Four US States Vote to Ban Slavery… 159 Years After Abolition

I’ve been thinking about prison. Not because I have plans to end up there, nor because I’m a great and empathetic guy. I’ve been watching Orange is the New Black is all, usually in the hours set aside for my important literary work.

It’s insane that we send people to prison at all, let alone in such needlessly horrible conditions sometimes, but let’s talk about one specific element of prison before I end up on a poorly-informed high horse. A particular prison issue I’ve been thinking about turns out to be topical.

We probably all know from general osmosis that American prisoners are given grunt work to do. Printing car license plates is a classic, right? Sewing mail bags is another. But those particular tasks are probably pop-cultural cliches in 2022 and you just know there’s other jobs done by American inmates for peanuts or for no money at all.

That there might be some sort of sweatshop-adjacent scam going on in US and other prisons has obviously occurred to me before but I never quite grasped the significance of that thought, probably because I’m a selfish hipster idiot, or maybe because its just too dark and shameful to contemplate.

This is the news story I’m talking about:

SLAVERY WAS ON the ballot in five states on Tuesday, with four of them — Alabama, Tennessee, Vermont, and Oregon — approving constitutional amendments to abolish the use of involuntary labor as a form of punishment. The fifth, Louisiana, rejected the measure after the Democratic state lawmaker who proposed it wound up telling voters to oppose it over an issue with the wording on the ballot.

It turns out that there’s a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, the famous constitutional rule abolishing slavery in the US in 1864. Apparently it’s fine to make billions of dollars from “involuntary labour” if the workers have been imprisoned. Hmm.

It’s interesting that when we hear about slavery in the press, it’s usually about rogue individuals or in an historic context or in a country where human rights concerns already widely reported, and not about the two million people currently incarcerated in Free World slammers.

I won’t say anything more for now because I don’t know enough about the issues (I’ve just reserved two books on the subject at the library though!) and I am, of course, not an American. But, y’know, bloody hell.