After building a small fortune, Synanon’s megalomaniac leader turns the revolutionary rehab into a violent cult.
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.
The work cure
At 300 rehabs across the country, the main form of addiction treatment is work. And the participants rarely get paid.
At hundreds of rehabs, recovery means work without pay
Despite deadly injuries and multiple investigations into illegal labor practices, work-based rehabs are an American growth industry.
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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.
Listen to American Rehab, a podcast series from Reveal
Reveal exposes how a treatment for drug addiction has turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid, shadow workforce.
Drug rehab ‘skirted compliance with the labor laws’ for financial gain, judge rules
A top Arkansas senator used unpaid rehab workers at his plastics factory. Now, participants have been awarded more than $1.1 million in back wages.
Drug rehab shutters amid coronavirus outbreak, sending residents scrambling
At a Cenikor drug rehab in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, residents were given two days to find a place to live. Some became homeless.
Drug rehab faces investigations into labor practices and Medicaid fraud
A Reveal exposé found that the drug rehab has sent thousands of patients to work without pay at hundreds of for-profit companies over the years.
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.