Involuntary servitude IS slavery by another name and we should not allow loopholes to allow the continued use of slavery by calling it something else or under the guise of punishing people.

Call it what it is....SLAVERY and it is morally wrong and an awful stain on our nation's history. No one should ever be subjected to slavery and slavery in any form should not be tolerated, whether in prisons or through human trafficking (which is essentially what prison labor is). 

Yes. The 13th Amendment reads, “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.”

When the 13th amendment was passed, slave owners panicked at the thought of losing their "property" that provided free labor and as a result, exploited the loophole in the 13th amendment that stated slavery was illegal EXCEPT when used as a punishment for a crime, hence the creation of "Black Codes" that gave them a legal way to get slaves by locking up FREE black people for the simplest of "offenses" such as walking on grass, selling corn or flour and being unemployed (which isn't a crime at all). 

As a result of the Black Codes, incarceration boomed and led to "convict leasing" which was a practice of selling the free labor of incarcerated people to the highest bidder (local and state governments and corporations).

Because of the loophole that makes an exception for slavery for people convicted of a crime, states can legally practice and make a profit from the selling of free and forced labor of incarcerated and/or convicted people. Therefore, slavery and involuntary servitude will never be complete until the 13th Amendment exception is gone.

Chattel slavery (The term "chattel" comes from Medieval Latin and Old French, and is similar to the word "cattle") was a system of human enslavement where people were treated as property and forced to work and exploited to make a profit for their owner.

Not unlike chattel slavery, prison labor today mirrors the exact same system of oppression and exploitation that our ancestors were subjected to. 

• Currently incarcerated people (and those on probation & parole) are referred to as "property of the State" and can be bought, sold, or transferred at the will of their enslaver. 
• Currently incarcerated people are forced to work for free (and in some states for pennies an hour) in extreme heat and cold weather and in hazardous conditions without the same safety protections and gear that are afforded to non incarcerated laborers.
• Currently incarcerated people are literally "sold" to the highest bidder by jails and prisons for a profit because the law frames this as "punishment" for a crime (our ancestors were also placed on auction blocks and sold as slaves to the highest bidder.) 
• Currently incarcerated people are punished if they refuse to work. Reports of such punishments range from being beaten by staff, being allowed to be raped and physically abused by other incarcerated people, being denied meals, recreation, phone and visitation and even having their parole denied.  
• Like chattel slavery where plantations warehoused Black bodies for the sole purpose of making a profit for the slave owner, ran by overseers and supplied a continuous supply of slaves by slave catchers, today's prisons are the new plantations where the corrections officers are the overseers and the police and judges are the slave catchers.

Once Abraham Lincoln "ended" slavery, to hold onto slavery, slave owners who panicked at the thought of losing their "property" and free labor, exploited the loophole in the 13th amendment and created laws that targeted and convicted newly freed Black people. These laws were called "Black Codes" and were created solely to hold onto slaves and to limit the rights of African Americans. Black Codes were simply a

continuation of slave codes that existed before the Civil war and, among other things:

• limited the growth of a free Black population and their social, economic, and political freedom by restricting black people's right to vote, serve on juries (or testify against white people), 
• denied Blacks the right to own property, conduct business, buy and lease land and move freely through public spaces through enforced curfews
• subjected Black people to paying fines for breaking curfews, possessing firearms and exhibiting public behavior that was considered objectionable 
• required Black peope to have written proof of employment each year and were penalized if they quit their jobs before working off an advance. 

However, the most central element of the Black Codes that truly took advantage of the loophole in the 13th amendment that contributes to the current use of slavery via a conviction and/or incarceration were vagrancy laws and “pig laws” where states criminalized Black men by making it a crime to be unemployed, or not working at a job whites recognized, and for stealing farm animals, thereby ensuring the availability of free Black labor AGAIN!

