Rehab or work camp? Addicts labor for businesses
Judges across the country are ordering defendants into recovery centers that are little more than work camps for private industry, an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
The programs promise freedom from addiction. Instead, they’ve turned thousands of men and women into indentured servants.
The rehabs get paid. The participants do not.
Perhaps no rehab better exemplifies this allegiance to big business than Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery, also known as CAAIR, in Oklahoma.
It was started in 2007 by chicken company executives struggling to find workers. By forming a Christian rehab, they could supply processing plants with a cheap and captive labor force while helping men overcome their addictions.
Defendants work in grueling conditions at chicken plants owned by Simmons Foods Inc., a company with annual revenue of $1.4 billion. They work alongside paid employees, churning out chicken products and pet food for some of America’s largest retailers and restaurants, including Walmart, KFC and PetSmart.
Reveal interviewed scores of former participants and employees, court officials and judges, and reviewed hundreds of pages of court filings and workers’ compensation records. Among the findings:
• The program might violate the 13th Amendment, which bans slavery and allows forced labor only for people convicted of a crime. Spurgin Many men sent to CAAIR have not yet been convicted and later have had their cases dismissed.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Noah Zatz, a professor specializing in labor law at UCLA. “That’s a very strong 13th Amendment violation case.”
•The authors of Oklahoma’s drug court law believe it is illegal for judges to send defendants to CAAIR. The law requires drug courts to use programs that are certified by the state. CAAIR is not. Rather than professional addiction treatment, the program mainly relies on faith and work to help people overcome addiction.
• CAAIR administrators use the threat of prison to push defendants to work, even when they are injured.
• CAAIR routinely files workers’ comp claims on defendants’ behalf and collects the payments. By law, those payments are required to go to the injured worker.
Courts send about 280 men to CAAIR each year. Some men say it changed their lives. But few ultimately finish. In 2014, 26 percent completed the program.
Instead of paychecks, they get bunk beds, meals and Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. They can meet with a counselor or attend classes on anger management and parenting. Weekly Bible study is mandatory. So is church.
Men in the CAAIR program said injuries were common at Simmons. Their hands became gnarled after days of hanging thousands of chickens from metal shackles. Others were maimed by machines or contracted serious bacterial infections.
Many drug courts use CAAIR because there is a shortage of affordable treatment programs. At CAAIR, there’s no wait list and “it doesn’t cost the state of Oklahoma one penny,” said Pontotoc County Judge Thomas Landrith.
Brandon Spurgin was struggling with a meth addiction when the Stephens County drug court sent him to CAAIR in 2014.
He was working at the chicken plant one night when a metal door crashed down and split his head open. Even though he was in severe pain and had a dozen staples in his head, Spurgin kept working. If he didn’t, CAAIR could kick him out, and he would be sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Three years later, Spurgin has graduated from drug court but is in chronic pain and unable to work full time. CAAIR filed for workers’ compensation on his behalf and took the $4,500 in insurance payments. Spurgin said he got nothing.