A Future Without Involuntary Servitude? In California, It's Long Overdue | KQED

In the past, I interviewed a woman who repaired the industrial-sized laundry dryers at the California Institution for Women in Chino while incarcerated. While teaching at Vacaville’s California Medical Facility, I met a man who did landscaping in front of the prison’s religious buildings. There’s a meat cutting facility at Mule Creek State Prison, and a poultry processing enterprise at Avenal State Prison.

Behind bars in California, people make everything from socks to American flags.

There’s plenty of potential occupations for people who are incarcerated. Some jobs are underpaid, and some don’t pay at all. But legally, every able-bodied person is supposed to work. It’s written in the state’s constitution as a form of “involuntary servitude” — or, as many see it: slavery.

This fall, if passed by voters, Prop. 6 would amend the state’s constitution to no longer require people who are incarcerated to work. Finally, 160 years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, we have the opportunity to put an end to a direct remnant of this country’s most inhumane system.

How did we get here? Let’s start at the top: the federal government. As you might have learned in history class, the 13th Amendment ended slavery, right? Well, no.

It 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.

That exception (“except as punishment for crime”) creates a loophole for states to force people who are incarcerated to work without compensation.

The application of this exception varies from state to state. California is one of eight states where involuntary servitude is still a legal form of punishment for a crime. (There are eight other states where it’s explicitly stated that “slavery,” verbatim, is a legal punishment for a crime.)

With nearly 200,000 people behind bars, California has the most populous incarceration system of all 16 states where this form of punishment is legal. That massive amount of people working for free, or in some cases a few cents per hour, plays a valuable part in the Golden State’s economic system — one that generates the third-highest GDP in the United States.

Now consider that African Americans account for nearly one-third of all incarcerated people, but only 5% of the state’s total population. Do you start to see how slavery, far from being abolished, is actually alive and well?

“W

e’re not just simply trying to change the language,” says Paul Briley, Executive Director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, of involuntary servitude. “We want to change the practice.”

During a recent video chat, Briley gave me a bit of a history lesson on the roots of the issue in California.

It starts with California’s first governor, Peter Hardeman Burnett, a noted racist and slave owner originally from Tennessee. Burnett got into California politics on the tail end of the Gold Rush, after leaving Oregon, where he was also politically involved. While in Oregon, he helped the state legislature establish a lash law, which required people of African descent to leave the state or else face punishment in the form of whippings.

“(Burnett) wanted to create a white-only west,” says Briley, adding that Burnett also advocated for California’s Fugitive Slave Law, which put Black residents who’d escaped slavery at high risk of being sent back to Southern slave states. The underlying ambition of the law, Briley says, was to keep this new state’s Black population to a minimum.

In 1852, the same year California passed its Fugitive Slave Law, the state also established its first mainland prison, San Quentin.

“There’s a direct correlation between slavery and mass incarceration,” notes Briley. And so — aiming to abolish not just the language but the practice — “that’s at the core of our mission: dismantling the entire prison industrial complex.”