Sorry, Obama: The US Has More Slaves Than Nearly Anyone Else

By
Liberal America
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President Obama recently signed an Executive Order closing an old loophole in the Tariff Act of 1930 — a loophole that allowed the U.S. to import goods made by the use of slave labor if onshore production couldn’t meet demand. That was a commendable act, and Americans from sea to shining sea are patting themselves on the back (at least, the ones who aren’t complaining that their Nikes will soon cost even more).

But it fails to address a huge unspoken fact about modern America — that we are, despite everything we tell ourselves about civil rights and our contempt for owning slaves, one of the largest slave-labor abusing nations on Earth. It happens every day, in every state of the Union…in prisons.

The New Face of Slavery
That’s because the 13th Amendment has a clear exception to the Constitutional ban on owning slaves.

“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.”

That might seem like a bit of basic justice to many people who think of murderers, rapists, and their ilk when they think ‘prisoner,’ but that’s not what America’s prison population looks like these days. In modern America:

  • Only 3.3% of adult, US-citizen prison inmates have been convicted of a violent crime.
  • 29.7% have been convicted of a property crime such as burglary, theft, or property-related fraud.
  • 15.7% have been convicted of a drug-related offense.
  • 12.3% have been convicted of a public-order offense, such as DUI or possession of a weapon.
  • 5% have been convicted of crimes not falling into any of the above categories.
  • 19.6% haven’t been convicted of anything; they’re just in jail waiting for trial.
  • And 3% are either children, non-citizens, or are in immigration detention (which has its own unique prison-related issues).

57.7% of our prison population falls into the “property crime, drugs, or public-order” category — that’s 1,311,00 adult Americans who work in the prison labor system every day but don’t fit the typical model of the irredeemable psychopath that comes to mind when you think “prisoner.”

(And all of this doesn’t begin to touch on the fact that the U.S. the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more crimes resulting in a prison sentence and longer prison sentences than any other country on Earth.)

But Is That Really “Slavery”?
Abso-freaking-loutely it is. According to the research of the Prison Policy Initiative:

  • The minimum wage received by a Federal prisoner ($0.12 – $0.23/hour depending on where they’re working) is less than the minimum wage in Haiti ($0.30 USD/hour).
  • State prisons are even worse, with most having no minimum wage at all. The average wage paid to a State inmate varies between $0.93 and $4.73 per 8 hour day of labor, depending on the difficulty of the job.
  • And in many states, the wages that a prisoner does make are seized by the prison to repay the prisoner’s “debt” incurred by existing in prison — making the entire idea of ‘wages’ moot in the first place, as no prisoner could ever hope to make a meaningful dent in the cost of their own incarceration.

There is nothing about prison labor that doesn’t scream ‘slaves’ — and the labor of these prisoners goes to build hundreds of things that everyday Americans use, well, every day. Prison workers supply:

  • 98 percent of the entire market for equipment assembly services,
  • 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes,
  • 92 percent of stove assembly,
  • 36 percent of home appliances,
  • 30 percent of headphones/microphones/speakers,
  • and 21 percent of office furniture — among many other things.

A Long History of Exploitation
Once the 13th Amendment was passed, as you might imagine, there was an explosion in the incarceration of Blacks in the South. Some plantations were converted directly into prisons — among them the structures that today are Mississippi State Penitentiary and Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana. Those prisons quickly filled with black ‘criminals’ incarcerated for any reason the local law enforcement could invent, and their labor was sold to locals using a convict-leasing system that was actually cheaper than slavery for the owners, because the State looked after the room, board, and health care of the workers.

That tradition has not changed over the last century. The excuses for incarceration were codified in Federal law as the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Poverty,” but the racial bias has, if anything, expanded dramatically since the end of the Civil War. Today, some of the most liberal Northern states have the highest black-to-white ratios of inmates, including Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey,  with more than 10x more black prisoners than white. (The national average is approximately half that — 5 to 1.) The worst place in the country? Washington D.C., with more than 20 blacks jailed for each white person.

Privatized Slavery
All of this is dire enough on its own, before you get into the sickening world that is privatized prisons, a facet of our society so ugly that the AFL-CIO has issued a resolution to fight against it. This particular subject is too broad to get into detail given the length of this article, but its relevance here can be summarized simply: there should never be a contractual obligation on the part of a government entity to maintain a ‘quota’ of prisoners, anywhere.

Prison privatization, the Wars on Drugs and Poverty, and the loophole in the 13th Amendment have come together to create a genuinely sickening situation in which the United States has more than 2.3 million slaves working within our borders. The only two countries with a greater slave population are China and India, and their populations are each more than four times ours — making for a credible argument that the United States of America is the most egregious slaveholding nation on Earth.

slaves

That is the true nature of modern slavery, and as laudable as Obama’s recent Executive Order was, it’s damn near criminal to pretend that it did anything to address the problem of modern American slavery.

(Featured Image courtesy of Cory Doctorow via Flickr, shared using a Creative Commons 2.0 license.)

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