Did you know that slavery is still legal in these United States?
Yes, even after the night they drove old Dixie down, slavery is still 100 percent legal, with full constitutional support even today as I post this.
But what about the Emancipation Proclamation?
Well, people who pay attention to history know that old Abe’s Emancipation Proclamation was more of a calculated wish for all the force of law it had. A hopeful mission statement.
It was the 13th Amendment that actually outlawed slavery, with an asterisk. Let’s look at the 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.
Huh, except as punishment for a crime.
This little loophole was very convenient for former slave states after the Civil War. Many used this carve out to effectively re-enslave black folks during the Jim Crow era. Even today African Americans make up 37 percent of the US prison population despite only making up 13 percent of the national population.
There are over 800,000 American slaves working in the US prison system today. Over 4,100 companies profit from the use of American slaves. It's probably more, but there isn't a lot of transparency on this subject.
Why is prison labor so popular with American companies? As writers Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg say, “for private business prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment. insurance, or workers’ compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign countries.”
In 8 states prison workers get zero compensation for their labor. As always, slaves work cheap. In the other 42 states prison slaves are wage slaves like the rest of us, but they earn waaay less, an average of between 13 and 52 cents an hour nationwide.
At the same time, both prisons and American business profit big time from all of this unpaid and barely-paid labor. Estimates suggest that prison labor produces more than $2 billion in goods nationally every year - but that has got to be a serious underestimation. Prison slaves also produce more than $9 billion in services for a lowball total estimate of $11 billion annually.
As the ACLU notes, "Incarcerated workers are under the complete control of their employers, and they have been stripped of even the most minimal protections against labor exploitation and abuse." Part of the reason for that is that prison unions were outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1977. Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners’ Labor Union says that security needs in prisons outweigh prisoners' Constitutional rights to speak, peacably assemble or petition to redress grievances. As George Washington University's Justice Journal notes, this contributes to the dominant attitude that American prisoners have no human rights.
It's funny to me that we don't use words like slavery to describe this situation. The US government owns almost a million slaves. American corporations profit from renting the labor of these slaves so that they don't have to hire Americans and pay them at least minimum wage. That's messed up, don't you think?
I'm going to say something controversial - I don't think the US government should own slaves anymore! More than 150 years after the Civil War?! Unpaid or barely paid prison labor is an abomination. But the only way to change it would be another Constitutional Amendment abolishing the 13th Amendment's loophole about prison slaves. A tall order in these divided times. Another reason I think we need a new American constitution.
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Let’s Make Them Pay
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