People talk about the 13th amendment ending slavery, but in reality it just codified it into the constitution. Jim Crow and then the prison industrial complex followed.
"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."
Some people today want the glory of abolitionist revolution without having to pay with their own blood.
Yeah, maybe you can make an argument that the justice system can work differently in one way or another with diff tradeoffs, but if you set up the argument so that you’re in a morally superior position to the people who fought and died in the civil war to end slavery, you should expect and you definitely deserve very strong opposition.
Or maybe we should figure out what we want to do by argument and consensus, instead of blindly following the old colonialists and ex-fascists in Europe?
You do. USA is a world leader in killing criminals. Only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt kill more per year.
> Or maybe we should figure out what we want to do by argument and consensus, instead of blindly following the old colonialists and ex-fascists in Europe?
You don't do that. You blindly follow some 20yr old colonials who scribbled out a constitution 200 years ago.
So you're saying we could do better I guess.
> You don't do that. You blindly follow some 20yr old colonials > who scribbled out a constitution 200 years ago.
I guess, but maybe better to follow 20 year old colonials who wrote a constitution 200 years ago than to blindly follow inbred royal families with even poorer claims to power? I mean, as long as we're just throwing insults at this point, you have to see that Europe is at least as ridiculous (and at least when it comes to politics, arguably much worse).
> except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted
It does otherwise end slavery, but provides the above loophole for continuing similar practices.
Like, after you’ve convinced everyone that you’re morally superior to everyone else, do murderers get to walk free?
> do murderers get to walk free?
You're arguing against an extreme position that nobody actually holds. Most reasonable people would probably point to criminal justice as implemented in many European countries as exemplifying a more humane model which produces better long term results.
The carveout for the enslavement of incarcerated people also created a perverse incentive which played out predictably in the wake of Reconstruction's failure. If you're interested in the long and painful history of this fact here's a useful resource:
People in the South after the civil war grasped for any excuse to disenfranchise black people. Big surprise. That’s not an argument to treat prisoners any differently than we do today.
Are people incarcerated unfairly or are they convicted under unjust or unconstitutional laws? That’s a reason to agitate for change.
Are duly convicted criminals forced to do things they don’t want to do? Oh well, sounds like a good idea to me, I will invest in continuing that practice as long as the laws are fair!
Why are you now changing your argument to "they deserve slavery?" Didn't you just say the Civil War ended slavery?
We didn’t fight the civil war to end the concept of incarceration for duly convicted lawbreakers. It’s pretty easy to understand and accept that right?
And the people who fought the civil war believed that they were doing it to end slavery.
So perhaps your definition of slavery is inconsistent with theirs, and also out of step with the letter of the law.
And again, the 13th Amendment is the first time slavery was mentioned and it explicitly allowed some form of it. Maybe the Civil War vets were fine with that, but the amendment still codified slavery.
For many Northerners, it had nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with states rights vs. federalism. And keeping the Union together. Revisionist history makes it 100% about slavery.
You can say that people in the north weren’t angels, they certainly weren’t, and that there were other issues that motivated people to enter the war and fight for their side, there certainly were.
But the central issue of the civil war was slavery. If it was any other issue, the seceding states would have said it, and surely a compromise would have been reached (as in fact even today states have “rights” if not just the “right” to hold slaves).
They did. I get the feeling we’ve read different history books. So many reasons. What about the industrial north and the agricultural south? Played no part in the war, I’ve suspect you’d say. It was all slavery.
Guess what kind of labor the economy of the "agricultural south" was dependent on at the time. The Civil War was primarily about slavery, especially the expansion of slavery westward. To argue the opposite is ahistorical nonsense so false it amounts to an outright lie.
Even the Confederacy was open about the fact that slavery was the reason for succession. Just read The Cornerstone Speech given by the vice president of the Confederacy weeks before the Civil War began:
> [The Confederacy's] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
I get the feeling we've read different history.
Forget books or opinions provided by other people many years after the fact, forget my opinion, just look at what the seceding states themselves said to justify their secession.
For example, here's South Carolina: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
The VERY FIRST sentence identifies the reason to secede being that the northern states are refusing to send back their fugitive slaves!
And if it's not clear enough for you, they repeat it in more detail just a little further down in the document:
---
"In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River."
"states rights" to do what?
Come one, you totally changed your question!
They shouldn't become slaves. US prison slaves produce $11B worth of products and services and are paid 11c to 52c per hour.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...
I believe in corporal punishment and fines. Petty crimes get fines, say some number larger than the average payout per crime divided by the chances of getting caught, so that on average criminals lose money. And for violent crimes, lashing, flogging, something quick, painful, that doesn't destroy families and take years from someone, and that doesn't maim or disable (so things like cutting off hands are out). And for repeat violent offenders and extreme cases like murder and torture and things, death, the reasoning being this is not punishment, it is corrective action, and if the corrective action doesn't work, the offender must be removed from society as they are a danger.
I can see exile making some sense in some cases but I haven't explored that really.
All this is predicated on the society being one where victimless crimes don't exist. Nothing should be illegal that involves no unwilling participants. Drugs, sodomy and things like that should not be crimes, social pressure and social sanction are enough to deter things a society doesn't want but that doesn't violate rights of others, and punishments for them should not be codified into law.
I know my opinion on this is not a commonly held view, and would be considered extreme by many, but I do think it is more humane and productive than incarceration.
> 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.
So XIII explicitly allows for criminals to be worked without reward. Of course equating that with chattel slavery (which was prohibited by XIII)...
And its purpose is specially for a slave population.
Some developed nations have reevaluated this, to have convicts be rehabilitated and more collaborative members of society. And the inhumane conditions in the US prisons - for slaves - being valid arguments to prevent extradition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehabilitative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformative_justice
> How did the 13th amendment codify slavery?
It codified it the above sense.
You can say “it codified [slavery] in the above sense”, but obviously this isn’t the sense that people meant when they went to war to end slavery. And neither you nor I had to make the sacrifice that those people made to end what they considered to be slavery in the US.
Maybe it’s worth considering what the purpose of the 13th amendment was? It’d be a pretty huge mistake to conclude that the purpose of passing the 13th amendment was to enshrine slavery in law, which so many people fought and died to abolish, right?
That's the last I'll respond to you about this topic.
I love it when this one gets pulled out. UH OH, NO MORE RESPONSES!
Well I'm also happy to leave it here, that the 13th amendment absolutely outlawed slavery and that people arguing for policy changes in law enforcement are making a weak case that their poorly justified agenda is somehow on par (or even more morally virtuous) with the 19th century abolitionists.
NOW I'M TAKING MY BALL AND GOING HOME.
Freed slaves also were unfairly scrutinized for eligibility to vote. Does that mean we should never work to guarantee the integrity of our voting systems?
https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2020/8/5/private-c...
Some people might argue that we should pursue even more extreme punishments, to dissuade people from committing crimes.
So your idea exacerbates the thing you want to dissuade.
The concept is called recidivism if you are interested in corroborating or learning additional perspectives of this. And why it occurs such as the misaligned incentives that promote recidivism that we as a society can fix.
Maybe it's actually wrong?
Disagreements on values often masquerade as disagreements on facts, especially because people often use fact claims oriented to their audience’s perceived values to sell actions based on different values to them.
you're looking at this through the lens of more enforcement+penalties versus less enforcement+penalties, a false dilemma that's not what the rest of us are talking about.