to honor that decision. Credit: Ayo Walker/Truthout

In 2022, Alabama became one of the first states in the nation to ban slavery without exception. A constitutional amendment, passed overwhelmingly by voters, removed language that had long allowed involuntary servitude to continue in state prisons — a holdover from the 13th Amendment’s infamous “exception clause.” The 13th Amendment, though widely celebrated at the time for abolishing most forms of slavery, still allows for involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime, and has remained the legal backbone for the vast system of prison labor in the U.S., where incarcerated people can be compelled to work under threat of punishment.

In Alabama, that legal framework is now gone. The new constitution is clear: slavery and involuntary servitude are banned in all forms, period.

And yet, the practice continues.

Incarcerated people in Alabama are still being forced to work, in part through “work release” programs where refusal can mean being sent to solitary confinement, transferred to more dangerous prisons, or denied parole. Some are punished not for choosing not to work, but for being unable to work — because of disability, injury, or chronic illness. In some cases, people are removed from work release without explanation, and when they seek to be reassigned or evaluated medically, they are told they are “noncompliant” or “refusing.” The punishment is the same.

It’s against this backdrop that a group of incarcerated workers filed an ongoing federal lawsuit in December 2023, challenging Alabama’s continued use of forced prison labor. Their claims go far beyond the state’s constitutional ban on slavery. The lawsuit also invokes the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), which prohibits labor obtained through coercion, and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 — a Reconstruction-era statute designed to combat racially motivated abuses by government officials. The suit further alleges that Alabama’s overly harsh and racist parole policies trap Black people in prisons for years beyond when they have proven ready for release, as part of a plan to keep large numbers of workers enrolled in forced, off-site work release. Together, the claims argue that Alabama’s prison labor system is not only unconstitutional, but part of a broader pattern of racial discrimination, corruption, and systemic violence.

The plaintiffs allege they are “entrapped in a system of ‘convict leasing’ in which incarcerated people are forced to work, subject to threats of physical violence, deprivation of bare necessities, and threat of extended imprisonment, for little or no money, to the significant benefit of the numerous government entities and private businesses that ‘employ’ them.”

The lead plaintiff, who goes by Kinetik Justice, has faced years of retaliation for creating the Free Alabama Movement, through which he encourages incarcerated people to strike and engage in other nonviolent refusal to work. In the complaint, Justice alleges that after helping organize a 2014 strike, he faced retaliation, including “years of solitary confinement, torture, taking away his personal and legal documents and records, beatings and transfers to prevent him from speaking about Alabama’s forced labor system.”

Another plaintiff, Lakiera Walker, who was incarcerated from 2007 to 2023, alleges that for years she was forced to work long, daily hours of unpaid physical labor in the prison, under threat of solitary confinement. She subsequently conducted road work for the county, for which she was paid $2 per day. When a work supervisor demanded sex, Walker refused and reported him to the prison. In response, she alleges prison officials issued her a disciplinary offense for purportedly refusing to work and sent her back to unpaid work in the prison.

During the final years of her incarceration — including after the 2022 state constitutional amendment banned forced labor — Walker was sent on work release to off-site, private companies, including one where she regularly worked 12-hour shifts inside freezers without adequate work clothes. The Alabama prison system keeps 40 percent of people’s work release pay, and charges them additional fees like $5 per day for van rides to work and $15 per month for laundry. Once, when Walker was so ill she had to be carried to the healthcare unit, she says a prison job placement officer told her to “get up and go make us our 40%.”

Last year, the judge initially dismissed the case without prejudice, allowing the plaintiffs to amend their complaint. But the early ruling made something else clear: the court has yet to grasp the full extent of what is happening inside Alabama’s prisons — the coercion masked as corrections, the public-private partnerships that treat incarcerated bodies as profit centers, and the near-constant threat of physical violence used to enforce compliance.

The defendants include the commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, top officials in the Alabama Bureau of Pardons and Paroles, and several private corporations that profit from this labor. One of those companies is Bama Budweiser, a distributor operating under the Budweiser name.

