The 13th Amendment Loophole: How Slavery Has Persisted To This Day

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a growing focus on penal studies and criminal justice. This has prompted scholars to grapple with the ethical and legal aspects of penal labor, questioning whether it resembles a contemporary rendition of slavery. On one side of the debate, scholars contend that the Thirteenth Amendment eradicated slavery once and for all in 1865. Proponents of this viewpoint attest that comparisons of penal labor to slavery erroneously conflate the two, as unlike slaves, prisoners are paid wages [1]. Some even go as far as to assert that incarcerated individuals are simply “paying” for their crimes through providing cheap — and in some cases, uncompensated — labor [2]. Meanwhile, on the other side of the debate, scholars argue that the Thirteenth Amendment only abolished one form of slavery, antebellum chattel slavery, while permitting the perpetuation of alternative modes of enslavement. They cite unremunerated and involuntary penal labor as a reflection of slavery, authorized by the Punishment Clause in the Thirteenth Amendment [3].

In this way, the two narratives raised by the body of scholarship fundamentally disagree on what “slavery” entails; while the first seems to solely consider slavery within the context of antebellum chattel slavery, the latter encompasses broader forms of racial subjugation. Using the first interpretation as the basis for my article would disregard penal labor’s clear connections to slavery. On the surface, chattel slavery and penal labor appear vastly different, with one system institutionalized and embedded in society as a whole, and the other affecting only a small portion of the population and confined strictly to prisons. However, upon further inspection, there are numerous correlations between the two, as both are centered on exploitation of compulsory labor for profit and racial subordination.

Just as slavery relegated Black Americans to an inferior caste, the loophole of the Punishment Clause in the Thirteenth Amendment establishes incarcerated individuals as persons without rights whose labor is property of the state. They do not get to choose where or when to work, as they exist not in the “real world,” but in their own separate realm of prisons, unprotected by standard labor laws and at the discretion of their superiors. Even once their sentence is over, they live in the shadows of the “indelible mark” of slavery, demoted to an inferior status with the label “felon” [4]. In this article, I will argue that although the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed one form of slavery — antebellum chattel slavery — it preserved and legitimized others. With the Punishment Clause, a new form of slavery has manifested through penal labor in federal and state prisons. Ultimately, the “indelible mark” of slavery extends beyond the confines of prisons, perpetuating even after incarceration has ended.

Varying Interpretations of the Thirteenth Amendment

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.

Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation [5].

– The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Depending on how one defines the concept of “slavery,” the Thirteenth Amendment can either be seen as offering significant promise or merely abolishing chattel slavery. Seemingly, it becomes a question of historical purpose, as articulated by Jacobus tenBroek: “[w]as its intent merely to effect release from physical bondage or was it to abolish as well the badges and incidents of that bondage?” [6] On one hand, as elucidated by Justice Miller in The Slaughter-House Cases (1873), it serves as a “grand yet simple declaration of the personal freedom of all the human race within the jurisdiction of this government — a declaration designed to establish the freedom of four millions of slaves” [7]. In tying the “personal freedom of all the human race” to the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment — equating Black men with their white counterparts — Miller seems to underpin that the abolishment of slavery included “the badges and incidents of that bondage” as well.

However, there are Justices who have narrowed the interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment, solely equating slavery with involuntary servitude. For instance, Justice Brown in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) asserts that “[t]he Thirteenth Amendment…abolished slavery and involuntary servitude…Slavery implies involuntary servitude — a state of bondage; the ownership of mankind as chattel” [8]. Simplifying the scope of the Thirteenth Amendment, Brown overlooks the nuanced, critical differences between slavery and involuntary servitude. By conflating the two, Brown misconstrues the intention of the Thirteenth Amendment, neglecting how slavery is race-based and far more insidious than involuntary servitude. Moreover, in defining slavery as “the ownership of mankind as chattel,” Brown only associates slavery with physical bondage, failing to grasp the extensive repercussions rooted in society.

