A group of current and former inmates are suing Alabama state, claiming they were forced to work at fast food restaurants, meat packing plants and even city offices for “next to nothing” while state officials took in $450 million from their “convict leasing.”

The federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday at Middle District Court, claims the prisoners were forced into “modern-day form of slavery.”

“The forced labor scheme that currently exists in the Alabama prison system is the modern reincarnation of the notorious ‘convict leasing’ system that replaced slavery after the Civil War,” said Janet Herold, legal director of Justice Catalyst Law.

Under the scheme, the class action suit alleges, the prisoners “are forced to work, often for little or no money, for the benefit of the numerous government entities and private businesses that ‘employ’ them.

“They live in a constant danger of being murdered, stabbed or raped that is so profound that the federal government has sued Alabama for inflicting ‘cruel and unusual punishment,’ and if they refuse to work, the State punishes them even more,” the suit says. “They are trapped in this labor trafficking scheme.”

Plaintiffs named in the suit said they were forced to work for McDonald’s, KFC, Wendy’s and Burger King franchises, as well as meat processors and even local Anheuser-Busch distributors.

It also names the City of Montgomery, the City of Troy and Jefferson County as agencies that have benefited from inmate labor.

In fact, since 2018, 575 private employers and over 100 public employers have “leased” labor from the state prisons, according to the lawsuit.

At these jobs, the suit claims, inmates are not allowed to refuse work or protest their dangerous work conditions or the long hours.

It also alleges that if prisoners do not comply, they risk being “put behind the wall” in one of the “higher-security ultra-violent facilities.”

Meanwhile, the State Department of Corrections takes 40% of an inmate’s gross earnings, claiming it is “to assist in defraying the cost of his/her incarceration,” the suit says.

The 129-page complaint goes even further, by arguing it’s “no accident” that the people “caught in a labor-trafficking scheme” are black, comparing them to “individuals who were enslaved and forced to participate in the sharecropping and ‘convict leasing’ schemes that followed the end of the Civil War.”

It notes that while 26.8% of Alabama’s population identifies as black or African American, double that percentage compromises the black incarcerated population.

The 129-page complaint goes even further, by arguing it’s “no accident” that the people “caught in a labor-trafficking scheme” are black, comparing them to “individuals who were enslaved and forced to participate in the sharecropping and ‘convict leasing’ schemes that followed the end of the Civil War.”

As of September, the complaint says, 1,374 incarcerated people were enrolled in the program.

Among those named in the suit are Lakiera Walker, who alleges she was forced to perform long hours of uncompensated work “upon threat of discipline” in a series of jobs, including housekeeping, stripping floors, providing care for mentally disabled or other ill incarcerated people, unloading chemical trucks, working inside freezers and at Burger King.

She was paid just $2 a day and was subjected to sexual harassment by supervising officers, she claims.

When she was severely ill and could not work, a supervisor allegedly told her to “get up and go make us our 40%.”

“These women need help. They really need a voice,” Walker told Law & Crime of her decision to sue.

“I knew I had to do something,” she said. “I want justice for this forced labor.”

Robert Earl Council, an incarcerated activist who co-founded the Free Alabama Movement — which helped organize a nationwide strike among imprisoned people in 2016 — also says he was “subject to severe and abusive treatment in retaliation for advocating that incarcerated persons refuse to submit to forced labor.”