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

Shoshana Walter
Reporter
Shoshana Walter is a reporter for Reveal, covering criminal justice. She and reporter Amy Julia Harris 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. It also won the Knight Award for Public Service, a Sigma Delta Chi Award for investigative reporting, and an Edward R. Murrow Award, and was a finalist for the Selden Ring, IRE and Livingston Awards. It led to numerous government investigations, two criminal probes and five federal class-action lawsuits alleging slavery, labor violations and fraud.
Walter's investigation on America's armed security guard industry revealed how armed guard licenses have been handed out to people with histories of violence, even people barred by courts from owning guns. Walter and reporter Ryan Gabrielson won the 2015 Livingston Award for Young Journalists for national reporting based on the series, which prompted new laws and an overhaul of California’s regulatory system. For her 2016 investigation about the plight of "trimmigrants," marijuana workers in California's Emerald Triangle, Walter embedded herself in illegal mountain grows and farms. There, she encountered an epidemic of sex abuse and human trafficking in the industry – and a criminal justice system focused more on the illegal drugs. The story prompted legislation, a criminal investigation and grass-roots efforts by the community, including the founding of a worker hotline and safe house.
Walter began her career as a police reporter for The Ledger in Lakeland, Florida, and previously covered violent crime and the politics of policing in Oakland, California, for The Bay Citizen. Her narrative nonfiction as a local reporter garnered a national Sigma Delta Chi Award and a Gold Medal for Public Service from the Florida Society of News Editors. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, she has been a Dart Center Ochberg fellow for journalism and trauma at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim fellow in criminal justice journalism. She is based in Reveal's Emeryville, California, office.
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.
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Salvation Army faces lawsuit over labor violations
The venerated charity is one of the largest providers of drug rehab in the United States. Now former participants are demanding wages for uncompensated “work therapy” at thrift stores.
Rehab work camps appear to violate federal law, senators say
Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin ask the Government Accountability Office to investigate, citing Reveal’s project on unpaid work at rehabs.
American Rehab Chapter 8: Shadow Workforce
For decades, work-based rehabs have spread across the country. No one knows how many are out there, so we counted them ourselves.
American Rehab Chapter 7: The Work Cure
One man’s journey into Cenikor leads to almost two years of hard labor. The program will change him. But can it help Chris Koon with his addiction?
American Rehab Chapter 6: The White Vans
Before sunrise, a line of passenger vans heads to job sites across Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They carry squads of unpaid laborers.
American Rehab Chapter 5: Reagan with the Snap
Cenikor rises from the ashes, thanks to an inventor of NFL football pads, the war on drugs and the endorsement of an American president.
American Rehab Chapter 4: Cowboy Conman
He’s a liar, a killer and a wannabe country singer. Luke Austin creates Cenikor in the image of a cult. But graft and violence nearly destroy it.