Forced Prison Labor Is on the Ballot

For millions of Americans, slavery is on the ballot this Election Day.

To many, this fact may be surprising. After all, chattel slavery famously ended over a century and a half ago, with the Union’s victory in the Civil War. Yet the 1865 ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment — the provision in the US Constitution abolishing slavery — contained a loophole: both slavery and “involuntary servitude” were permissible “as a punishment for crime.” Activists and advocates, especially those behind bars, have been fighting this so-called “exception clause” ever since.

Due in large part to the exception clause, the exploitation of American prisoners is still rampant today. Hundreds of thousands perform labor for little to no pay. A landmark 2022 study found that incarcerated people produce more than $2 billion in goods and $9 billion in services annually but receive pay that usually ranges from thirteen to fifty-two cents per hour. More than 75 percent of prison laborers report that they are not allowed to refuse to work. Excluded from workplace safety protections and unable to join labor unions, they routinely suffer gruesome injuries and even deaths.

They perform a staggeringly wide array of jobs within and without prison walls, from staffing call centers to fighting fires. Thousands of companies, from Walmart to Wendy’s, profit directly or indirectly off of prison labor, but most incarcerated workers are forced to support their own sites of incarceration: cleaning, cooking, doing the laundry. So dependent are American jails and prisons on unpaid or barely paid “orange-collar labor” that the sociologist Michael Gibson-Light has argued that some facilities might have to close altogether without it.

Nonetheless, many Americans…