For more than two decades imprisoned in California, Samual Brown worked more than a dozen different jobs and was transferred between penitentiaries throughout the state \u2013 earning less than a dollar per hour. At the beginning of the pandemic, he worked as a healthcare facility worker tasked with disinfecting areas where inmates with Covid had been held. He wanted to quit his job \u2013 he had asthma and risked his life \u2013 but was told he \u201chad no choice\u201d. By the time Brown was released in December 2021, he had paid just $3,000 of the more than $37,000 in restitution he owed the state.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is tied directly into the same type of practices from slavery,\u201d Brown, who is co-founder of the Anti-Violence Safety and Accountability Project, says. \u201cThat\u2019s the same practice, the same energy, the same spirit that you see in this prison setting. A person can be on one plantation, and then they\u2019ll be moved to another plantation, and you\u2019ll never see the people who you were with ever again. They can separate you from your wife, separate you from your children, from your family. It\u2019s the same way in the modern-day carceral setting.\u201d<\/p>\n
More than 150 years after slavery was outlawed in the US, California remains one of dozens of states in the country that allows slavery and indentured servitude as a punishment for a crime in its state constitution, a vestige of the US Constitution\u2019s 13th amendment. In 2021, an estimated 791,500 incarcerated people worked in US prisons as part of their sentences in 2021, often without basic workplace protections and under dangerous working conditions for little to no pay, according to a June report by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law School\u2019s Global Human Rights Clinic.<\/p>\n
When we talk to people who are incarcerated about how they feel are not being protected from slavery, the first thing we hear are about feeling less than human.
\nBianca Tylek
\nSince 2008, Colorado, Nebraska and Utah have removed such language from their state constitutions. And in November, voters in four states \u2013 Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont \u2013 approved ballot measures that removed such provisions, bringing the number to seven states.<\/p>\n
Next year, the Abolish Slavery National Network, a group of organizers involved in movements across the country to end constitutional provisions allowing slavery and involuntary servitude, anticipates that 22 states will have legislation. Their hope is that, as more and more states approve amendments to their state constitutions, so too will Congress and a constitutional convention: removing the language from the US constitution to eliminate the exception. In 2021, Georgia Representative Nikema Williams and Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley reintroduced legislation known as the abolition amendment that would close the slavery loophole in the 13th amendment.<\/p>\n
Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a national group lobbying for a federal constitutional amendment, says that removing the exception for slavery and indentured servitude as a punishment for a crime from the US constitution would \u201cestablish that all people, especially people who are incarcerated, are deserving the same humanity and dignity\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen slavery was legal back in the 1800s, it was rooted in this concept that Black people that were enslaved were less than human,\u201d Tylek says. \u201cWhen we talk to people who are incarcerated about how they feel are not being protected from slavery by the 13th amendment, the first thing we hear are about feeling less than human \u2013 about feeling worthless, about feeling like society doesn\u2019t recognize them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tylek added that the provision\u2019s removal would also \u201cend the brutal practices around prison labor\u201d, a practice enmeshed within the US carceral system since the passage of the 13th amendment in 1865.<\/p>\n
An ACLU report from June 2022 about the exploitation of US prison labor noted that the constitutional loophole permitted states to turn to \u201cincarcerated labor as a means of partially replacing chattel slavery and the free labor force slavery provided\u201d and subjected them to brutal conditions that persist today. The loophole gave way to laws during the 19th century such as the so-called Black Codes that empowered authorities to incarcerate Black people for petty crimes and allowed authorities to engage in \u201cconvict leasing\u201d where the incarcerated people would work in factories, construction, and elsewhere for long days under threat of brutal punishment.<\/p>\n