Just a Reminder that Slavery is Still Legal in America
No, like, explicitly legal.
I had a post come up on my Facebook memories today (god I’m such a Millennial sometimes) that reminded me of the fact that slavery is still legal in America right now.
For the record, I’m not talking about how terrible the minimum wage is these days — it is, and it needs to go up, but that’s not the point of this article. No, I mean that slavery is still explicitly legal in America according to the Constitution, specifically the 13th Amendment.
“But Matthew,” you say in an obvious setup to my next point, “the 13th Amendment abolished slavery! How does it make slavery legal?” That’s a fine point you make there, so let’s read the actual text of the Amendment. It’s not long — two sections, each one sentence long. The whole thing is under 50 words of text.
Section 1
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Hold on, let’s look at Section 1 again. Emphasis is mine.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
So yeah, in a nutshell, if you’re a prisoner, you’re a slave. This isn’t even a metaphor, it’s the truth according to the constitution. And oh boy, does our capitalistic system take advantage of that.
Prisoners who work make anywhere from a couple of cents to $2 or $3 an hour, depending on the kind of work that they do and where they are incarcerated. Some states don’t pay their inmate workers anything. And, while many of the jobs that these prisoners do are dangerous (see: fighting wildfires), the prison system makes hundreds of millions of dollars from those prisoners every year.
Call me a liberal nutjob if you will, but I tend to think that exploiting people by making them literal slaves for profits is one of the worst kinds of awful that capitalism has produced. The whole thing is ripe for abuse.
With this, the “justice” system has reason to make sure that as many people are incarcerated as possible — we’ve got around 20% of the global incarcerated population compared to our 5% of the population in general. Employing prisoners at below-market wages helps keep the wages of the general population down as well.
“But Matthew,” you ask, again setting up my next point, “shouldn’t these prisoners pay back their debt to society from their crimes? Isn’t prison about paying the price, and shouldn’t work be part of that?”
Well, put simply, yes, I believe that people should be paid fairly for their work. I don’t care that they’re prisoners, I don’t care what crime they committed, and I don’t care what they did or didn’t do to “deserve it,” they’re people. Slavery is never okay, and prisoners are not exempt from that statement just because they’ve committed some sort of crime. All people deserve rights, and prisoners are people.
We are too fixated in this country on punishment and retribution when we should be focused on rehabilitation. We send people to jail with some weird sense that they’ll “learn their lesson” and come out better, then we punish them after they’re out by withholding jobs and benefits because of their records, which drives many back to crime. It doesn’t help that they live hard, dangerous lives in prison and are often not given the support they need to transition.
Additionally, crime is a natural offshoot of poverty — when people are poor and desperate, they’ll do a lot to get by. Sometimes people wind up criminals because they are poor and for no other reason because we like to criminalize poverty and homelessness in this country.
I honestly think that if we focus more on the rehabilitation of prisoners — giving them the support they need to succeed outside of jails and prisons, supporting them more once they’re out, and de-stigmatizing prison time — it will make a huge difference. Crime will inevitably go down as a result (I mean, it’s been going down for decades, but that doesn’t stop people from thinking it’s going up), and a whole bunch of racial minorities and people with mental illnesses will find that their lives have improved.
However, changing the system from one that exploits slave labor and perpetuates criminality to one that enables prisoners to become functional members of society isn’t profitable, and profit drives everything in America. The whole thing is classist and racist, and there is a whole class of American oligarchs who make their money on the backs of working-class people. People like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk profit from keeping people poor and divided, and they are heavily invested in making sure that the system continues to work for them.
I don’t know what to do about this right now, because there are so many horrible things going on in the world that are threatening both democracy and life as we know it. There are lots of organizations doing good work on this, such as the Innocence Project, that you can donate to in order to help them make progress.
If nothing else, please remember that in America, the land of the free, slavery is still legal, and if you’re okay with that, I’m not okay with you.
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