A group of Democratic lawmakers has reintroduced a joint resolution to negate a clause in the 13th Amendment of the Constitution that permits slavery or involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime.”

  • DoucheAsaurusOP
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    21 year ago

    I hear what you’re saying. It can be awfully discouraging when you see seemingly no headway on a serious issue like this. There’s a lot of money flowing out of the prison industrial complex to stifle the conversation too because they’re making money hand over fist working that virtually free labor. I posted it here though precisely because I think it needs to talked about. It’s a disgraceful thing to still have legalized slavery in the US and it’s going to feel like failure after failure until we finally win and get it changed. Don’t lose heart.

    • HopeOfTheGunblade
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      21 year ago

      Ideally, we could solve this at the level of the 13th, wham bam settled.

      In practice, I think what we’re going to end up doing, if we do anything, is chipping away at it; legalizing drugs, moving away from a privatized prison model (And credit where it’s due, big fan of Biden making as much of that push was within his direct power), etc. I also think that it’s not going to be a continuous trip to improvement; I suspect the states that are now losing a bunch of immigrant labor because they “just wanted to scare them” and succeeded at doing just that, are going to go even harder on the privatized prison / legalized slave labor angle. Someone has to harvest those crops, after all, and it won’t be the average voter complaining about immigrants taking those jobs.