LAWMAKERS TURN FOCUS TO FORCED PRISON LABOR
Exception in 13th Amendment still stands today
Days after the official nationwide abolition of slavery in December 1865, Alabama made it illegal for Black farm employees to sell a long list of foods, including corn, rice, cotton and “animal of any kind.”
Another law punished Black people for gathering in a “disorderly way,” one professor said in a Cornell Law Review article. Another for carrying a pistol. And whipping and branding were scrapped as penalties, while a new sentence was added: “hard labor for the county.”
Desperate to keep profiting from Black bondage, Alabama’s leaders were exploiting an exception to the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery in the United States “except as a punishment for crime.” That caveat stands today, allowing forced labor in prisons that disproportionately hold people of color.
The same day that President Joe Biden signed into law a bill commemorating the date June 19, Democratic lawmakers reintroduced a proposal they say is long overdue to truly end centuries of bondage: a constitutional amendment to remove the “punishment clause.” With key Biden administration priorities such as voting access and changes to policing stalled in
Congress, the renewed push to end forced prison work is one of many changes advocates are framing as necessary to back the symbolic embrace of Juneteenth with national action to address racism and inequality.
“We know that the work of making that vision of a just and equal society a reality is unfinished,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said Saturday, two days after introducing the proposed “abolition amendment” with Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Ga. “We know that slavery’s legacy of injustice continues in many ways today.”
Williams said she is “confident” the amendment will pass.
Scholars have debated the intentions behind the 13th
Amendment’s allowance of forced servitude for people convicted of crimes. But Michele Goodwin, a UC Irvine law professor, says Southern lawmakers negotiating the measure were “addicted” to slavery and the White wealth it generated.
The abolitionist lawmaker Charles Sumner from Massachusetts wanted an explicit statement that all men are equal, Goodwin wrote in the Cornell Law Review, and urged his Senate colleagues to “clean the statute book of all existing supports of slavery, so that it may find nothing there to which it may cling for life.”
But other lawmakers beat those ideas back, and a simple statement of equality did not arrive until 1868, when states ratified the 14th Amendment. In the meantime, Goodwin said, Southern states lost no time in creating hundreds of laws targeting Black people for enslavement through the criminal justice system.
Plantations in some places actually expanded after the 13th Amendment’s ratification, scholars have found, while Black people convicted of minor offenses were sent to toil on railroads and work in coal mines.
These brazen “Black Codes” and the Jim Crow laws that followed in the late 19th and 20th centuries may be gone, advocates say, but the 13th Amendment’s punishment clause remains consequential for Black Americans far more likely to be incarcerated. Many prison workers earn cents on the hour, if anything, because they are not subject to federal laws on minimum wage. A court held that Congress would need to extend those standards to people in prison.
Some have defended the current system, saying prisoners can do valuable and cheap work for the public good, from making personal protective equipment in a pandemic to fighting fires.
Those seeking a constitutional amendment also see benefits to work programs but say anything but voluntary, paid jobs continues a dark history.