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END LEGAL SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES  
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Andrew Ross, Tommaso Bardelli and Aiyuba Thomas
June 19, 2024
New York Times
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_ Some historians have described the South's convict leasing system
as “worse than slavery,” because there was no incentive to avoid
working those people to death. _

, Félix Decombat

 

Today we celebrate Juneteenth, the day when word of the Emancipation
Proclamation reached the farthest outpost in America. Many people do
not realize that Emancipation did not legally end slavery in the
United States, however. The 13th Amendment — the culmination of
centuries of resistance by enslaved people, a lifetime of abolitionist
campaigning and a bloody civil war — prohibited involuntary
servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted.”

In the North, that so-called exception clause was interpreted as
allowing the private contracting of forced prison labor, which was
already underway, and in the ex-Confederacy it gave rise to the much
more brutal system by which freed men and women were routinely
arrested under false charges and then leased out to plantation owners
and industrialists to work off their sentence. Some historians have
described this convict leasing system as “worse than slavery,”
because there was no incentive to avoid working those people to death.

Over time, courts accepted that all people who are incarcerated lose
the protection against slavery or involuntary servitude. The legacy of
that legal deference is a grim one. Today, a majority of the 1.2
million Americans locked up in state and federal prisons work under
duress in jobs that cover the entire spectrum, from cellblock
cleaning
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skilled manufacturing, for wages as low as a few cents per hour or, in
several states, for nothing at all. And though members of Congress
denounce imported goods made with prison labor in places like
China’s Xinjiang province, the offices of many government agencies
in Washington and elsewhere are stocked with furniture and supplies
made by prisoners in this country. In fact, federal agencies are
mandated to purchase goods from federal prisons, just as state or
municipal agencies, including public schools and universities, often
must consider sourcing from state penitentiaries. In many states,
prison-made goods are freely available on the open market and shipped
overseas.

Labor that people have no meaningful right to refuse and that is
enforced under conditions of total control is, unquestionably,
slavery. It’s a different model from the chattel slavery over which
the Civil War was fought, but by all norms of international law, it is
a violation of fundamental human rights.

The nation that deigns to teach the rest of the world lessons in
liberty should ban this practice on its own shores rather than
integrating its products into the economy. For those who want to work
while serving their sentence, we should guarantee fair pay for their
labor.

The prisoner rights movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s called
for raising prisoners’ hourly pay. One of the top demands during the
1971 Attica uprising was to “apply the New York State minimum wage
law to all state institutions.” More radical Black nationalists saw
the nation’s overcrowded penitentiaries as akin to modern slave
ships and argued that even if they were to offer prevailing wages,
collective bargaining and workplace protections, they would still be
instruments of racial capture and control.

More recently, some prison abolitionists — encouraged by the
widespread influence of Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim
Crow” and Ava DuVernay’s documentary “13th” and coordinated
through the Abolish Slavery National Network — have focused on
getting the exception clause repealed through state and federal
amendments. Beginning in 2016, campaigns in seven states — Colorado,
Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Oregon, Tennessee and Alabama — succeeded
in passing amendments that banned slavery_ _without exception, not
even for forced prison labor. Amendment initiatives are currently
underway in as many as 20 states and also at the federal level, where
a joint bill was introduced in Congress in 2020 and at every session
since. These measures only outlaw forced labor. They do not stipulate
that prison labor has to be paid at the prevailing wage, and so, in
states such as Colorado and Alabama, incarcerated people have had to
go to court to sue for higher pay. In New York, advocates have
sought an additional bill
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guarantees the minimum wage and the right to organize.

Resistance to the amendments has been surprisingly strong. In some
cases, the opposition is from “law and order” legislators who say
these measures would coddle criminals. But the overriding concern is
cost. This objection became more prevalent after lawmakers punted on
the California Abolition Act (which included no wage provisions) in
response to a Department of Finance estimate that the cost of paying
minimum wage would be $1.5 billion. Ever since then, legislators in
other states have been on notice. If the amendments result in
substantial wage increases, how much will their states be burdened?

That kind of question is in a direct line of descent from the
complaints of slave owners about the prospect of having to compensate
workers for picking their cotton and sugar cane. Then as now, there is
a price to be paid for abolishing slavery, but the benefits of paying
a fair wage far outweigh the fiscal costs.

We have interviewed many formerly incarcerated men and women who spoke
about the difference it would have made in their lives to earn surplus
income that is not swallowed up by the purchase of necessities from
the prison commissary store; of being able to spare their
debt-burdened families from having to support them; of saving enough
money to re-enter society on a stable footing; of contributing,
through a standard wage arrangement, toward future benefits such as
Medicare, Social Security or unemployment insurance; and of freeing
themselves from the need to participate in the risky trade in
contraband goods that is a direct byproduct of ultralow pay.

For its part, the state would save on the welfare services related to
health care, housing and unemployment that are currently expended on
people exiting prison with empty pockets. And it would be a boost to
public safety because there would be less economic need for people to
resort, on re-entry, to illegal activities to support themselves.
According to one estimate
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paying incarcerated people a minimum wage would produce a net national
benefit of up to $20.3 billion per year.

But dwelling on the cold numbers alone does not account for the moral
cost of prolonging this nation’s historical tolerance of coerced
labor. The basic human dignity that comes from being protected from
slavery can be attained only when _everyone_ is free to refuse work
assignments, especially when they are_ _unsafe and ill paid. More
than 160 years after Lincoln’s proclamation, it is high time to take
care of the unfinished business of Emancipation.

_The writers, members of the New York University Prison Education
Program Research Lab, are the authors of “Abolition Labor: The
Fight to End Prison Slavery.”
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* US Prisons
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* Forced labor
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* slavery
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