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 with 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 range of 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 provides 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 does’t want to. But when the propositions 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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