A Tesla Semi truck crashed into trees and caught fire off the side of a highway in California early Monday, causing road closures on I-80 for almost 16 hours. As reported by KCRA 3 News, Cal Fire crews first headed to the crash site near the Nevada border after 3AM local time.

Firefighters doused the Tesla Semi with thousands of gallons of water to cool its lithium-ion EV battery pack down to a manageable target temperature of around 100 degrees Fahrenheit while waiting for its cells to burn out. Around 4PM the crew got the batteries to a safer temperature and began work to move what was left of the Semi to Tesla’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada. The highway was fully reopened after 7PM.

California Highway Patrol told KCRA 3 that the driver of the Semi was taken to a hospital after walking away from the crash. Now, authorities are investigating the cause of the crash, including whether the driver had fallen asleep. The Semi was operated by Tesla, which often uses the class 8 commercial truck to haul freshly made EV batteries from the Gigafactory to its Fremont, California car manufacturing plant. In this case, it was not pulling a trailer, so it seems the Semi’s own batteries were burning.

It’s not the first time big Tesla batteries have caught fire in California. The company’s Megawatt energy storage batteries went aflame at a local utility in 2022, shutting down part of a highway.

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.”

As University of California students return to school this week, UC President Michael V. Drake has instructed chancellors at all 10 of the school’s campuses to enforce rules banning protests that block walkways, protest encampments and the use of masks that conceal identity.

A similar policy has been announced for the California State University system.

The new policy attempts to limit the kinds of protests against the war in Gaza and American support for Israel in that war seen at college campuses across the country last spring.

“Freedom to express diverse viewpoints is fundamental to the mission of the University, and lawful protests play a pivotal role in that process. While the vast majority of protests held on our campuses are peaceful and nonviolent, some of the activities we saw this past year were not,” Drake wrote in a letter made public Monday.

“I hope that the direction provided in this letter will help you achieve an inclusive and welcoming environment at our campuses that protects and enables free expression while ensuring the safety of all community members by providing greater clarity and consistency in our policies and policy application,” Drake said also.

The news comes one week after a U.S. district judge ordered UCLA to protect Jewish students in areas of campus where protests against the Gaza war are held.

UCLA was the center of a particularly violent incident on late April, after anti-Gaza war protesters erected an encampment on the school’s centrally located Royce Quad. The entrances to the encampment were guarded, and reportedly, passersby were only allowed to enter if they wore a wristband that indicated they supported the protests.

On April 30, a group of counter protesters, who appeared to consist mainly of right wing activists who did not attend UCLA, attacked the protest encampment with fireworks, tear gas and pipes. The response from law enforcement, particularly UCLA police and security guards but also LAPD was heavily scrutinized after it took more than three hours to quell the attack and the attackers were allowed to leave without being arrested. The chief of the UCLA police department subsequently faced calls to resign.

The ruling against UCLA came as part of a lawsuit from three Jewish UCLA students — Yitzchok Frankel, Joshua Ghayoum and Eden Shemuelian — who say they faced religious discrimination because they have a religious obligation to support the Jewish state of Israel. Because of Royce Quad’s location, the encampment made it more difficult for students who supported Israel to get to class.

The encampment was evicted on May 6.