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Comment by _9ptr | Hacker News Reader

Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state. We have a similar sounding exception clause in Germany, and nobody would call the prisoners slaves.

That being said, I don't doubt that the american prison systems has severe problems, for example the one raised in the other answer to my previous comment.

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The text of the 13th amendment makes a direct equivalence between the chattel slavery it outlawed and the incarcerated forced labor that it left unaffected:

> 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

The plain reading of that text is that slavery remains a permitted punishment in the US.

I don't know much about constitutional law, either german or american, but I know you often can't just "plain read" the text.

Maybe some additional context would help.

Right after the civil war,

1. slavery became illegal, except as punishment for a crime

2. a ton of vague laws sprung up, like "malicious mischief". Look up "Jim Crow" or "black codes" to get a sense of these.

3. States started "convict-leasing" out prisoners as a source of income, often right back to the plantations that slaves were liberated from before. The convicted were not paid for this labor.

Additional context: Virginia Supreme Court rules that inmates are slaves to the state in 1871: https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/slaves-s... Virginia held the capitol of the Confederacy - the states that tried to leave the USA to retain their slaves.

I forget why the crime exception was added to the 13th amendment, but I assume it was to make it more palatable to the states that still wanted slaves

I’m not an American or a constitutional expert but my plain reading of that text is that the exception is for “involuntary servitude”. You could read it both ways but that’s how I’d understand it.

That's cool but I'm not talking about Germany.

> Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave.

The difference is so slight as to be meaningless.

> nobody would call the prisoners slaves.

We Americans don't like doing that either, because it makes us uncomfortable.

>Forced labor for criminals isn't the same as being a slave. They are not owned by the state.

I'm having trouble understanding how it's different. They are held by the state, forced to work, are not free to leave, and we have a bit of a history...

It’s the “convicted of a crime” part that makes it different.

So we've come to the difference of opinions, which is that your definition of slavery excludes those convicted of a crime, while others' doesn't. Not a very interesting point to debate on.

Yes, I think there is a difference between being kidnapped from your home, shipped across the ocean and sold into a life of servitude (with any children you have being born into the same condition, or yourself being born into such a situation) vs. doing labor as part of a sentence for a crime of which you have been duly convicted (and will someday be released from). That is my opinion.

Would your opinion change if the legal system that permitted people to be kidnapped, shipped, and sold, was the same system that decided if you're a criminal fit to be kidnapped, shipped, and sold?

No. The system that allowed the former was changed. I reject the premise that convicted criminals were or are "kidnapped, shipped, and sold" in any way that is comparable to chattel slavery. Were there some abuses? Probably. We live in an imperfect world.

Fair, not comparable to chattel slavery.

Do you know about black codes? I brought up the "who decides who criminals are" because it starts here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_(United_States)

Again, not comparable to chattel slavery, but related enough that it links to the page for chattel slavery in the first paragraph.

Everybody thinks those things are different, so that's not very interesting either.

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