Brown's grave misinterpretation stemmed from his oversight of the contradistinction, a pivotal aspect of understanding the Thirteenth Amendment — a point astutely captured by Albion Tourgée, Plessy’s attorney, in his 1895 “Brief of Plaintiff in Error.” In his brief, Tourgée queries what “slavery” was meant to refer to in the Amendment, asserting that it is “intended to embrace something more than a state of ‘involuntary servitude,’” since it is being used in contradistinction to that term [9]. The “nor” is key in comprehending the deliberate distinction between “slavery” and “involuntary servitude” — they are two utterly separate social constructs [10]. While “involuntary servitude” pertains to compulsory labor, the crux of what is defined as slavery, Tourgée contends, is the “estate or condition of being a slave” [11]. As Tourgée explicates, “slavery was a caste, a legal condition of subjection to the dominant class, a bondage quite separable from the incident of ownership” [12]. Through framing slavery as a “caste,” Tourgée highlights that slavery is more than mere bondage to ownership; it is a system of “legal subjection and statutory inferiority to the dominant race” ingrained in the very fabric of society [13].

Thus, by establishing that slavery extends beyond the ownership of chattel, Tourgée builds up to his argument of the Amendment’s true, intended purpose. He contends that the objective of the Thirteenth Amendment was “not merely to destroy chattelism and involuntary servitude, but the estate and condition of subjection and inferiority of personal right and privilege, which was the result and essential concomitant of slavery” [14]. In this way, the Thirteenth Amendment called for the restoration and protection of “the natural rights of man,” which had been stripped by “race discrimination” and “personal control of the enslaved race” [15]. tenBroek echoed Tourgée’s sentiment in asserting that the Thirteenth Amendment was supposed to eradicate “the involuntary personal servitude of the bondman; the denial to the blacks, bond and free, of their natural rights through the failure of the government to protect them and to protect them equally” [16]. However, despite these grand promises for unequivocal freedom of Black men, the Thirteenth Amendment delivered minimal progress beyond the initial abolition of African American chattel slavery.

The Punishment Clause in the Thirteenth Amendment

Looking at the historical context leading up to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment reveals the plausible economic motives behind the Punishment Clause. In the years preceding the Civil War, the United States relied chiefly on labor-intensive crops in international trade, using the profits to become one of the world’s largest economies. Between 1801 and 1862, the amount of cotton picked by enslaved individuals increased by 400 percent and by the start of the Civil War, the South was accountable for generating 75 percent of the world’s cotton supply [17]. Besides cotton, the United States also traded crops such as sugar cane, rice, and tobacco, which all required inordinate amounts of physical labor to produce. Investors capitalized on the trade of these cash crops, which surged dramatically with the use of free labor in production. Southern states, in particular, benefited from exporting these crops, becoming the wealthiest region in the country; the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than the rest of the South’s population [18]. As this region relied on free labor as a means to generate profit, there were profound fears that the abolition of slavery, and thus end of uncompensated labor, would have a detrimental effect on the South’s economy.

Despite eradicating chattel slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment provided a solution to the economic dilemma faced by the South through its punishment exception, allowing states to continue to thrive off of free labor as long as the workers were “duly convicted” [19]. As a result, after its inception, there was a dramatic increase in practices designed to criminalize and incarcerate Black Americans and recently enslaved people [20]. Rather than shrinking the size of plantations, as one might expect, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment correlated with a 286 percent increase in the number of plantations (in selected parishes in Louisiana) between 1860 and 1880 [21]. Likewise, tenant plantations in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina during the early years of Jim Crow also increased their size in acreage “from 19 to 24 percent,” operating primarily on penal labor [22]. Thus, “[a]ntithetical to its purpose, the Thirteenth Amendment turned from a shield protecting against one system of racial subordination (chattel slavery) to a sword enabling another (penal slavery)” [23].

As the Punishment Clause does not specify the limits of incarcerated individuals’ forced labor, courts have continuously struggled with the vagueness of the Amendment, often resorting to prison deference. While there are two primary interpretations of the clause, only one has held any influence over how courts treat the Amendment. One viewpoint, championed by the Amendment’s Democratic framers, is that a criminal conviction strips incarcerated individuals from any protection whatsoever against slavery and involuntary servitude [24]. The other, endorsed by the Amendment’s Republican framers, is that convicted persons retain protection against any form of servitude that is not inflicted as punishment for a crime, but for some non-penological end, including generating private profits and controlling black labor [25].

