The 13th Amendment boasts emancipation, yet American prisons remain an exception. Photo from Freerange.

SADIA KHATRI | OPINION COLUMNIST | sskhatri@butler.edu

While the 13th Amendment boasts freedom from slavery, there is one major stipulation within the amendment that many are quick to look past. The 13th Amendment reads that slavery and involuntary servitude cannot exist within the United States — unless it is being used as a form of punishment for a convicted crime. 

This exception defines the lives of the incarcerated. Slavery, though considered to be abolished in American society, is arguably well and alive within the American criminal justice system. It is such an integral part of the United States but many people overlook it. 

Assistant professor of history Charlene Fletcher — whose research is focused on the relationship between slavery and convict leasing, in addition to work on what freedom for Black women really looked like in the antebellum South  — shared insight on the reality of the impacts of emancipation on Black Americans. 

“The phrasing of the 13th Amendment, although it is supposed to bring about change in this country, it actually worked or served to keep things the way that they were,” Fletcher said. “Instead of agricultural labor, or labor in general, in enslaving spaces, now you see them in carceral spaces — whether it’s in a prison, whether it’s a penal farm. If somebody has been arrested and their labor is sold to a turpentine camp or a coal mine … it serves to keep Black people specifically in these confined spaces.”

Over a million individuals are incarcerated in America, and it is estimated that about two out of three of these incarcerated individuals are prison laborers. These workers are faced with dangerous working conditions and virtually negligible wages. In Indiana, incarcerated workers are paid between 30 to 55 cents an hour for working for Indiana Correctional Industries. The value prison laborers generated is estimated at about $2 billion in goods and $9 billion in prison maintenance services. Of the incarcerated individuals who work, about 76% are forced to perform labor or face some form of punishment. This reality only becomes more troubling when considering how the Black population is often overrepresented in jails due to racial profiling, over-policing, and a handful of other deeply systemic issues.

When many prison laborers are forced to work, can we earnestly argue that emancipation from slavery fully exists?

Sam Jones, a senior vocal performance and German double major, noted that the current prison and police systems are not far removed from slavery at all. 

“The prison labor system is a manifestation of American slavery,” Jones said. “It goes [by] a different name now. It just goes through more legal barriers.”

Prison laborers face abominable work conditions with little to no pay, and a proper conversation about the state of incarceration today is not complete if the origins of prisons and policing are ignored. The police state, as we know it today, is a legacy of slavery.  

“One of the things that you see happening after the Civil War, after the abolishment of slavery, is you see this sharp uptick of the criminalization of Black people, but also the subsequent arrests and confining or incarceration of Black people,” Fletcher said. “We’re talking about people being convicted of stealing a fence post … In the South, there were laws known as pig laws, where you were accused of taking a hog, you could be incarcerated for these things, whether you actually did it or not.” 

Our policing system directly descends from slavery, and many of our prisons employ a system of forced labor that bears a resemblance to an era of slavery we claim to have abolished — the system was designed to imprison and enslave, one way or another. Known as the prison industrial complex, this systemic overlap between industry and governmental interest in upholding incarceration has major impacts. 

The prison industrial complex, coupled with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling permitting the arrest of homeless or unhoused individuals sleeping in public spaces, raises concerns about what a lack of stable housing could entail for the average American. In the decision, the Supreme Court ruled that cities are allowed to arrest individuals for sleeping in public spaces. 37.1 million American households are considered to be cost-burdened homeowners or renters, and even within the homeless population, a significant proportion are totally unsheltered. 

A lack of stable housing should not be a prison sentence. Though this recent ruling is concerning, Dr. Fletcher emphasized that similar legislation and policies have almost always been in place. 

“After slavery was abolished, you have a lot of different laws that are being passed at that time,” Fletcher said. “One of those types of laws [was] known as vagrancy laws. Vagrancy was literally a catch-all. If you were … not where you were supposed to be, or if you were homeless or if you were unemployed, you were considered a vagrant, and could find yourself in jail … We still have laws for vagrancy.”

Vagrancy laws and other parts of the Black Codes sought to restrict the freedom and liberties of Black Americans, and these laws and policies persist. 

“It’s similar to Jim Crow era laws,” Jones said. “Something like jaywalking … no one, for the most part, nowadays gets punished for that … [But] if an officer really wants to target somebody or a certain group of people, they can just do that, because the law says so, even if … it’s not enforced for the general population.”

Emma Podvorec, a junior criminology-psychology and anthropology double major, emphasized that there are a number of factors that could put the typical American at risk of housing instability. 

“People already can’t afford their housing or their mortgages, and there’s already a shortage when it comes to affordable housing to begin with, that it’s just unfortunately going to raise the prison population,” Podvorec said. “Especially since there’s no movement to raise the minimum wage and people are already having to work three jobs or more just to keep their family fed and housed.”

A lack of financial stability can easily contribute to housing instability, which puts one at a greater risk of homelessness, which could lead to arrest and incarceration. Homelessness should not put someone at risk of potentially having to forcefully labor in dangerous conditions.  

Emancipation from one system of oppression means very little when other similar systems are not only in place but thriving; American society is far from abolishing slavery. No person should have to face the risk of incarceration — and moreover, the risk of negligibly paid labor — because they do not have stable housing. 

For a country that boasts freedom and liberty for all, a sizable portion of our population is incarcerated. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with some individual states also having higher incarceration rates than various other countries. There are 24 states, one of which is Indiana, that have incarceration rates per capita that exceed that of the United States as a whole. There is not enough boasting about freedom and liberty that can offset the ridiculous rate at which Americans face incarceration. 

There is nothing free, liberated or emancipated about a society where force — and scarcely paid — labor is a legitimate punishment many risk facing.