Men in the program work for free, under constant threat of being sent to prison, on products for big-name brands, including Popeyes, KFC and Walmart.
Author Archives: 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., And Justice for Some, Inequality, Worked Over, Workers’ Rights
Chicken workers sue, saying they were modern-day slaves
Judges across the country had ordered defendants into rehab programs that double as work camps for for-profit companies.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., And Justice for Some
How a drug court rehab kept its participants’ workers’ comp
“That sounds like something from the early 1900s. And this is going on right now? And how is it legal?”
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., And Justice for Some
These are the rehabs that make people work in chicken plants
We found a slew of rehab programs that supply cheap and captive workers to major poultry companies, such as Tyson Foods and Simmons Foods.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., And Justice for Some
Response to work camp investigation: ‘Nothing short of slavery’
The outcry came in response to a Reveal investigation that shows how drug court defendants are being forced to work for free.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., And Justice for Some, Inequality
They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants
“It was a slave camp. I can’t believe the court sent me there.”
Posted inAccountability, Day Care, The God Loophole
Boy’s death renews effort to license religious day cares in Alabama
Kamden Johnson hopped into a van at Community Church Ministries in Mobile. Hours later, the 5-year-old’s body was found dumped in a driveway.
Posted inThe God Loophole
Alabama House passes bill to increase oversight of religious day cares
The Alabama House of Representatives resoundingly voted to increase oversight of unlicensed religious day cares, a big step for a state with the most sweeping religious exemption in the country.
Posted inAccountability, Day Care, Religion, Religion and Government, The God Loophole, U.S. Education
Child Care Safety Act would give state oversight of religious day cares
Alabama lawmakers introduced a landmark bill to abolish a longstanding law that exempts more than 900 religious day cares from state oversight.
Posted inThe Trump Era
Steve Bannon had a big weekend in the White House. Get to know him
Four things we’ve learned from reporting on the man who’s risen to power in Trump’s White House.