Andrew Jarecki

They work at the Budweiser distributorship.

And it's all sort of under the heading of, well, this is good for the guys.

They get to get out into the community.

But it's a forced labor situation because if they don't accept those assignments...

then they're going to be punished, and they're going to be punished with long stays in solitary confinement.

They're going to be given disciplinaries so that their sentences can be extended.

They are often just beaten for that.

So it's really an extension.

I've heard you on your show talk about the Jim Crow laws, which led to convict leasing.

And what we're seeing in Alabama now, it's not like convict leasing.

It is exactly convict leasing.

They are just selling the labor of incarcerated people to industries.

For pennies on the dollar of what you would get if you had to pay people.

Yeah.

The prisoners get any money?

They get a little money.

For example, the guy you see who's driving a sanitation truck, Danny Dandridge, describes how he's getting paid $2 a day.

I think for that job, they get paid...

little bit of money and then on top of that they're charged for the cost of the van that takes them to the workplace they're charged for the uniform that they have to wear so it's sort of like they're they're kind of fees and fines that knock everything down to almost nothing and in a lot of cases the two dollars a day is a lot you know they're they're required to do lots of work unpaid

In the prisons, they do all the construction.