Slavery As A Punishment For Crime - 2185 Words

It’s common knowledge that slavery was made illegal in the United States by the 13th amendment to the constitution, in 1865. However, it is less widely known that the 13th amendment still allows slavery as a punishment for crime. If a person commits an illegal act, it is perfectly constitutional to enslave them. This forced labor is one of the most profitable industries to the United States. The blatant exploitation of prisoners by the U.S. government must be put to an end. The U.S. government currently has about 2 million people incarcerated in the nations’ prison system. There are about 1.7 million more people legally enslaved in the prison system today than there were before slavery was supposedly abolished. The U.S. has only 5% of the†¦show more content†¦No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers’ compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign countries†¦all at a fraction of the cost of ‘free labor.’† (Goldberg Evans). Prison labor is used in many of the top companies in the U.S., including IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, and Boeing, Nordstrom, and Revlon. One of the most disturbing uses of prison labor is to make the nation’s graduation caps and gowns (Davis). The military even uses prison labor to make army uniforms (Gentilviso). Racism in the Justice System: The exploitation of prisoners by the U.S. is not color blind. There is a disproportionately large amount of people of color incarcerated in this country. There are more Native Americans per capita in prison than any other group (Davis). Latino people are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated than non-Hispanic whites (PrisonPolicy.org). Black men make up 60% of the prison population (McCalla). Michelle Alexander states in The New Jim Crow that there are more Black men in prison or jail, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850. This is not because of the erroneous idea of Black men naturally being delinquent. It is because the prison industrial complex was deliberately manufactured to directly replace the profit the country made through the enslavement of African-Americans. The