As Juneteenth marks the end of slavery, lawmakers turn their focus to forced prison labor

Days after the official nationwide abolition of slavery in December 1865, Alabama made it illegal for black farm workers to sell a long list of foods, including corn, rice, cotton, and “animals of all kinds”.

Another law punished blacks for “disorderly gatherings,” a professor said in an article in the Cornell Law Review. Another one for carrying a gun. And flogging and branding were removed as punishments, while a new sentence was added: “Heavy labor for the county”.

To continue benefiting from black bondage, Alabama leaders took advantage of an exception to the 13th Amendment that outlawed slavery in the United States “except as a punishment for a crime.” This reservation applies to this day and allows forced labor in prisons in which a disproportionately large number of colored people are held – even if the Americans celebrate emancipation with the Juniteenth, which was newly declared a federal holiday.

On the same day that President Joe Biden signed a bill to commemorate the June 19 date, Democratic lawmakers reintroduced what they believe is long overdue to really end centuries of bondage: a constitutional amendment to the Repeal of the “penalty clause”. With key priorities for the Biden administration such as access to voting rights and changes in policing in Congress stalled, the renewed push to end forced labor in prisons is one of many changes that advocates shape as needed to embrace the symbolic embrace of Juneteenth with national measures to combat racism and inequality.

“We know that work on realizing this vision of a just and equal society is ongoing,” said Senator Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., At a virtual meeting on Saturday, two days after the proposed “abolition change” was introduced with Representative Nikema Williams, D-Ga. “We know that the legacy of the injustice of slavery continues today in many ways.”

Williams said she was “confident” the amendment would pass, noting that some states, red and blue, had recently removed similar exemptions from their constitutions.

“We are in a phase of reckoning with the history of our country,” she said on Saturday.

Scholars have debated the intentions behind the 13th Amendment, which allows forced labor for people convicted of crimes. But Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, says the southern lawmakers negotiating the measure are “addicted” to slavery and the white wealth it generated.

Massachusetts abolitionist lawmaker Charles Sumner wanted an explicit statement that all human beings are equal, Goodwin wrote in the Cornell Law Review, calling on his Senate colleagues “to purge the law of all existing pillars of slavery so it won’t find anything”. to which it can cling for a lifetime. “

But other lawmakers pushed back these ideas, and a simple declaration on equality did not come until 1868 when states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. In the meantime, Goodwin said, the southern states have wasted no time enacting hundreds of laws targeting Black people for enslavement by the criminal justice system – preventing them from congregating on street corners, staying in town for too long, or staying outside too long.

New laws paved the way for whites to put black children into years of bondage by claiming they could look after them better than their own parents, Goodwin told the Washington Post.

“What you find are these painful letters written by black parents – who had no opportunity to get an education, so they write the best English they can, the best handwriting – and beg and plead for it there is federal intervention so that they can get their children back, ”said the professor.

In some places, after the ratification of the 13th Amendment, the plantations were actually expanded, scientists found, while blacks convicted of minor offenses were sent to work in chain gangs on railroads and did deadly jobs in coal mines.

A judge of the Supreme Court of Virginia put it as follows in 1871: A prisoner is a “slave of the state”, his property should be treated “like that of the dead.”

Those brazen black codes and the Jim Crow laws that followed in the late 19th and 20th centuries may be gone, proponents say, but the penalty clause in Amendment 13 remains far more likely for black Americans to be incarcerated become. That legacy was highlighted in Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary “13th”.

Many prison workers earn cents an hour, if any, because they are not subject to federal minimum wage laws. A court ruled that Congress should extend these standards to people in prisons.

Some have defended the current system, saying that prisoners can do valuable and cheap work for the public good, from making personal protective equipment in a pandemic to fighting fires.

“My prison job made me feel like I was doing my existential duty to society: I made a contribution,” wrote Chandra Bozelko in a 2017 Los Angeles Times opinion article.

Those seeking constitutional change also see benefits from work programs, but say that anything but voluntary, paid jobs has a dark history. They also raise concerns about hazardous working conditions for inmates, with the spread of the coronavirus in prisons bringing a new review.

A previous Democratic proposal to lift the 13th Amendment exception for convicted persons, tabled in December, has not been pursued. Martina McLennan, a Merkley spokeswoman, told the Post in an email that “nothing about it. . . should be a partisan issue “and the senator” looks forward to working with his colleagues on both sides of the aisle. “

Goodwin said the topic had grown in importance in recent years. Colorado was the first state to lift the constitutional exemption in 2018.

“I think we’re still at the point where we really have to explain it,” said the law professor on Saturday. But she sees momentum.

“I think it’s prime time,” she said.

Copyright: (c) 2021, The Washington Post