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13th Amendment Pros And Cons

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Everything that is mentioned in the 13th amendment makes sense minus this one part that says “except as a punishment for crime.” Basically that says you can punish or criminal with slavery, and that exists in the US and we do it all over the country all the time. It is called prison labor. We are kind of familiar with the idea. Prisoners making license plates is the classic example. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Across the country convicts do work in carpentry, swing, mining, packaging, fire fighting, telemarketing, fish farming, and artisanal cheese-making. The last example is why this is back in the news. Whole food took some flak for selling felon made cheese and at pretty hefty markup. According to the Civil Liberties Union, this …show more content…
Thus, things get more uncomfortable when you consider that America does not have a great track record when it comes to prison labor. After the civil war, southern states struggled with a sudden lack of slave labor, and this is because of the 13th amendment. Their solution in part was to use that same clause, “except as punishment for crime,” as a loophole. Many states passed broadly racist vagrancy laws that allowed authorities to pick up blacks on charges like loitering, imprison them when they couldn’t pay fines and lease them out on mass to places like plantations. In other words, the South got its slaves back. This system of convict leasing was not totally abolished until 1941. Back here in 2018 though, what are we supposed to think about the prison labor? Prisoners are treated light-years better today, whether they are working are not. But there are also so many more of them. America’s prison system has exploded since the 1980s, giving America far in a way the biggest prisoner population in the world. And that population is racially skewed in the extreme. Around 40% of prisoners are black, even though only about 13% of the country is overall. The 13th amendment, the abolition of slavery that happened 153 years ago, and now 153 years later, we have this prison system

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