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>Because it is enshrined in the 13th Amendment:

Permitted, not "enshrined". It doesn't mandate it, it allows it. And despite being allowed, all US convicts are paid wages. No one is sentenced to labor, hard or otherwise.

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The "wages" are typically something like 25 cents per hour, often much less than that. The work is mandatory, and sentences can be extended if you refuse to work, so they effectively are sentenced to labor.

What little money they get they immediately give back. Inmates are charged anywhere from $0.06 to $0.25 per minute for phone calls. Prisons spend less than $2/day per inmate on meals, barely enough for sustenance, so many inmates supplement by purchasing from the prison commissary. If that's not bad enough, prisons in 40 states are so-called pay-to-stay, charging prisoners for their accommodations.

Simply wrong and dishonest, yet so easy to google.

https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/work_programs.j...

I suppose you could consider 15 cents an hour “paid wages”, but to me that’s just a bad veneer for what our system truly is.

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