Most present-day courts have adopted the interpretation of the Democratic framers, adhering to the notion that “a sentence of imprisonment renders a person vulnerable to forced labor for any variety of purposes including generating public revenue or private profit” [26]. As federal courts have “construed this exception to allow for nearly all forms of forced labor by convicts,” [27] really the only instance where type of labor is restricted is when it conflicts with the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” [28]. In most cases, courts defer to prison administrators because the prison operates in an entirely different realm than the world that the rest of us inhabit [29]. Thus, when prisoners attempt to invoke other workers’ rights, including the statutory minimum wage, or even any wage at all, courts continue to rely on prison deference doctrine. Consequently, compulsory penal labor has persisted in the United States largely unchecked, with approximately 55 percent of the American prison population working while serving their sentences [30].

A Manifestation of The Punishment Clause: Penal Labor in Federal and State Prisons

Presently, it is estimated that well over 800,000 — and probably close to a million — inmates work full-time in jails and prisons across the United States. Prison jobs are primarily divided into two categories: prison and support work, including laundry services, food preparation, and maintenance work, and “correctional industries” jobs, in which prisoners provide a wide range of labor services, such as sewing military uniforms, making license plates, or staffing a call center [31]. In most prisons and jails, inmates receive no remuneration or only pennies per hour for their labor, “engendering analogies to slavery adapted to life behind bars” [32]. Pay often varies on a state-by-state basis and depends on the type of labor. For instance, in Alabama, prisoners earn no wages for “non-industry jobs,” however, work for private industries can earn $0.25 to $0.75 per hour. Meanwhile, in other states that pay for “non-industry jobs,” like in Arizona, the wages can be as little as $0.15 to $0.20 per hour [33]. On average, the minimum hourly wage paid to workers for “non-industry jobs” is $0.13, whereas the average maximum hourly wage is $0.52 [34].

While some scholars contend that a low wage is better than no wage, and hence is not reflective of slavery, these arguments neglect to consider the essence of slavery rooted in the prison economy, through the fiscal motivations of compulsory labor for profit. The minimal or absent wages given to incarcerated workers is instrumental to the affordability and accessibility of penal labor, a key component to reducing the cost of prisons. As Alex Friedmann, Managing Editor at Prison Legal News explains, “[p]risons cannot operate without prison labor. They would be simply unaffordable” [35]. Thus, the majority of the maintenance required for prisons to function is provided for by the inmates themselves, supplying vital jobs such as cooking food, washing laundry, and performing janitorial duties. At the national level, imprisoned workers contribute services valued at over $9 billion annually for the upkeep of the prisons where they are confined [36].

Apart from furnishing labor within the prisons themselves, incarcerated workers also deliver crucial services to both the government and the private sector. A primary example of the government’s reliance on penal labor is demonstrated through the work of incarcerated firefighters in Georgia and California. Nearly one-third of the counties in Georgia rely on the free labor of incarcerated firefighters, some of whom are the sole fire protection and emergency medical response in the entire region [37]. California’s inmate firefighters are paid one dollar an hour when they are on the front lines of the wildfires, causing some to draw comparisons to slave labor [38]. Similar to the non-inmate firefighters, they labor continuously for 24 hours, occasionally enduring shifts as long as 48 hours, trekking into hazardous, isolated environments with heavy survival equipment, gallons of water, and their tools. However, unlike full-time civilian firefighters whose annual pay starts out at $40,000, inmate firefighters only make about $500 a year [39]. As La’Sonya Edwards, a female incarcerated firefighter in California, lamented, “[t]he pay is ridiculous…There are some days we are worn down to the core…And this isn’t that different from slave conditions. We need to get paid more for what we do” [40]. Edwards earns around $500 annually working in the fire camps in addition to whatever else she earns on the fire line, which may amount to merely a few hundred dollars in a month [41]. Moreover, as civilian firefighters train via a three-year apprenticeship, comparatively, the training for inmate firefighters is less than three weeks and only requires passing a fitness test. Despite that the firefighter program is justified as providing rehabilitation for the inmates, Los Angeles County Fire refuses to hire felons, and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation does not offer official help to inmates who want firefighter jobs when released.

