Alabama’s Black Belt was once at the heart of the cotton kingdom—an economy built on the forced labor of enslaved people. Plantations extracted enormous amounts of wealth while systematically denying education, capital, and opportunity to Black residents. Families were separated, communities destabilized, and the land itself became a tool for profit rather than sustenance. Wealth flowed out of these counties into the hands of absentee owners and resource-dependent markets, while local development stagnated.
While owning people is no longer legal in the United States, the logic of labor discipline, de-skilling, and profit concentration persists.
Sven Beckert argues in his award-winning book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, that the global rise of industrial capitalism is inseparable from the logic of plantation extraction. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic similarly show how coerced labor, hierarchical control, and economic exploitation form a throughline from maritime and plantation economies into industrial production.
While owning people is no longer legal in the United States, the logic of labor discipline, de-skilling, and profit concentration persists in factories and prison workshops.
Cooperative businesses—typically owned by either the workers who labor at them or by the consumers who buy their products and services—offer a path out of this morass. But it is a path that still needs to be seized.
How Alabama’s Economy Today Reflects Its Plantation Past
Alabama’s modern economy demonstrates a clear throughline from cotton plantations to factory floors and prison workshops. The manufacturing sector spans automotive, aerospace, textiles, chemicals, food processing, and institutional goods.
Major automotive plants including Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota collectively employ roughly 50,000 workers across the state. While these plants provide employment opportunities, the structure of the work is tightly regimented, often repetitive, and de-skilled, designed to maximize efficiency and throughput. Wages remain low relative to the value produced, turnover is high, benefits vary, and advancement opportunities are limited, particularly for workers from rural counties.
Factories often take root in counties that once thrived on small-scale farms, replacing agricultural livelihoods with industrial labor. Over time, this shift has not only transformed the nature of work but also the social fabric of rural Alabama.
As manufacturing replaced farming, younger generations began migrating to cities in search of better opportunities, leaving behind aging populations and hollowed-out communities. The loss of agricultural independence, coupled with limited reinvestment from industrial profits, has deepened economic precarity. What remains are regions increasingly dependent on low-wage labor or entangled in the criminal justice system, as Beckert’s book demonstrates.
This cycle is most apparent in Alabama’s prison system. Alabama Correctional Industries (ACI) employs around 400 incarcerated individuals across multiple facilities, producing office furniture, uniforms, mattresses, janitorial products, and vehicle tags for state agencies.
In 2023, ACI reported $13.66 million in revenue and netted $3.15 million in profit. Prisoners are compensated well under a dollar an hour—between $0.15 and $0.25—with deductions for room, board, and restitution. Since 2018, inmates have put in over 17 million work hours but have been left with virtually no economic benefit despite generating hundreds of millions of dollars annually in revenue for the state.
Living on the Edge
The consequences of these low wages are felt most acutely by those who entered incarceration with limited income. Nationally, the median pre-incarceration income for individuals in prison is around $19,185, and for Black men it is $17,625. In Alabama, 16.3 percent of residents live below the federal poverty line.
While the prison population is disproportionately Black, the more immediate concern is economic precarity: Low-income people are funneled into a labor system that generates revenue for the state but provides almost no opportunity for financial stability or upward mobility.
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Prison labor, in this sense, reproduces the extractive logic of the plantation economy, concentrating profit externally while leaving workers and their communities economically disadvantaged. Jobs are de-skilled, tightly supervised, and bound by strict quotas. Economies of scale extract maximum output while minimizing investment in skills, wages, or long-term opportunity. The cycle of extraction, poverty, and limited local development persists.
By underpaying incarcerated workers, the state perpetuates cycles of extraction, limiting opportunities for financial stability and skill development.
This imbalance raises a pressing policy question: Should incarcerated workers be paid higher wages? Advocates argue that fair compensation is not merely a moral imperative but a practical strategy for building stronger, more resilient communities. Higher wages would allow incarcerated individuals to save money, support their families, and acquire resources to successfully reintegrate into society.
Conversely, maintaining low wages serves short-term economic and operational goals: It maximizes state revenue, simplifies administration, and maintains a labor system that mirrors the coercive structures of the plantation, even absent formal slavery.
However, the social costs—persistent poverty, intergenerational economic disadvantage, and weakened communities—far outweigh these short-term gains. By underpaying incarcerated workers, the state perpetuates cycles of extraction, limiting opportunities for financial stability and skill development that could benefit both individuals and the broader economy.
Research confirms that cooperative models can reduce recidivism while teaching practical skills.
The Case for Cooperatives
Cooperatives offer a pathway to economic empowerment. In Alabama’s Black Belt, Black-led agricultural and worker co-ops provide examples of how communities can retain control over production, profits, and decision-making. The East Alabama Black Belt Farmers’ Cooperative, formed in 2020 by seven farmers, manages over 1,000 acres and delivers produce to local grocery stores, increasing food access while building sustainable livelihoods.
The Southeastern Goat Cooperative supports dozens of small farmers raising goats for dairy and meat, preserving small-scale agricultural traditions and keeping wealth in the community. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, founded during the Civil Rights era, now supports over 70 co-ops and 20,000 families, providing land retention assistance, cooperative development, and advocacy.
Research confirms that cooperative models can reduce recidivism while teaching practical skills. Jessica Gordon Nembhard highlights how cooperatives foster business management, democratic governance, and self-confidence among participants. For example, through Cooperativa ARIGOS in Puerto Rico, incarcerated members manage the business democratically, share profits equitably, and see dramatically lower recidivism, with only two of 50 members returned to prison.
By combining wage reform and cooperative ownership, incarcerated workers in Alabama could gain skills, retain income, and connect with broader cooperative networks, supporting reintegration and building resilient communities.
Reclaiming Labor and Community Wealth
Alabama can move beyond its plantation roots. Fair wages, cooperative training, and ownership are key. Workers should be able to save, invest, and gain real experience managing production. Cooperative participation connects labor to community wealth and skill development, breaking cycles of extraction.
The state stands to benefit as well. Communities retain wealth, workers acquire skills, and recidivism declines. By putting opportunity, ownership, and dignity back in the hands of people, Alabama can transform both its economy and its prison system. This is how the state can finally turn its plantation past into a cooperative, equitable future.
