Five states had propositions on the ballot to remove “slavery” from their Constitutions. Four passed, and the fifth, Louisiana, was a poorly drafted change that found little support on either side the issue. Wait, you say. Side? What side could there possibly be that was in favor of state constitutions permitting slavery? I mean, it’s slavery. Didn’t we fight a war to rid ourselves of slavery?
The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution contains a clause of which many are unaware.
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.
This is where the messaging of constitutional slavery is somewhat disingenuous. The issue isn’t whether people should be able to buy and sell others, but whether prisoners are subject to “involuntary servitude.” The issues within that category ranges from the deeply offensive and wrong to the banal and, well, expected.
Can a prisoner be required to work in the kitchen, laundry, or hallways of a prison? Can a prisoner be required to maintain his cell? Even make his bed? If a prisoner isn’t a “slave,” is the answer “you can’t make me”?
What about a defendant sentenced to community service? Can he be forced to pick up garbage along the highway or serve meals to the homeless?
But the impetus for this change is the abuse of prisoners compelled to work for “for-profit” businesses who buy cheap labor from prisons to make their widgets. Inmates may be paid pennies per hour (or day) while the business makes a killing off their work. The prison does pretty well off their labors too, pocketing the difference between what the business pays and what they pay the inmates.
It’s all forced labor, even if one doesn’t feel as much like slavery while the other smacks of it.
When the messaging is to eliminate slavery, what decent person wouldn’t be for it? The answer is that there are a host of implications beyond the ugliness of the word “slavery” that should be considered. In some instances, such as prisoners being trained to be firefighters in California, they are not only taught useful skills that could well help them as they transition out of prison, but they may be able to reduce their sentence. These prisoners aren’t forced to be firefighters, but are volunteers who choose to do so. What they are not is paid like firefighters would be outside, and this puts the program at risk.
The argument is that prisoners should not be denied decent wages and conditions for their work, even though they are prisoners. And to a large degree, they are required to perform work or else. That may seem pretty slavish.
On the other hand, prison isn’t a jobs program where, by committing a crime, you get a guaranteed decent income. Will the expectation that this shift will mean that prisoners will get better wages and working conditions as befits employees rather than slaves bear out? There is a serious potential that businesses using prisoners as cheap labor won’t continue to do so if they’re no longer cheap labor. If they’re paying the going rate, perhaps minimum wage, they might do better using labor elsewhere.
Even worse, some would argue that prisoners would be allowed to unionize like any other bargaining unit of employees, enabling unions to call a strike, picket and negotiate the terms and conditions of prison labor. That might make sense from a labor management perspective, but less so from a prison perspective. After all, they’re still prisoners.
If these jobs programs disappear from prisons, there would be a few fairly serious negative impacts on prisoners. For one thing, prisoners without family able to put money into their account rely on this income, poor though it be, for their ability to purchase goods at commissary. For another thing, many enter prison with no job skills at all, and these jobs provide them with something to offer when they’re released, even if it’s not much.
But the biggest negative impact would be the loss of something to do. Prison is boring. Imagine sitting on your cot in a cell, hour after hour, day after day, for decades. Sure, the tedium may be broken up with lifting weights, playing ball or avoiding a shiv, but that’s not nearly as exciting a use of time as it would seem. These jobs give inmates something to do with themselves, some sense of purpose, some way to fill the extremely long time until they walk out the door.
This isn’t to say that prisoners have not been horribly abused, between the niggardly wages or compelled service cutting the warden’s cousin’s lawn. And if prisoners aren’t running the kitchen and the laundry as part of their sentence, then someone else will have to do so and there is a possibility that they will not only cost a lot more, but provide far worse service than the prisoners provide themselves.
Wouldn’t the better answer be to create parameters to preclude abusive use of prisoners while maintaining the responsibility of maintaining prisons and providing opportunities for those who want to work? Perhaps, although there remains debate whether a prisoner should be required to do any work if he doesn’t want to. But when the proposition is presented as being for or against slavery, it’s nearly impossible to argue in favor of slavery. And to be fair, even if rules were in place to prevent abuse, it would still happen because these are prisons and no one has as yet figured out how to prevent abuse no matter what the rules say.
