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| Sonia Kumar |
Sonia Kumar has spent her 17-year legal career representing people who have spent decades behind bars in Maryland prisons. As a senior staff attorney with the
American Civil Liberties Union, Kumar has fought for racial justice and combated abuses within the prison system.
With many clients in long-term detention, Kumar has also focused on helping incarcerated people receive a minimum wage for work they do while serving their sentences. She understands the impact of subminimum wages on these workers and how hard it can be to afford necessities while behind bars.
One case that she's thrown her support behind is
Scott v. Baltimore County 
. Several prisoners, who are represented by Howard B. Hoffman and Jordan S. Liew of
Hoffman Employment Law LLC, brought the case in January 2021. They said they were paid just $20 for 10 hours of work each day standing at conveyor belts and picking out trash from recycled material.
Michael A. Scott and the other prisoners said they conducted this work outside the Baltimore County Detention Center's walls and worked alongside employees who were not incarcerated, but they weren't paid a minimum wage like their colleagues were.
A Maryland federal court threw out their case in June 2023, but the Fourth Circuit revived the suit in May 2024, holding that their work outside prison walls could entitle them to protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Kumar and the ACLU had urged the Fourth Circuit to reach that decision, filing an amicus brief that described racial injustices that permeate the prison system and explained that when one group of workers is exploited for its labor, everyone suffers.
Kumar is a graduate of Yale Law School and co-founder of the Maryland Parole Partnership and the Lifer Family Support Network. She also serves on the board of directors for the Maryland Chapter of the
Federal Bar Association.
Kumar recently spoke with Law360 about the impact of subminimum wages on her clients and the continuing fight for fair pay for incarcerated people.
Why is she passionate about this issue?
In working with incarcerated individuals in Maryland who are serving life sentences, Kumar said she learned about some of the big issues facing people in the prison system, and what it means to be an incarcerated worker.
"And one of the things that I think is really important that can get lost is that nobody's saying that they don't want to work or be productive or all of those things, but the question is what does that look like and what is fair?" Kumar said.
And although many people have been working behind bars for years, despite this experience, they are unprepared to enter the working world when they're released, she said.
"They're coming home having worked their whole lives, but without any kind of income or resources that reflect that labor," Kumar said. "And so learning about that, and really seeing it up close and then seeing it from the perspectives of family members who are then in the position of trying to make up for what their loved ones aren't getting, really opened my eyes to this systemic set of issues in this area."
What's a story that's stuck with her?
The ACLU had a longtime client who went into the prison system as a teenager and spent decades behind bars, Kumar said. He started out working at "the very bottom of the totem pole" in a meat cutting plant in the Maryland prison system, she said, and worked his way up over the course of his tenure behind bars to a high-level supervisory position at the plant.
"And I remember realizing how much pride [he] took in the work that he did, and what he accomplished and his own sort of growth," Kumar said.
But when he was released from prison in his 50s, Kumar said, he struggled to find work and fully reenter society because there was little reflection of all the labor he had performed for decades behind bars.
"It just felt so incredibly unfair because he had worked so hard and was still coming out kind of dependent on others for income because of the way our system is set up structurally," Kumar said.
What's the most important takeaway from the Fourth Circuit's decision in the Scott case?
In the amicus brief, Kumar discussed how the modern carceral labor system evolved from slavery, and how expensive it can be to access adequate food and other necessities while behind bars.
"Courts are informed by the actual experiences of people in those settings," Kumar said. "We filed our brief on behalf of people who had lived through the system, had loved ones living through the system in Maryland. You know, bring a little bit of that reality to the attention of the court."
She said her goal was to show the reality of the situation and how allowing inmates to work alongside "free-world" workers creates opportunities for exploitation. The purpose of the FLSA is to protect all workers, she said, but free-world workers can be disadvantaged when employers are able to rely on the labor of people who are incarcerated.
In the Scott case, for example, the inmates said they were paid $20 a day for nine- to 10-hour shifts.
"When we allow people who are incarcerated to be exploited for their labor, we're actually undermining all workers," Kumar said. "We undermine their ability to get a fair wage for the work that they're doing. And I think that that's part of what also resonated with the court in this case."
After the Fourth Circuit revived the prisoners' lawsuit, Baltimore County appealed the decision to the
U.S. Supreme Court. In April, the justices declined to review the Fourth Circuit's opinion, and the case is back at the trial court. According to court records, the parties attended a settlement conference April 30.
How has this issue evolved?
While the landscape surrounding incarcerated workers' employee status under the FLSA remains murky, Kumar said there seems to be more conversation about this topic and acknowledgment that the current system needs to change.
"It is just complete mythology to think that people who are detained get what they need from the prison system or the jail they're in," Kumar said. "And there's a multibillion-dollar industry that sort of completely shows that to be false, and how much of that falls on families that are already disproportionately lacking in wealth or resources."
It's a human thing to want to be productive and feel like you're gaining skills, she said, and coupled with the high costs of being in prison, many people need to be able to work and earn real wages while incarcerated.
"One of the most important things we can be doing in general is just educating each other about what people's real experiences actually are, so that when there is an acknowledgment of something not fair or potentially unlawful, we're able to come up with proposed solutions and remedies," Kumar said.
--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.
Workers Behind Bars is a special series from Law360 exploring the push to end subminimum wages and forced labor for detained and incarcerated workers and the labor laws central to this dispute. Have a story idea for Access to Justice? Reach us at accesstojustice@law360.com.
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