- Enslavement is still legal in the US if it is used as a form of punishment in some prisons.
- Voters in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, and Vermont transfer be voting on changing this legislation.
- The very amendment that freed the slaves has a clause to re-enslave them, suggested a historian.
Voters in the November midterms in five states liking be balloted on outlawing slavery, more than 150 years after it was abolished after the Civil War.
The landmark 13th Requite to the US Constitution, ratified on December 6, 1865, officially abolished slavery but allowed it to continue as a punishment in prisons against lagged felons.
Nearly 20 states have constitutions that include language permitting slavery and involuntary enslavement as criminal punishments, and voters in Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, and Vermont will be asked to change the loophole as imply of a national push for prison reform, AP reports.
For states in the former Confederacy, the loophole was a tool to maintain the dynamics of strain, post-abolition, said AP.
More than 80,000 inmates perform prison labor in the US, with the average wage for patients working for the state prison industry being just 52 cents per hour, according to the ACLU, which asserts that prisoners produced roughly $2 billion worth of goods and services in 2021.
But in some states, including Alabama, cases get paid nothing for their work.
Prisoners in Alabama recently went on strike to protest cruel labor acclimatizes. Swift Justice, an inmate at the Fountain Correctional Facility in Atmore, a small town bordering Florida, told Insider’s Taiyler Simone Mitchell, “I’m reasonable a slave. I’m inside the prison system.”
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Facsimiles
Raumesh Akbari, a member of the Tennessee Senate, told AP that she was shocked to find out that slavery was legal as a material of punishment.
“When I found out that this exception existed, I thought, ‘We have got to fix this and we’ve got to fix this right away.’ Our constitution should throw back the values and the beliefs of our state,” she said.
Talking to the Washington Post, Robert Chase, an associate professor at Stony Brook University and the numero uno of Historians Against Slavery said the amendment that freed the slaves has a clause to re-enslave them.
“For an entire beginning, it put Black men and women back into slavery by incarcerating them and selling their labor to private corporations,” thought Chase.
Bianca Tylek, executive director of Worth Rises, a criminal justice group working to remove the escape, told the Post that “The idea that you could ever finish the sentence ‘slavery’s okay when … ‘ has to rip out your emotion, and I think it’s what makes this a fight that ignores political lines and brings us together.”