But as this fleshes out, it may yet prove to be another situation where the “win” creates unintended consequences that will prove detrimental to prisoners who really don’t want to sit in their cell idle for the next 20 years.
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According to the OpEd in the Times on 11/2 by (“incarcerated writer”) Patrick Irving, prisoners need their jobs not only to stay occupied and sane, but to earn enough for essentials like shoes. Thus, a ban on jobs in the name of avoiding involuntary servitude sounds like an unfunded mandate, unless the law also guarantees that (unemployed) prisoners are given everything they need.
(On the other hand, I would worry about applications of the totalitarian principle, namely, “Everything not forbidden is compulsory.” If work is allowed to some, it becomes de facto mandatory for all, just to keep up. This applies not only to positional goods, but maybe even essentials like shoes.)
About 70 years ago, there was a psychiatric hospital nearby that had a farm. Patients would work there, voluntarily. It was a win-win situation. The patients had something to do that made them feel useful, they literally enjoyed the fruits of their labor, and the hospital saved on food costs.
Then came the reformers who said the hospital was exploiting the patients. The farm was closed down. Food expenses increased. The mental health of the patient farmers deteriorated.
Often, the best therapy is having something to do.
Involuntary servitude exists whether or not the inmates are required to work. They can’t leave, and they are serving their sentences. In a state that amends carelessly, there could be unintended consequences.
Many county jails and some state prisons have operating farms to offset food costs and give prisoners a chance to work. It helps keep food costs down, as you said, and some give inmates extra time off their sentences for working.
There was a time that prisoners were forced to work and even rented out. Some of the nation’s railroads were built with convict labor. But I’m pretty sure that forced manual labor was outlawed decades ago.
By special dispensation from our host, here’s Bukka White, “Parchman Farm”:
Much of the point is to find ways to expand the criteria for oppression to include otherwise accepted practices, not because those practices are themselves so unjust but so that the oppression narrative can be furthered. Language praxis, name it and claim it. Prisoners doing work? Meh. People being oppressed with racism and the sl word? Oh my god I can’t even! Sort of like how disagreement, curtness and misgendering go from trivialities to literal violence when recast to serve the narrative. People respond to the narrative context, not the things themselves.
How long before someone gets the idea to apply the principles of power differentials and consent that are used with sexual relationships to the realm of labor, and starts arguing that working at McDonalds to pay the bills is “involuntary servitude”? Or being forced to hold a job as part of a probationary sentence or of parole. Sure, you get paid, but it’s all basically company scrip payable to The Man to live in his market plantation. All sex is rape, all work is slavery!
Hundred dollar car note, two hundred rent
I get a check on Friday, but it’s all ready spent
Working for a living, living and working
I’m taking what they’re giving
’cause I’m working for a living
Dammit, should have used “Sixteen Tons.”
Maybe other states are different, but in California where I spent several years in prison learning not to be such a reckless young man, nobody is required to work. On the contrary, working is considered a privilege. We only got a few dollars a day, but when you only need to buy shampoo, playing cards and candy bars, $100 is a princely sum, and we were very grateful for it.
The comparison to slavery becomes somewhat apt when you consider the “half-time” that is awarded for working. Some see it as a reward for working, others see half-time as the default and serving the entire sentence as a punishment for not working.
The real problem with prison labor is unrelated to concerns about slavery. Prison labor creates a danger because it makes prisoners valuable, as evidenced by Kamala’s fight to keep more people imprisoned so they could fight wildfires. It leads to things like private prison corporations, which then lobby for harsher laws to create more “customers,” and write contracts that require states to provide them with minimum numbers of prisoners or pay penalties.
In a just system, the imprisonment of citizens would be a cost to society. The taxpayers and their “representatives” would weigh that cost when deciding whether to institute laws that will cause people to be imprisoned. Making it profitable leads to corruption. Unfortunately that barn door has been open for centuries and the cows are all gone.
I have read your comments for a while, but did not know your background. (If you mentioned it before, and I missed it, I apologize). Obviously, I should and do defer to your experience and STFU here. But I am not sure that society, facing higher prison costs, will necessarily opt for shorter sentences but instead simply not pay the bill and thereby make prison more miserable.