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Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

There has also been slavery going on in the U.S. Here's a story about a NY couple who was convicted in 2008 of keeping two maids as slaves: https://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/06/27/slave.labor/

[Edit: Fixed broken URL.]

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I know a lot of people, especially Americans, just can’t help but take a crap on America every chance they get, but we’re talking about a 15 year old crime, for which the perpetrators were held accountable versus an active slave trade in Saudi Arabia. Human trafficking in all forms is abhorrent but these are not the same IMHO.

You may want to read this:

https://theexodusroad.com/does-slavery-exist-in-america-toda...

I explicitly note that in my own country (NL) there are also many such cases, especially in the exploitation of women for the sex trade which is particularly lively here and a reason why plenty of women from Eastern countries are trafficked here, as well as the agricultural sector where people are grossly taken advantage of to labor under very bad circumstances often having to rent their bed for roughly what they make during a day of work.

It's despicable.

I'm glad that you brought up agricultural indentured servitude. I live in the midwest US, and I feel that the migrant workers that we hear so many bad things about are just picking the individually optimal outcome, and if we wanted to see fundamental change we need to punish the companies that exploit these workers for rock bottom wages.

The only reason they are exploitable is because they don't have property rights. Why don't they have property rights?

If you read the X-Dossiers (statements from victims and such in Dutroux case) you’ll find a lot of shocking things involving highly ranked people from Belgium, The Netherlands, etc...

https://ia801803.us.archive.org/14/items/dutroux-x-dossiers-...

Dutch speaking people can also watch this documentary regarding the X-Dossiers: https://www.bnnvara.nl/zembla/artikelen/de-x-dossiers-deel-i

I've heard of other recent cases of slavery, but unfortunately this was the only one I remembered enough details about to find a reference to. I'm guessing that for every case that's discovered and prosecuted, there are many others that are not (seems to be true of crimes in general).

And I certainly have no intention of crapping on America, which has provided me with many opportunities. But I think we should be aware that horrors like slavery can happen here too, not just in far-off countries.

You will be surprised to learn that Human Trafficking is a global problem including in America and is lot more than 1 or 2 isolated incidents.

Why do you feel like a factual comment (AFAICT) was "taking a crap on America?"

The information is new to me, I assumed human trafficking in the US was exclusive for sexual exploitation/prostitution, not labor.

Of course making something illegal doesn't mean it will never happen again, and slavery and human trafficking still happen all over the world.

Nonetheless, there's naturally more outrage about places (like Saudi Arabia and Qatar) where it's still quasi-legal.

Gives me a 404.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/nyregion/23slave.html

“Muttontown slave trial” will bring up lots of search results.

https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nye/pr/2008/2008jun26.h...

https://sherloc.unodc.org/cld/case-law-doc/traffickingperson...

Surprisingly, the link requires a final '/'. Usually this is optional, but not this time: https://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/06/27/slave.labor/

That’s because it’s an index.html file

https://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/06/27/slave.labor/index.html

Yes. I say surprising, because traditionally web servers redirect from the bare name of a directory to the equivalent with a slash at the end. This then either redirects to the index.html or just serves it directly. In Apache, these are both handled by mod_dir: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_dir.html. They are using Varnish in front of the web server, and I don't know if they want this behavior or not.

archive.org only seems to have indexed it for one month in 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080712034359/http://www.cnn.co...

edit: nevermind, original link needed a trailing slash

Sorry, fixed. (URL needed the '/' at the end.)

There are ~1m slaves in the United States.

A statement like this needs a trustworthy reference.

https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/findings/country-stu...

"The Global Slavery Index 2018 estimates that on any given day in 2016 there were 403,000 people living in conditions of modern slavery in the United States, a prevalence of 1.3 victims of modern slavery for every thousand in the country."

I'm not entirely sure how they got to that number though.

It's also important to remember that slavery is explicitly allowed in the US constitution, and there are certainly valid interpretations of modern slavery that would count significant numbers of those currently incarcerated as being victims of modern slavery - for example https://harvardpolitics.com/involuntary-servitude-how-prison...

Slavery is not allowed in the US Constitution. The 13th Amendment specifically abolishes it.

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/13th-amendment

With a specific exception: "(...) except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted".

So it does still exist - but America only considers criminals for it. From what I've gathered, though, that is still a lot of people.

Your link specifically allows it

So there are 403,000 living in the conditions of slaver, with a ratio of 1.3 per 1,000.

That is not > 1m as previously stated.

Again, it depends on how you define enslaved.

Whether that number is 1m, 500k, or 100k... who gives a fuck. It's 2022 and hundreds of thousands of people are living through modern slavery.

Southern border is completely open. Trafficking is the norm.

Had a group try and grab my young adult daughter and pull her into a van.

These are real issues that many Americans completely ignore.

No it doesn't, just because you find something hard to believe doesn't mean you can't check on it yourself. This isn't a journal peer review and citations are not required.

I don't even think this is what they were talking about but there are over one million prisoners in the US and prisoners can be forced to work without pay. The constitution doesn't consider that slavery but the rest of the world certainly can.

> The constitution doesn't consider that slavery but the rest of the world certainly can.

It does actually.

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.

Indeed. Thirteenth amendment, section 1.

Most places skirt that by paying the inmates for the work. However, the pay determined was decided in 1896 at 27p/day. That's 27 cents. A day. It might have changed over the years but that's what it was in Virginia when my step-father was a judge.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/

> The constitution doesn't consider that slavery but the rest of the world certainly can.

Section 1 of the 13th Amendment explicitly refers to this as slavery:

“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.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_...

I wasn't referring to prison labor although that is a valid discussion too. It's ironic that the "land of the free" only leads in incarcerated citizens, obesity, and diabetes per capita.

I also don't have a reference on hand. I listened to an NPR radio segment that blew my mind. There's a bunch of information from reputable sources but finding a specific number can be tricky. First of all, it's estimated because it's obviously unknown. Also, defining the "bounds" of slavery inherently changes the count. There is a fairly recent citation that states there are 400,000 enslaved people in the United States on any given day.

https://www.state.gov/what-is-modern-slavery/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_trafficking_in_the_Unite...

https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/human-trafficking

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/19/us-modern-slav...

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