Armstrong on Captive Labor

Andrea C. Armstrong (Loyola University New Orleans College of Law) has posted Beyond the 13th Amendment-Captive Labor (82 Ohio St. L.J. 1039 (2021)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

 

This article proposes a framework to understand incarcerated labor beyond the confines of the Thirteenth Amendment. A new congressional resolution to amend the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution aims to expand protection from slavery and involuntary servitude to incarcerated people convicted of a crime. The current Thirteenth Amendment, enacted in 1865, prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude for all “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That exception is used to justify forced agricultural labor on former plantation sites, involuntary cleaning after oil spills and other natural disasters, and work on behalf of private corporations including answering phones, sewing clothes, and recycling electronics.

This article argues that the 13th amendment merely provides the foundation for enabling the use of captive labor. Numerous federal and state statutes and court decisions build upon this foundation to create a system that is involuntary (including job assignments), uncompensated, unprotected by labor and workplace safety systems, and unrelated to a person’s development or re-entry. To fully address the harms facing forced incarcerated workers, the article urges advocates to go beyond strategies to amend the Thirteenth Amendment and to address the statutory and judicial decisions that exclude incarcerated workers from standard protections.