“It’s like slavery,” said one rehab participant, “like we were on the plantation.”
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.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay.
Rehab featured in Reveal story being investigated for food stamp fraud
We found that the program required defendants to sign up for food stamps and then confiscated the cards.
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Inside a judge’s rehab: Unpaid work at a local Coca-Cola plant
A judge started his own rehab where defendants must work at a bottling plant and other companies, under threat of prison if they don’t comply.
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Accused of slavery, Arkansas politician’s company files defamation suit
The state’s Senate majority leader is accused of participating in “a pervasive scheme of slavery.”
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., And Justice for Some, Inequality
ACLU accuses rehab work camp: Human trafficking, bedbugs, no treatment
It is the second class-action lawsuit filed against the Drug and Alcohol Recovery Program prompted by an investigation by Reveal.
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Arkansas’ Senate leader cancels his company’s contract with work camp
The move comes following a Reveal investigation into unpaid labor from drug rehab program participants.
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Top Arkansas politician uses labor from rehab work camp
Jim Hendren’s use of a work camp program shows how beneficiaries of unpaid labor stretch from top companies to high levels of state political power.
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Third lawsuit this month filed over forced labor at chicken plants
Rehabilitation centers put men to work for free in chicken processing plants and a plastic manufacturer, under threat of prison.
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Rehab work camps were about to be regulated. Then a friend stepped in
Because of the intervention, many recovery programs in Oklahoma remain exempt from state oversight.
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Why courts’ use of religious work camps could be ‘patently illegal’
“A more religiously coercive environment is scarcely imaginable,” says the Freedom From Religion Foundation.