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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

It is slave labor. The US constitution bans slavery except for prisoners. Here is the text of the Thirteenth Amendment, Section 1: “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.”

– edit: To add a bit more substance, here is an article about the recent Georgia prison strike and the Thirteenth Amendment: http://prisonlaw.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/prison-labor-and-t...

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The Constitution prohibits slavery except as a punishment for crime. The punishment for each crime is set by a judge during sentencing after a guilty conviction and it is very specific. Sentencing a prisoner to punishment in the form of prison for 10 years is not the same as sentencing to punishment of slave labor for 10 years. The two are completely different. If a judge has not sentenced the prisoner to slave labor as punishment, it is not Constitutional to have prison slave labor.

Slave labor convictions for blacks were very common in the South from reconstruction up until World War II when they fell out of favor. For 70 years from 1870 to 1940 it was quite routine whenever slave laborers were needed for companies to pay local sheriffs to round up blacks on bogus charges such as loitering, convict them in sham trials, and then sell them to corporations to do hard labor 6 days a week 14 hours a day. This is extensively documented in Blackmon's "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II."

The article I linked to claims that the language of the amendment bars legal challenges to unpaid or minimally paid prison labor. (It also mentions the book you mentioned.) The Thirteenth Amendment which is ostensibly about slavery would seem to ban prison labor outside of prisons. That’s the connection I wanted to make. Is there something to that?

I know that I’m casting a wide net. Prison labor is certainly not the same as slavery as it existed in the US decades ago. I do think, though, that I’m at least somewhat justified in calling prison labor slavery. Prisoners are forced to do it and they are not paid or paid very little. (This is not necessarily a moral judgment. Just because something meets some definition doesn’t mean it’s wrong.)

"The Thirteenth Amendment which is ostensibly about slavery would seem to ban prison labor outside of prisons."

That seems like quite a stretch and isn't really consistent with the language.

It seems like at least some law professors agree with you but courts have generally decided otherwise: http://prisonlaw.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/a-different-take-o...

That article starts with a reference to an earlier blog post which seems to be more in line with what you are saying. Perhaps in future you could read the articles you link to and include the relevant information? A link is not an argument in itself.

I already linked to and extensively quoted the other article this article links to a few levels higher up ;-)

If this continue, soon the US will become worse than the Soviet Gulag. Only 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, with a further 6 to 7 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR. In the US 7,225,800 people at yearend 2009 were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole — about 3.1% of adults in the U.S. cresident population, or 1 in every 32 adults.

(Source wikipedia.)

I also recommend reading Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie, on why the US should empty their prisons: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartl...

to me that means that labor has to be ordered by the judge as part of the punishment

That’s what I thought when I first read the text but apparently not. Quote from the article I linked: “In light of its plain text, the Thirteenth Amendment has generally been interpreted to bar legal challenges to unpaid or minimally paid prison labor.”

I'm not so sure. If it's ordinary for prisoners to work for minimal compensation, and the judge orders you to go to prison, he has implicitly included the possibility of labor in that sentence. There are a lot of other aspects of prison that would not fly when you're dealing with a free person but which are generally considered to be implicit when you're sent to jail.

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