We found that the program required defendants to sign up for food stamps and then confiscated the cards.
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.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., Inequality
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.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., And Justice for Some, Inequality
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.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., And Justice for Some, Inequality
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.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., Inequality
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.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., And Justice for Some
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.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay.
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.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., And Justice for Some
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.
Posted inAll Work. No Pay., And Justice for Some
Second group of chicken workers sue, alleging rehab slavery
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.