A group of Democratic lawmakers has reintroduced a joint resolution to negate a clause in the 13th Amendment of the Constitution that permits slavery or involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime.”
A group of Democratic lawmakers has reintroduced a joint resolution to negate a clause in the 13th Amendment of the Constitution that permits slavery or involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime.”
I hear what you’re saying. It can be awfully discouraging when you see seemingly no headway on a serious issue like this. There’s a lot of money flowing out of the prison industrial complex to stifle the conversation too because they’re making money hand over fist working that virtually free labor. I posted it here though precisely because I think it needs to talked about. It’s a disgraceful thing to still have legalized slavery in the US and it’s going to feel like failure after failure until we finally win and get it changed. Don’t lose heart.
Ideally, we could solve this at the level of the 13th, wham bam settled.
In practice, I think what we’re going to end up doing, if we do anything, is chipping away at it; legalizing drugs, moving away from a privatized prison model (And credit where it’s due, big fan of Biden making as much of that push was within his direct power), etc. I also think that it’s not going to be a continuous trip to improvement; I suspect the states that are now losing a bunch of immigrant labor because they “just wanted to scare them” and succeeded at doing just that, are going to go even harder on the privatized prison / legalized slave labor angle. Someone has to harvest those crops, after all, and it won’t be the average voter complaining about immigrants taking those jobs.