For decades, work-based rehabs have spread across the country. No one knows how many are out there, so we counted them ourselves.

Amy Julia Harris
Reporter
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.
American Rehab: A Venomous Snake
After amassing a small fortune, Synanon turns from a revolutionary rehab into a violent cult with mass sterilizations and a rattlesnake in a mailbox.
American Rehab: A Desperate Call
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.
American Rehab Chapter 3: A Venomous Snake
After building a small fortune, Synanon’s megalomaniac leader turns the revolutionary rehab into a violent cult.
American Rehab Chapter 2: Miracle on the Beach
Reveal’s American Rehab exposes how a treatment for drug addiction has turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid shadow workforce.
American Rehab Chapter 1: A Desperate Call
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.
Prominent rehab faces 3 lawsuits for sending patients to work without pay
“Cenikor has turned patients struggling with addiction into a pool of unpaid, forced labor,” according to one of the suits.
They worked in sweltering heat for Exxon, Shell and Walmart. They didn’t get paid a dime
“I can’t fathom this being legitimate,” one former Labor Department investigator says of a drug rehab’s work program.
Public housing tenants get $650,000 settlement for squalid living conditions
A Reveal investigation showed that officials allowed the housing project in Richmond, California to be overrun with roaches, mice, squatters and mold.
Drug rehab patients demand back wages after being sent to work for free
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.