Douglas Blackmon, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008) noted that "Before the Civil War, police had rarely detained enslaved people, instead returning them to slavers for discipline", but "After emancipation, Black men, women, and children were increasingly targeted and arrested for “crimes” such as loitering, spitting, walking along a railroad, and vagrancy. These misdemeanors were created or strengthened by Southern legislators to harass Black people or, worse, trap them into a penal system that provided virtually free labor primarily for emerging new industries in the South—such as Chattahoochee Brick and coal mines in north Georgia. Black citizens soon accounted for up to 90 percent of the prisoners in dozens of work camps across Georgia and the South. They would be leased to brickyards, turpentine camps, lumber yards, and factories. In Louisiana and Texas, workers built railroad lines and subsisted on “food buzzards would not eat,” Blackmon writes. In Alabama and north Georgia, convicts worked nearly 18 hours a day in coal mines—amid standing water, poisonous air, and frequent deadly explosions. In Atlanta, they baked bricks." (Blackmon, 2008).

Because of the Black Codes, thousands upon thousands of formerly enslaved Blacks were criminalized for minor offenses and often things that were not criminal at all,  imprisoned and then “leased” out by prison wardens to private companies to be worked as free labor – hence the characterization of this and similar practices by Blackmon as “slavery by another name.” 

FYI: Black Codes were later a factor in the emergence of Jim Crow laws, which continued to restrict the rights of African Americans.

Lockup quotas, also known as bed guarantees, are contract agreements between private prisons and state or local governments that guarantee profits for private prisons by requiring the government to keep a minimum percentage of the prison beds filled at all times. If the government doesn't meet the quota, they must pay the private prison company for the empty beds. 

Therefore, by incentivize keeping prisons full, even when states have public policy goals to reduce incarceration, local police, prosecutors and judges choose to arrest, convict and lock up as opposed to give approriate alternative sentences such as community services, restitution or probation thereby driving mass incarceration and creating an endless supply of slaves.

Consequences nd harms of lockup quotas include:

• forcing taxpayers to pay for prisons even when crime rates are lower. 
• Private prisons incentivize incarceration over rehabilitation and education by reducing educational and reentry programs to not only cut costs but to ensure that people are NOT successful once released so that they will return.
• Private prisons lobby for policies that increase incarceration, such as mandatory minimums. 

For free? No. 

Of course anyone subjected to being in an 8x8 cell 23 hours out of the day would want to get out to keep busy to pass the time but no one in their right mind wants to be forced to work for free while their labor is sold to the highest bidder and and the wages they should be making, stolen by greedy governments and corporations.

No. Being in jail or prison and away from your family and society IS the punishment and when a person is sentenced, they are not sentenced to being a slave! 

Work programs and community service can be structured in ways that do not constitute slavery or involuntary servitude.

Yes but only if used the way they were intended, to allow incarcerated people to gain attainable skills to have upon release of to keep them engaged to reduce their chances of getting involved in conflict. 

However, work programs are not being used as they should be. They are being solely used as tools of slavery and profit and therefore are not rehabilitative.

Because wages are relative and can be rescinded at any given time or corrections officers will likely find ways to siphon any wages earned by incarcerated people, permanently changeing the state law via the constitution is the only sure fire way to frive the clear message that slavery is wrong, no matter what you call it! 

Absolutely! Incarcerated women and girls perform strenuous, demanding and dangerous manual labor alongside incarcerated men such as construction, road work, landscaping, breaking rock, shoveling and hauling wet clay.

Georgia was not only one of the first states to exploit the labor of incarcerated women for railroad construction; it also built the first all-female work camp in 1885 in Atlanta where the women were required to make the 40,000 odd bricks used to build the adjacent Fulton County Almshouse. In another female camp, the Bolton Broom Factory, women produced brooms. The number of incarcerated Black women far surpassed the number of incarcerated white women. While large numbers of Black men were arrested for vagrancy, many Black women were charged with minor offenses such as arguing or using profane language in public. (source: Women in Convict Camps)

The Prison Industry: Corporate Database exposes over 4,000 corporations and investors that profit off mass incarceration and mass surveillance and their devastating impacts on our nation, and especially our most marginalized communities. Corporations are assigned harm scores, marked for divestment, flagged from supporting prison labor, and more. View the database here.

Join the chapter, donate, sign our petition to #endslaveryinGA, stop shopping with businesses that profit from slavery, host a screening of "Working in Captivity, a Woman's Quest to End Slavery in Georgia" by our chapter Lead (Waleisah Wilson-Menefee), request a speaker, follow us on social media share our posts, YouTube videos and emails with your networks, join us at one of our upcoming events but most importantly, work to combat the false narrative that slavery was abolished in 1865  and doesn't exist. It does! 

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