ADVERTISEMENT
Faithfully Magazine
  • News
    • All
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • World
    David Wenwei Chou

    FBI Probes Attack on Taiwanese American Churchgoers in California as Hate Crime

    Ruth Whitfield

    God-Loving Matriarch and Devoted Church Deacon Among Buffalo Shooting Victims

    Crystal Mason provisional ballot

    Texas Court Must Reconsider Illegal Voting Conviction of Black Woman Sentenced to 5 Years

    Kelly Neidert UNT

    ‘The Most Hated Conservative College Student in the State’: How a Texas Student Embroiled Her Campus in a Culture War

  • Clippings
    Dr. John Cheng, 52, was fatally shot by David Chou

    Dr. John Cheng Hailed as Hero for Stopping Laguna Woods Church Gunman

    The May 13, 2022, funeral procession of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh in Jerusalem

    Israeli Police Attack Christian Journalist’s Funeral Procession, Beat Mourners

    cellphone

    Nigerian Student Beaten to Death, Set on Fire for Critical WhatsApp Post of Prophet Muhammad

    Indian Boarding School Students

    Christians Likely Helped Run Half of U.S. Indian Boarding Schools

  • Features
    children in a classroom getting education

    On Race and Schools, Here’s What Americans Agree and Disagree On

    Kelly Neidert UNT

    ‘The Most Hated Conservative College Student in the State’: How a Texas Student Embroiled Her Campus in a Culture War

    Stop Asian Hate sign

    ‘We Are Being Hunted’ — Asian Americans Say They Are More Scared Now Than Ever

    Ida B. Wells Doll Barbie

    Ida B. Wells Barbie Doll Faces an Uphill Battle Against Anti-Blackness

  • Inspiration
    • All
    • Bible
    • First-Person Essay
    • Poetry
    Everything Everywhere All At Once. (A24 Films)

    ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ & the Absurdity of Love as Resistance

    God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God's Unexpected Coming

    The Gospels Give Birth to Poetry (‘God Speaks Through Wombs’ Excerpt)

    two women talk

    100 Proverbs That Teach Us How to Speak, Listen, and Respectfully Disagree

    Rapper J Cole and a hanging tree

    J. Cole’s ‘Javari,’ the Cross, and the Lynching Tree

  • Members
  • About Us
    • Staff and Advisors
    • Write for Us
    • Advertise With Us
SUBSCRIBE
No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • All
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • World
    David Wenwei Chou

    FBI Probes Attack on Taiwanese American Churchgoers in California as Hate Crime

    Ruth Whitfield

    God-Loving Matriarch and Devoted Church Deacon Among Buffalo Shooting Victims

    Crystal Mason provisional ballot

    Texas Court Must Reconsider Illegal Voting Conviction of Black Woman Sentenced to 5 Years

    Kelly Neidert UNT

    ‘The Most Hated Conservative College Student in the State’: How a Texas Student Embroiled Her Campus in a Culture War

  • Clippings
    Dr. John Cheng, 52, was fatally shot by David Chou

    Dr. John Cheng Hailed as Hero for Stopping Laguna Woods Church Gunman

    The May 13, 2022, funeral procession of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh in Jerusalem

    Israeli Police Attack Christian Journalist’s Funeral Procession, Beat Mourners

    cellphone

    Nigerian Student Beaten to Death, Set on Fire for Critical WhatsApp Post of Prophet Muhammad

    Indian Boarding School Students

    Christians Likely Helped Run Half of U.S. Indian Boarding Schools

  • Features
    children in a classroom getting education

    On Race and Schools, Here’s What Americans Agree and Disagree On

    Kelly Neidert UNT

    ‘The Most Hated Conservative College Student in the State’: How a Texas Student Embroiled Her Campus in a Culture War

    Stop Asian Hate sign

    ‘We Are Being Hunted’ — Asian Americans Say They Are More Scared Now Than Ever

    Ida B. Wells Doll Barbie

    Ida B. Wells Barbie Doll Faces an Uphill Battle Against Anti-Blackness

  • Inspiration
    • All
    • Bible
    • First-Person Essay
    • Poetry
    Everything Everywhere All At Once. (A24 Films)

    ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ & the Absurdity of Love as Resistance