In its March 2024 legal response to the allegations, Bama Budweiser does not meaningfully address the constitutional issue — whether Alabama’s prison labor system violates the state’s explicit ban on slavery. Instead, the company’s brief resorts to a series of dehumanizing attacks and dangerous arguments that seek to delegitimize the plaintiffs themselves.

The brief opens by arguing that the plaintiffs “never worked for Bama Budweiser,” and therefore the claims should be dismissed. This, of course, ignores that the company has contracted with ADOC to knowingly obtain and benefit from the labor of incarcerated workers. But Bama Budweiser’s response then quickly shifts into something much darker. In one of the most inflammatory passages, the company writes:

“What we have, then, are two murderers, an attempted murderer, multiple violent felons, robbers, burglars, and drug dealers. And they come into this Court complaining about having to work for a beer distributor.”

This is not a legal defense. It’s a moral judgment — one that seeks to strip incarcerated people of constitutional protection by appealing to public fear and disgust. The clear implication is that some people do not deserve rights. That their labor can be taken. That their bodily autonomy is irrelevant.

Elsewhere in the brief, Bama Budweiser points back to the previous version of the Alabama Constitution that provided an exception legalizing slavery for people in prison, which seems to suggest that the amendment — passed in 2022 by 76 percent of Alabama voters — banning slavery and involuntary servitude for all, without exception, should never have passed. They dismiss media reports of inhumane prison conditions as unreliable “hearsay,” and mock the idea that enforcing labor rules against incarcerated people might ever rise to the level of coercion.

This is a photograph of the entrance of Red Eagle Prison Honor Farm in Montgomery, Alabama. Photo: SaveRivers/Wikimedia Commons.

All of this is done under the brand name of Budweiser — a company that, in recent years, has styled itself as a champion of inclusion and human dignity. Its parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, has released national advertisements promoting LGBTQ+ rights, immigrant narratives, and “American values.” They have called themselves proud allies of “marginalized communities.”

But in this brief, filed in a federal court in Alabama, a place where marginalized communities are plentiful, a distributor making use of the company’s name is sending an unambiguous message: people in prison are not worthy of dignity. Not worthy of labor protections. Not worthy of constitutional enforcement.

The dissonance is staggering.

That’s why I’m calling on Anheuser-Busch InBev to go on the record. If they believe, as they say, in human dignity and freedom, they must disavow this brief. They must state clearly whether they support the position their distributor has taken — that the constitutional ban on slavery does not apply to people behind bars.

Because silence here is not neutrality. It’s complicity.

This isn’t a theoretical debate. I’ve been incarcerated in Alabama since 2006, and I’ve spent years in solitary confinement — not for violence or escape, but for speaking out against forced labor. Since 2016, I’ve helped organize work strikes, exposed illegal retaliation, and insisted that every person behind these walls deserves the right to refuse labor without facing abuse.

That’s not “insubordination.” That’s autonomy. That’s freedom. Those in prison have lost nearly everything, but under the U.S. Constitution we still have the right to say no to bodily abuse and exploitation. And the fact that such basic assertions of bodily integrity are met with punishment shows just how far this system has strayed from anything resembling rehabilitation.

People in prison are disciplined for refusing to work even when they are mentally or physically unable to perform the assigned task. There are men here with untreated injuries, degenerative conditions, serious mental illness — and still, refusal is met with sanctions. Write-ups. Lost parole dates. Transfers to higher-security prisons. Extended time in cages.

That is not a job. That is coercion. That is slavery — rebranded for the 21st century.

The question before the court is whether this system is legal under Alabama’s new constitution. But the question before the public is even more urgent: will we allow companies to profit from forced labor, while branding it “corrections”? Will we let corporate lawyers rewrite the meaning of abolition from inside federal courtrooms?

Alabama voters already made their decision. They banned slavery. Now it’s time for the courts — and the corporations — to honor that decision.

Anheuser-Busch can’t have it both ways. If they stand for justice, they must say so. If not, their name will remain attached to a defense that argues — in plain terms — that the right to be free from slavery does not belong to everyone.

The stakes could not be clearer. And neither could the line that’s been crossed.

This article was supported by the Ridgeway Reporting Project, managed by Solitary Watch with funding from the Vital Projects Fund and the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation.

This article was originally published in Truthout. Truthout is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to providing independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues.