Prison Labor Is a Stronghold of Slavery in the U.S.

In the United States, freedom has never been free.

Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans. (Photo: Federal Bureau of Prisons)

For Black Americans especially, the cost of freedom has been immense — paid through generations of impossible decisions and forced compromises involving the loss of history, family unity, financial stability, and privacy, Bianca Tylak reported for openDemocracy.

The costs that emerged in the struggle to escape chattel slavery continue today, embedded in the carceral system as an ongoing scheme of racialized destabilization and economic extraction.

In this context, efforts to establish a universal basic income in the US should not be seen as charity or even policy innovation, but as necessary reparations and redress.

The 13th Amendment did not abolish slavery — it revised it and cloaked it in legality.

By including an exception clause allowing slavery “as punishment for a crime,” Congress preserved the grounds for forced labor.

In the aftermath of emancipation, Southern lawmakers used the clause to criminalize everyday Black life through Black Codes, funneling newly freed people into profitable “convict leasing” programs.

The US prison population shifted rapidly from predominantly white to predominantly Black, with labor exploitation at the system’s core.

This laid the foundation for today’s carceral state — a system that cages more than two million people, who remain unprotected from slavery.

Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans. Slavery is not just the history of the US prison system. It is its present.