    God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God's Unexpected Coming

    The Gospels Give Birth to Poetry (‘God Speaks Through Wombs’ Excerpt)

    two women talk

    100 Proverbs That Teach Us How to Speak, Listen, and Respectfully Disagree

    Rapper J Cole and a hanging tree

    J. Cole’s ‘Javari,’ the Cross, and the Lynching Tree

  • Members
  • About Us
    • Staff and Advisors
    • Write for Us
    • Advertise With Us
No Result
View All Result
Faithfully Magazine
No Result
View All Result

The 13th Amendment’s Fatal Flaw Created Modern-Day Convict Slavery

FM Editors by FM Editors
January 25, 2022
in Opinion & Analysis
Reading Time: 6 mins read
0
empty prisoner cell

(Photo: Emiliano Bar/Unsplash)

Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on RedditShare on LinkedInEmail This
26
SHARES
ShareTweetPin It

By Kwasi Konadu and Clifford C. Campbell

The 13th Amendment is having a moment of reckoning. Considered one of the crowning achievements of American democracy, the Civil War-era constitutional amendment set “free” an estimated 4 million enslaved people and seemed to demonstrate American claims to equality and freedom. But the amendment did not apply to those convicted of a crime.

Mosaic Coffee

And one group of people are disproportionately, though not solely, criminalized – descendants of formerly enslaved people.

RELATED STORIES

Recent Violence Shows the Need to Teach More Asian American History

Abortion Right Guaranteed by Roe Will Be Replaced by State Power if Supreme Court Adopts Alito’s Leaked Opinion

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,” the amendment reads, “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.”

In other words, slavery still exists in America, but the only people whose labor can be enslaved are those convicted of a crime.

To some lawmakers and human rights advocates, that exception is a blight on democracy and the very idea of freedom – even for those convicted of a crime. As scholars of slavery and the histories of African America, our research shows the 13th Amendment’s exception clause reinvented slave labor and involuntary servitude behind prison walls.

Free labor

Since the late 1700s, U.S. states have used the labor of convicts, a predominantly white institution that came to include people of African ancestry. Convict slavery and chattel slavery co-existed. In Virginia, the state that had the largest number of enslaved Africans, inmates were declared “civilly dead” and “slaves of the State.”

It wasn’t until the early 1900s that states ended convict-leasing, the practice whereby wealthy farms or industrial business owners paid state prisons to use inmates to work on railroads and highways and in coal mines. In Georgia, for example, the end of convict-leasing in 1907 caused severe economic blows to several industries, including brick and mining companies and coal mines. Without access to cheap labor, many collapsed or suffered severe losses.

Today, the United States has the largest prison population in the world, with an estimated 2.2 million incarcerated people. For many of them, the 13th amendment’s exception has become a rule of forced labor. Over 20 states still include the exception clause in their own state constitutions. Thirty-eight states have programs in which for-profit companies have factories in their prisons. Prisoners perform everything from picking cotton to manufacturing goods to fighting forest fires.

In a 2015 story, “American Slavery, Reinvented,” The Atlantic magazine described the consequences of refusing to work. “With few exceptions,” wrote the story’s author, Whitney Benns, “inmates are required to work if cleared by medical professionals at the prison. Punishments for refusing to do so include solitary confinement, loss of earned good time, and revocation of family visitation.”

In some cases, inmates are paid less than a penny an hour. And many who served their sentences leave prison in debt, having worked without the protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act or the National Labor Relations Act.

In Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana and Texas, penal plantations exist where predominantly Black men pick cotton and other crops under the watchful eyes of typically armed white men on horseback. Some of the largest cotton production prisons are in Arkansas, helping to make the United States “the third-largest producer of cotton globally,” behind China and India.

Hulu

Ironically, many of the prisons, like Louisiana State Penitentiary, or “Angola,” are located on former slave plantations.

Modern-day convict slavery

Late in 2021, on the 156th anniversary of ratification of the 13th Amendment of Dec. 6, 1865, U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, introduced a bill to eliminate the exception. Known as the Abolition Amendment, the resolution would “prohibit the use of slavery and involuntary servitude as a punishment for a crime.”

“America was founded on beautiful principles of equality and justice and horrific realities of slavery and white supremacy,” Merkley said in a statement, “and if we are ever going to fully deliver on the principles, we have to directly confront the realities.”

Based on our research, those realities are steeped in the mythology that America is a “land of the free.” While many believe it is the freest country in the world, the nation ranks 23rd among countries that uphold personal, civil and economic freedoms, according the Human Freedom Index, co-published by the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

For U.S. analysts who examine the nation’s constitutional pledges and its actions, the country is less free than often assumed.

