California is well known for its costly housing, high end apparel, high class lifestyle, and entertainment industry. It’s also well known for its cultural separation, homelessness, incarceration rates and overall poverty. Unfortunately, it is not well known for the fact that California still depends on involuntary servitude to run the prison system. To put it plainly, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) depends on slavery in order to function at the diminishing capacity in which it currently functions.
The Punishment Clause of the Thirteenth Amendment states: “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.” This single clause supports the fact that slavery and involuntary servitude were not abolished. They are still very much alive and acceptable forms of punishment within the United States. While slavery and involuntary servitude are not written as a punishment within the plea agreement, or any other post-conviction sentencing agreement, inmates are still forced to work with little or no compensation, as well as face the risk of disciplinary actions for failure to report to their job assignments, or failure to complete a task.
CDCR functions primarily on involuntary servitude and slavery due to it being cost effective, with the added benefit of it being easy to justify punishing an incarcerated individual that refuses to perform the duties of their assignment simply because there is no protection for an enslaved population. It is literally written in the Thirteenth Amendment of the American Constitution that slavery and involuntary servitude are acceptable forms of punishment for committing a crime, yet the incarcerated individual is not sentenced to a term of slavery, they are sentenced to a length of time within a rehabilitation facility that chooses to enforce slavery as an additional form of punishment…