Despite Unemployment Spike, Alabama Refuses Prisoners Work-Release Paroles
Alabama is notoriously stingy with parole grants to eligible prisoners, but it also leaves many to languish in work-release centers, where the unemployment rate in January 2024 hit 26%—far above the state’s overall rate of just 2.9%
Though numbering just 350 of the state’s 20,469 prisoners, the unemployed highlight the casual cruelty of a Department of Corrections (DOC) that is absurdly overcrowded: Currently running 169% of overall capacity, DOC said the rate in 12 minimum-security “work centers” was 271%. Just 106 prisoners were paroled from these centers in 2023, compared to more than 1,700 paroled six years earlier in 2017.
As PLN has reported, the state faces three major legal challenges from prisoners held in its deadly DOC. Most recently a group accused the state Board of Pardons and Paroles (BPP) of denying them release specifically so DOC can continue to cheaply lease them to over 100 private corporate employers. [See: PLN, Mar. 2023, p.32.]
For work-release eligibility, prisoners must be classified in DOC’s lowest security risk group, “minimum community”—allowing them to work without guard supervision for a private employer. Prisoners cannot look for work but must wait for a DOC “job placement officer” to hook them up with a work assignment, often for the federal minimum wage of $7.25 hour. DOC takes 40% of that for their housing, leaving prisoners lucky enough to find 35 hours per week with a paycheck of about $152 before taxes.
Alabama journalist Beth Shelburne profiled prisoner Anthony Allen, 48, who’s been idled at DOC’s work-release center in Hamilton since his December 2023 layoff from a furniture company warehouse, where he was injured in a slip-and-fall on the job. Though DOC considers prisoners like him “nearing the end of their incarceration,” Allen was denied parole in 2020 and forced to wait the maximum five years before his next BPP hearing in 2025.
“I’m trying to focus on the bigger picture,” he told Shelburne. “But honestly, this whole situation is starting to mess with my head.”
Buried in a report released by the U.N. International Labor Organization on March 19, 2024, was one telling statistic: 15% of an estimated 23 million people worldwide whose labor was coerced in 2021 were held in custody by a government.
Source: Moth to Flame
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