Over time, those realities demonstrate a conflict in U.S. history, illustrated by the 13th Amendment. Some states approved the amendment in 1865. Others, like Delaware, Mississippi and New Jersey, rejected it. Free labor was at stake. America embraced the idea of freedom, but it was economically powered by slave labor. Today, the net result is that America is a nation with “4 percent of the planet’s population but 22 percent of its imprisoned,” according to Bryan Stevenson writing in The New York Times Magazine.

Some readers might be puzzled by our discussion of “slavery” in modern life. The Slavery Convention was an international treaty created in 1926, and it defined slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership is exercised.” The “right of ownership” includes buying, selling, using, profiting, transferring or destroying that person. This legal definition of slavery has been upheld by international courts since 1926.

The U.S. government ratified this treaty in 1929. But in doing so it opposed “forced or compulsory labour except as punishment for crime of which the person concerned has been duly convicted,” according to the treaty. The wording of the U.S. government’s opposition is the same as the 13th Amendment. Sixty-four years after passing that amendment, the U.S. government affirmed the use of prisons for forced labor or convict slavery.

It is, then, unlikely the Abolition Amendment will become law despite the authority to do so granted by the second section of the 13th Amendment. A constitutional amendment would have to pass both the House and Senate by a two-thirds majority, then be ratified by three-quarters (or 38) of the 50 state legislatures.

Interest by lawmakers in abolishing modern-day slavery is nothing new.

Back in 2015, President Barack Obama issued a proclamation to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment’s passage. He praised the amendment for “the protections it restored and the lives it liberated,” but then conceded work still needed to be done to fully abolish all forms of slavery.

The interest in the 13th Amendment has also been widespread throughout popular culture. Films, books, activists and prisoners across the United States have for some time linked that amendment to what legal scholar Andrea Armstrong calls “prison-created slavery.”

But given the political realities and economic imperatives at play, free prison labor will persist in America for the foreseeable future, leaving in serious doubt the idea of American freedom – and abundant evidence of modern-day convict slavery.The Conversation

Editor’s note: This article was republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.


Kwasi Konadu is a professor in Africana & Latin American Studies at Colgate University and Clifford C. Campbell is a visiting lecturer at Dartmouth College

Leave your vote

0 Points
Upvote Downvote

Browse and manage your votes from your Member Profile Page

What's Your Reaction?

  • AngryAngry
    0
    Angry
  • CuteCute
    0
    Cute
  • CryCry
    0
    Cry
  • LOLLOL
    0
    LOL
  • LoveLove
    0
    Love
  • OMGOMG
    0
    OMG

REPRINT REQUESTS | MEMBERSHIPS | GIVE



Share This Post

Share via

Share This Post

  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • Flipboard
  • SMS
More
  • Report
26
SHARES
ShareTweetPin It

Related Posts

stop asian hate

Recent Violence Shows the Need to Teach More Asian American History

abortion protest

Abortion Right Guaranteed by Roe Will Be Replaced by State Power if Supreme Court Adopts Alito’s Leaked Opinion

Upcoming Live Events

There are no upcoming Events at this time.

Recently Published

  • Dr. John Cheng Hailed as Hero for Stopping Laguna Woods Church Gunman
  • FBI Probes Attack on Taiwanese American Churchgoers in California as Hate Crime
  • God-Loving Matriarch and Devoted Church Deacon Among Buffalo Shooting Victims
  • Israeli Police Attack Christian Journalist’s Funeral Procession, Beat Mourners
  • Nigerian Student Beaten to Death, Set on Fire for Critical WhatsApp Post of Prophet Muhammad
Mosaic Coffee
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Us
  • Shop
  • Newsletter

© 2022 Faithfully Media LLC, owner and operator. All rights reserved. This site participates in the Amazon Associates program, and other affiliate programs, and may earn a commission from your purchases.

No Result
View All Result
  • News
  • Clippings
  • Features
  • Spotlight
  • Inspiration
  • Log In
    • Your Profile
Share via

Share This Post

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Email
  • WhatsApp
  • Copy Link
  • Tumblr
  • Digg
  • Flipboard
  • SMS
close

Log In

Sign In

Login with Facebook
Login with Twitter
Forgot password?

Don't have an account? Register

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Back to Login

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Accept

Add to Collection

  • Public collection title

  • Private collection title

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. Visit our Privacy and Cookie Policy.
Send this to a friend