This is not about wage slaves or household drudges who are treated like slaves. In the recent National Geographic, there is a story and pictures of actual slaves in countries around the world. Some of these are so-called “white slaves” who are women forced into prostitution, a name given to women in this kind of bondage despite their color. The article points out that there are zero countries where slavery is legal while physical slavery is practiced in most countries all over the world. What I mean to talk about here is the slavery that is legal and permitted in the United States of America.
Slavery exists here clandestinely – but it exists. Legal slavery is allowed in our Constitution. It is in the 13th Amendment that frees those held as slaves in states allowing slavery at the end of the Civil War. If you read the Amendment, you see there is a “but”. The Amendment reads “…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…” The words after “except” is the rationale for slavery in our land of the free and the brave.
Going to prison is “involuntary servitude”. You can be made to work – the old prison yard where boulders were reduced to small stones is the prototype. We have improved on that image by providing useful work making license plates with the prisoner given token payment that can be used as he or she wills. But the practice of enslaving millions convicted of crimes is part of our life. A really murky place we can go is the enslavement (without useful work) of suspected enemies and myriads of refugees who try to enter our country and cross our borders to flee terrible conditions. Their belief is that things will be better when they arrive here and do not speak the language or have obeyed our laws.
I think that we do enslave and put to work those who go to jail. They sometimes languish there without anything to do but, when they are given work, like slaves, they do not work for themselves. We have not escaped the scourge of civilization only to give it another name. We must not be going about the work of civilization correctly if we have a class of people, usually recidivists, who people our jails and prisons where no reformation is carried out and modern penology is supposed to scientifically and humanely treat the troubled people who are enmeshed in our system of crime and punishment. Slavery is not the answer.