The Founding Fathers were okay with slavery as long as their purposes were being served.
Founding fathers? I mean, yes, but this is also still the case now, no matter what the founding fathers thought. Very few Americans support a blanket ban on slavery, politicians willing to consider it are even rarer. The only things that has changed are our purposes, and which industries benefit most from forced labor under our current economic system. This is a special issue of mine, an issue I've spent a lot of time on the phone campaigning for over the years, and the response from most of the people you talk to about this are disheartening at best. Most people think slavery has already been abolished, true, but when they are educated on the topic and find out about the exemption, the most common reaction is a shrug. Who cares about prisoners? They shouldn't have comitted crimes if they didn't want to be subject to enslavement.
The mistreatment of prisoners is apaulling, worldwide, but the USA really does seem to be particulary awful, amongst OECD nations.
Requiring prisoners to work for zero (or low) wages is worryingly common; But the US takes it to another level entirely.
This is because the 13th amendment ending slavery plainly states that slavery — not just imprisonment, but
slavery — is just fine and dandy for anyone convicted of a crime. And we wonder why blacks are disproportionately represented in prisons. It’s called slavery by other means.
Correct. Despite tireless efforts over the last decade, several states still allow slavery outright, and almost all states take advantage of the law to justify other forms of inhuman treatment. If the law
allows slavery, the reasoning goes, anything better than slavery is generosity. Even if it is violently coerced forced labor, labor for less than a dollar an hour, pay in the form of "scrip" worthless outside of the system, overly dangerous labor with inadequate protection, or whatever other twisted thing the states can come up with to call "not technically slavery". Most Americans have no idea all this is going on unless they know someone who is in the penal system somehow, but they also don't
want to know, and will urgently push away any discussion of the issue. It's not a major political motivator, though there have been a few heroes in this fight as well. In the last decade alone, nine states have finally outlawed the practice of outright slavery in any context, and the pressure on those that haven't is mounting.
Outside the prison issue, you have a few other avenues by which American money, law, or politics encourage or fail to act on enslavement. There's issue of human trafficking and illegal slavery, which despite much public attention and concern, has only been escalating over time, fueled by quite a lot of factors both in and beyond the government's control. You also have all but uncontrolled trade in slave-produced goods from other nations, which is bad press for a company when it is revealed but otherwise without consequences, certainly not any legal consequences, even for an individual or company who most certainly knows they are funding a slave plantation for their wares. Every time you bite into chocolate bar, there's a
pretty good chance a child slave was involved in its production. Two of the major players in this industry, Nestle and Cargill, were sued by two of their victims who escaped to the US in 2021, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the slavers. The good news is, though, we still get pretty cheap chocolate.
As Tom rightly put it, we are okay with slavery as long as our purposes are being served. Or to put it another way, we only object to slavery insofar as doing so serves our purposes. We cannot assume that "good people" will act whenever the law falls silent, not on such an important question. The time has passed to blindly trust that a politician secretly or nominally objects to slavery depite being heavily invested in it, and will do something about it on their deathbed maybe as per our "Founding Fathers". The Constitution is an incomplete document, and we need to get over our three decade long unspoken taboo on amending it, if our nation is to progress into the best of the new millennium's ideals.
