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The framers of the 13th Amendment did not intend to establish an empire of prison labor.
By Eric Foner
Mr. Foner is the author of “The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.”
Dec. 15, 2020
Convicts working on a prison farm in 1934.Credit.Lomax Collection, via Library of Congress
Early this month, a group of Democratic members of Congress introduced an Abolition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Why, in the year 2020, does the Constitution need an amendment dealing with the abolition of slavery? Wasn’t that accomplished over a century and a half ago?
The problem is that the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, which prohibits slavery throughout the country, allows for “involuntary servitude” as a “punishment for crime.” This loophole made possible the establishment of a giant, extremely profitable, system of convict labor, mainly affecting African-Americans, in the Jim Crow South. That system no longer exists but its leg