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Amy Julia Harris is a reporter for Reveal, covering vulnerable communities. She and Reveal reporter Shoshana Walter exposed how courts across the country are sending defendants to rehabs that are little more than lucrative work camps for private industry. Their work was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting and won a Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigative reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists. It also led to four government investigations, including two criminal probes and four federal class-action lawsuits alleging slavery and fraud.
Harris was a Livingston Award for Young Journalists finalist for her investigation into the lack of government oversight of religious-based day cares, which led to tragedies for children in Alabama and elsewhere. In a previous project for Reveal, she uncovered widespread squalor in a public housing complex in the San Francisco Bay Area and traced it back to mismanagement and fraud in the troubled public housing agency.
Before joining Reveal, Harris was an education reporter at The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia. She has also written for The Seattle Times, Half Moon Bay Review, and Campaigns and Elections Politics Magazine.
For decades, work-based rehabs have spread across the country. No one knows how many are out there, so we counted them ourselves.
After amassing a small fortune, Synanon turns from a revolutionary rehab into a violent cult with mass sterilizations and a rattlesnake in a mailbox.
Penny Rawlings is relieved to finally get her brother into rehab at a place called Cenikor. She doesn’t realize that getting him out of treatment is going to be the bigger problem.
After building a small fortune, Synanon’s megalomaniac leader turns the revolutionary rehab into a violent cult.
Reveal’s American Rehab exposes how a treatment for drug addiction has turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid shadow workforce.
Penny Rawlings is relieved to finally get her brother into rehab at a place called Cenikor. She doesn’t realize that getting him out of treatment is going to be the bigger problem.
“Cenikor has turned patients struggling with addiction into a pool of unpaid, forced labor,” according to one of the suits.
“I can’t fathom this being legitimate,” one former Labor Department investigator says of a drug rehab’s work program.
A Reveal investigation showed that officials allowed the housing project in Richmond, California to be overrun with roaches, mice, squatters and mold.
Recovery Connections Community in North Carolina is one of many drug rehabs nationwide that put their clients to work in private businesses, and keep their wages.