Although California has recently been exposed for its dependence on penal labor to fight wildfires, the government continues to conceal its use of incarcerated workers through the more palatable names of UNICOR and “correctional industries.” In the 2017 fiscal year, UNICOR — the trade name for Federal Prison Industries Inc. — employed almost 17,000 inmates, amassing the sale of over $453.8 million in goods, ranging from clothing and textiles to electronics and office furniture [42]. In total, according to data collected in 2021, the commodities, goods, and services produced by the market of over 60,000 captive laborers is estimated to be worth over $2 billion [43]. Private companies benefit from this market through purchasing goods and services from correctional facilities for a lower cost than they would pay typically in the private market. Colorado Correctional Industries, for instance, sold goods to around 100 private companies, resulting in over $6.2 million in profit for the state correctional industries program in 2020. Similarly, Utah Correctional Industries also sold goods and services to nearly a thousand private companies, including major corporations like American Express, Apple, T-Mobile, FedEx, and Pepsi-Co [44]. California’s equivalent program generated the most profit with more than $249 million in sales in 2019 [45], the majority of which came from textiles and construction, with $10 million in revenue from meat-cutting [46].

Beyond manufacturing roles, another facet of penal labor includes the prison farms of the South, bearing unsettling resemblances to antebellum chattel slavery. More than 600 state prisons throughout the United States have some form of prison farm system instituted, with around two percent of all convicted persons working on a farm [47]. Though touted as fostering rehabilitation and technical skills as well as reducing idleness, there are practically no benefits to incarcerated workers for field work. The penal plantations have direct ties to chattel slavery, with some even located on the original sites of the slave plantations, growing the same crops produced by enslaved people less than 160 years earlier [48].

Mississippi’s Parchman Farm, for example, a 18,000-acre plantation established in 1901 and frequently referred to as “the closest thing to slavery that survived the civil war,” continues to operate as a working prison farm to this day [49]. With Black Missippians representing 70 percent of Parchman’s incarcerated demographic, despite only comprising 37 percent of the state’s population, it is evident that racial discrimination plays a significant role in the functioning of these prison farms [50]. A parallel occurrence has prevailed at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola. Every incarcerated individual at the site, situated in land that was originally a slave plantation, begins work at the fields, harvesting crops such as cotton, corn, and sugarcane, for only $0.02 an hour [51]. Just as in Parchman, 74 percent of the incarcerated workers at Angola are Black [52]. The racial disparities within the penal plantations serve as a profound reminder of the enduring legacy of chattel slavery and its resulting racial subjugation, casting a shadow on the experiences of Black incarcerated individuals laboring in these prison farms.

A further way in which the echoes of slavery continue to impact penal labor is through the presence of involuntary work devoid of benefits or legal protections. Ultimately, the very crux of chattel slavery was not merely about a lack of compensation: it fundamentally stripped persons of their autonomy and self-determination. In a similar manner, from the moment they enter the prison gates, incarcerated individuals lose the right to decide whether to work, due to the Thirteenth Amendment providing for involuntary servitude and slavery in prisons. Hence, over 76 percent of incarcerated workers report that they are required to work, lest they be subject to additional punishment, including loss of family visitation, inability to access basic life necessities like soap and food, denial of opportunities to lessen their sentence, and even solitary confinement for up to six months [53]. During solitary confinement, most or all of their property is confiscated, and they are only allowed out of their cells for less than an hour to shower and exercise: the “exercise” is confined to a small, “dog kennel-like” enclosure [54].

Unlike workers in the “real world,” convicted persons suffer from inhumane working conditions and no legal safeguards. Excluded from fundamental workplace protections like the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the majority of incarcerated individuals are denied the protection of basic health and safety standards. As a result, 64 percent of convicted workers surveyed by the ACLU reported feeling concerned about their safety while working [55]. These fears can be attributed to incarcerated laborers being assigned to work in unsafe conditions without the necessary training, experience, or protective equipment that would be guaranteed in workplaces outside the prison confines. Therefore, numerous penal workers have suffered from substantial injuries as a result of inadequate workplace protections.

In North Carolina, for example, four incarcerated workers who experienced severe chemical burns from their work received nothing more than diaper rash ointment for their injuries. Similarly, in Colorado, a convict worker assigned to a sawmill was instructed by her supervisor to reach into a conveyor belt and dislodge a piece of wood. A blade ended up slicing into her helmet, reaching her skull and nearly decapitating her. Rather than being rushed to the emergency room, a shift commander sent her to the prison infirmary where she was loaded onto a prison van with two feminine hygiene pads on her wound, eventually developing an antibiotic-resistance staph infection due to the poor treatment she received for her injury [56].

