From Prison Legal News:
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Global Human Rights Clinic (GHRC) of the University of Chicago Law School released a comprehensive report on June 15, 2022, detailing the way American prisoners are coerced into providing labor for little or no compensation. The practice is a pervasive and disturbing legacy of the nation’s history of slavery which, the report argues, should be abandoned.
The report draws a line from slavery to the exploitation of prisoners for their labor. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime.” Many states treated this exception like a mandate, ushering in the next phase of American involuntary servitude — convict leasing.
In the South, convicts were primarily leased for agriculture, but other industries included mining and construction – even turpentine production. In the North, convicts were usually leased to factories. There they were often forced to work 14 to 18 hours a day and subjected to brutal punishment “for not working fast enough, for accidentally damaging equipment, and sometimes for no reason at all,” the report notes.
Read the full report here.
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