Hendren denies 'forced labor' lawsuits

When he was facing jail time in Oklahoma in 2016, Shane Norrid said he was told the only way to avoid prison was to go into a six-month drug treatment program.

He agreed but said that instead of getting the help he expected, he found himself living in a dorm run by a treatment center and working for months without pay at Hendren Plastics Inc., a small rotational molder in Gravette, Ark.

When he wasn't working in the factory five or six days a week — and having to rely on the treatment agency for transportation — Norrid said he was confined to the dorm, which had an infestation of bed bugs and little treatment options.

"I was told I would avoid prison and that I would get treatment to help change my life, but I saw almost as soon as I got there that this program wasn't what I expected treatment to be," he said.

Norrid's story and similar accounts from other workers come from two lawsuits filed in Oklahoma and Arkansas in recent weeks.

Both lawsuits name Hendren Plastics as one of several defendants, along with the treatment agencies and other manufacturers, although Hendren sharply disputes the central claim that it got labor for nothing.

It said it paid the treatment programs as its contract required but was not aware what happened beyond that.

Still, a Nov. 1 lawsuit by the ​ Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union argues that the program failed participants, calling it a "human trafficking and forced labor" scheme that provided labor for welding companies, chicken processing plants and other manufacturers, including Hendren.

ACLU said workers "were made to perform thousands of hours of uncompensated labor for the for-profit businesses and individuals" and given little real drug treatment.

"Oklahomans dealing with addiction deserve quality treatment, but instead, victims of this scheme found themselves forced to work without pay and live in inhumane conditions," said Brady Henderson, ACLU of Oklahoma Legal Director, in a statement.

The CEO of Hendren Plastics, Jim Hendren, sharply disputed allegations that his firm benefited from free labor.

He said his company paid the social service agency, the Drug and Alcohol Recovery Program, $9.25 per hour for each worker. But he said he did not know what arrangements DARP had with the people that the courts put in its custody.

"We paid for every dime of labor we received," Hendren said. "I was not privy to the agreement between the program and participants."

Hendren said the company, which rotomolds dock floats and sells them under the Eagle Floats brand name at Home Depot and elsewhere, was approached by DARP and joined in late 2013 or 2014.

Hendren said in a Nov. 2 telephone interview that he ended the firm's work with DARP in late October because he did not want "to expose the company to lawsuits from things that are beyond my control."

He said within his 50-person company, some DARP participants have gone on to full-time jobs with Hendren Plastics, and it seemed to have helped.

The company initially agreed to participate because it saw value in helping people with drug and other problems, he said.

"We believe in opportunities for people to get their lives turned around," he said. "It's an opportunity to help folks who have made some poor decisions."

Hendren is a prominent politician in Arkansas, serving in the State Senate, where he's majority leader. He's also a nephew of current Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and former U.S. Senator Tim Hutchinson.

Hendren started Hendren Plastics in 1985 with his father, Kim Hendren, who is currently in the Arkansas House of Representatives.

The two lawsuits allege an environment where DARP participants had very few opportunities for real drug treatment and suggest unsafe work conditions.

The suits identified three people who worked at Hendren without pay as part of their time in treatment, which were often six-month court-ordered terms.

In an affidavit filed with a class-action lawsuit in Benton County Circuit Court, Mark Fochtman said he was assigned by local courts in Arkansas to one of the drug treatment programs, first working without pay for 45 hours a week in difficult conditions in chicken processing plants.

In that factory, he said he saw other workers from the treatment program doing jobs that required hanging chickens on hooks and that the "birds routinely defecated in the mouths and faces of those employees."

"I quickly learned [it] was not a treatment facility, but was instead a work camp," he said.

Fochtman said after a few months he switched to working at Hendren, where he clocked 60 hours a week, again without pay.

"The environment was very caustic working around melted plastics, and there was a high rate of injury among employees," Fochtman said. "Because of the work environment, the turnover rate during my time was high."

Hendren disputed the allegations that Fochtman worked 60 hours a week and that the work environment was unsafe.

"None of those accusations are true," Hendren said. "We pride ourselves on our workplace safety."

A third worker at Hendren, Christopher Williams, said he was sent to DARP by a local judge, then made to work at Hendren without pay, with DARP or its executives getting paid for Williams' labor.

In the ACLU lawsuit, Williams said he left DARP after about two months, when a family member showed him an Oct. 1 article from an Oklahoma newspaper about conditions in the DARP program, and he convinced a judge to transfer him to another treatment agency.

While at DARP, he said he "received little to no drug treatment ... and lived in cramped living conditions with an infinite bed bug infestation." The ACLU suit said he and others experienced bleeding sores and wounds from the bed bugs.

In the lawsuit, several of participants describe limited communications with those outside the program and said it was difficult to transfer to other programs.

Treatment program staff used threats of kicking them out and sending them to jail if they did not work as they were told, the lawsuits allege.

One of the agencies in the lawsuit, Christian Alcoholics & Addicts in Recovery, defended its programs in media reports, saying that it provided treatment for people who cannot afford it, giving them food, bunk beds and access to Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, along with other counseling.

Work is a key part of the program, according to Janet Wilkerson, CAAIR's founder and CEO, in an interview with Reveal News, a nonprofit investigative reporting website.

"Money is an obstacle for so many of these men," she said. "We're not going to charge them to come here, but they're going to have to work. That's a part of recovery, getting up like you and I do every day and going to a job."

DARP could not be reached for comment, but the local judge, Thomas Smith, who oversees Benton County's drug court, defended DARP, telling TV 20/29 News in Fort Smith that it's a valuable last chance tool and that he'd never heard of anyone being mistreated.

The ACLU suit said some of the men lacked insurance or money to pay for treatment.

The two lawsuits represent nine former workers, but are seeking other plaintiffs. The ACLU said the number could rise as high as 2,000, stretching back to 2007.

The cases have generated intense media coverage in Oklahoma and Arkansas, including stories that preceded the lawsuits in the news outlet Reveal and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

The lawsuits seek back pay and penalties, and one asks for a declaration that the entire program violates Arkansas laws against illegal labor practices.

They're not the only lawsuits. Hendren Plastics has also filed a defamation lawsuit against one of the lawyers in the Benton County case for comments to the media suggesting that Hendren Plastics benefited from turning the treatment program workers into "slaves."

But the lawyers bringing the lawsuits argued that the programs failed because they did not provide meaningful chances for recovery.

"Alternatives to incarceration are an important component to battling our mass incarceration crisis," said the ACLU's Henderson. "But profiteering schemes ... are not the answer. Without proper oversight, medically qualified counselors and meaningful services, incarceration alternatives like this one are ripe for abuse."