Despite committing arduous — sometimes even life-threatening — labor and receiving minimal to no compensation, the majority of imprisoned workers are left with nonmarketable jobs upon completing their sentence. Of the nation’s approximately 800,000 imprisoned workers, 80 percent typically only perform low-paid maintenance labor, leaving them with essentially no vocational skills or experience from these dead-end jobs. However, this was not always the case: in 2002, around 6,000 incarcerated persons participated in over 130 vocational programs, designed to equip incarcerated workers with marketable skills and training that will increase their chances of finding employment after release. Yet, several years later, the number of available vocational programs has fallen below 100 [57]. As illustrated by N’Ashid Abdul Latif, a formerly incarcerated worker, “[t]hey took away the better jobs over time – those that taught us engine repair and other valuable trades. They should bring back jobs people can use when they get home” [58]. With so few of the available jobs for incarcerated individuals offering marketable skills and adequate pay, upon release, they are left with thousands of dollars of crippling debt in addition to challenges in securing employment.

Conclusion: How the “Indelible Mark” of Slavery in Prisons Perpetuates into the Real World

Upon leaving the confines of prisons, formerly incarcerated individuals are left with the label of “felon,” serving as an incessant reminder of their past wrongdoings and criminality. Preventing them from ever fully reintegrating into society, inevitably, the label transcends being a simple reminder. It morphs into a mechanism of social stratification, relegating them to an inferior caste of second-class citizens separate from the rest of society. They become “other,” individuals whose past continues to forever define them, without the same rights afforded to the rest of citizens. Thus, the categorization of “felon” transforms into a permanent stigma deeply interwoven in their very identity and self-perception, reminiscent of the “indelible mark” of slavery that subjugated and defined Black Americans in the antebellum United States.

Once branded a felon, the “indelible mark” of a criminal record remains throughout the rest of one’s life, pervading as a state of perpetual servitude. Today, a formerly incarcerated individual has barely more rights, and debatably less respect, than a liberated slave or Black American living “free” in Mississippi at the peak of Jim Crow [59]. Society has deemed criminals as persons entitled to no dignity or moral consideration, subjecting them to a lifetime of legalized discrimination and public scorn. Despite being released from the prison system’s official control, the stigma of criminality pervades all aspects of their life, with police supervision, harassment, and monitoring as normal occurrences for all those labeled “felons.” The label haunts them in notices placed in job applications, rental agreements, school applications, loan applications, and petitions for licenses, serving as a constant reminder that they are second-class citizens. Facing discrimination in employment, housing, public benefits, and education, it is virtually impossible for those sullied by the “indelible mark” of criminality to integrate into the economy and society upon release [60]. Some are even banned from having a say in our nation’s political process with restrictions on voting rights. Ultimately, these sanctions convey that anyone with the label “felon” is unwanted by mainstream society, stripping them of any sense of dignity or freedom. Unable to escape the shadows of this “indelible mark,” many have no choice but to revert to a life of crime, leading to an endless cycle of recidivism and permanent servitude.

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[5] U.S. Const. amend XIII

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[10] U.S. Const. amend XIII

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[19] U.S. Const. amend XIII

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[22] Goodwin, “The Thirteenth Amendment,” 935.

[23] Goodwin, “The Thirteenth Amendment,” 933.

[24] Note: By “Democratic,” I mean the Democratic Party in the 1860s, with a conservative stance on racial issues and opposition to radical reconstruction, and not liberal as it is understood today.

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[28] U.S. Const. amend VIII

[29] Raghunath, "A PROMISE," 400.

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[33] Goodwin, “The Thirteenth Amendment,” 903-904.

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[40] Lowe, "The Incarcerated," The New York Times.

[41] Ibid

[42] Moritz-Rabson, "'Prison Slavery,'" Newsweek.

[43] ACLU and University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, Captive Labor, 37.

[44] ACLU and University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, Captive Labor, 41.

[45] ACLU and University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, Captive Labor, 40.

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[48] ACLU and University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, Captive Labor, 34.

[49] Moser, "Slavery and the Modern-Day," JSTOR.

[50] Ibid

[51] ACLU and University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, Captive Labor, 34.

[52] Moser, "Slavery and the Modern-Day," JSTOR.

[53] ACLU and University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, Captive Labor, 5.

[54] ACLU and University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, Captive Labor, 48.

[55] ACLU and University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, Captive Labor, 62.

[56] ACLU and University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, Captive Labor, 63-64.

[57] ACLU and University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, Captive Labor, 78.

[58] Ibid

[59] Michelle Alexander and Cornel West, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2020 Edition) (New York: New Press, 2020), 141.

[60] Ibid