By: Serena Edwards
The 13th Amendment is famously known as the amendment that prohibits slavery; however, millions of inmates are subjected to slavery conditions because of a loophole within the 13th Amendment. Slavery never went away; if anything, the government became more subtle in how it implemented it.
The 13th Amendment 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.”
It is important to note the section where it states, “except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall.” This part is often overlooked by citizens and abused and manipulated by the government.
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, which freed all enslaved people who were in rebellion against the Union. However, this did not free the enslaved people working on plantations. The last enslaved person to be “freed” was on June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas (Juneteenth).
Slavery within the United States (U.S.) was around for centuries before being “ratified”. The horrific conditions that Black people had to endure have been taught, but not to the fullest extent it should. When enslaved people became free, they were let into a world that still felt like they were left behind at the plantation. The government didn’t know what to do with enslaved people since there was an extensive number of people who were now free.
The Black Codes came into effect by the government shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation.
According to History.com, “Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War.”
The government started putting harder punishments on crimes and criminalizing things such as homelessness to bring Black people back to prison, ultimately enslaving them all over again.
37 percent of people incarcerated in the U.S. are Black as of 2025; however, Black people make up only 14.4 percent of the population within the U.S. According to the Pew Research Center, “This marks a 33% increase since 2000, when there were 36.2 million Black people living in the U.S.”
Within the prison system, officers have used slavery tactics to make inmates do unpaid labor. Within the 13th Amendment, slavery is condoned as punishment for those who have committed a crime. Due to this loophole, the prison system has abused this and overworked its inmates. “U.S. law also explicitly excludes incarcerated workers from the most universally recognized workplace protections. Incarcerated workers are not covered by minimum wage laws or overtime protection, are not afforded the right to unionize, and are denied workplace safety guarantees,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
“Despite producing billions of dollars in value for the benefit of prisons and the private sector, incarcerated workers have almost no labor rights and are paid very little—if they are paid at all—for menial, exploitative, and at times dangerous work that fails to prepare them for life beyond incarceration,” according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
The documentary 13th breaks down how the 13th Amendment didn’t abolish slavery, but rather just modernized it to seem more human.
The school-to-prison pipeline is a tactic used in schools that allows police presence within schools and ultimately allows students to be arrested as discipline. This policy in school ultimately traumatizes students and trains their minds to get used to the prison system. This particularly affects Black children at a disproportionate rate.
“Black students with disabilities are three times more likely to receive short-term suspensions than their white counterparts, and are more than four times as likely to end up in correctional facilities,” according to ACLU.
The system is broken and has conditioned Black students to see incarceration as a mainstream route of life. Giving suspensions for minor infractions leads students to get involved with other dangerous activities, such as gangs.
Even within the courts, judges find it reasonable to charge children with jail time for being “rude”. Donna Scott Davenport, a judge in Tennessee, is particularly hard on children by arresting them and teaching them a “lesson”.
“For cursing, she said, she typically sentenced kids to two to 10 days in jail. ‘Was I in violation?’ she said. ‘Heck, yes. But am I going to allow a child to cuss anyone out? Heck, no,’ according to ProPublica.
These harmful policies and rulings lead to the never-ending cycle of Black children learning comfort within the prison system.
Rikers Island is one of the biggest prisons within the US and houses over a thousand inmates from all different age ranges, starting from eighteen. The conditions are so inhumane that they consider Rikers Island a humanitarian crisis. Many people have died in these facilities due to working extensive hours and living with limited resources. These circumstances are interchangeable with the circumstances on plantations, yet are dismissed because these people are “criminals”.
Slavery has always been around and is still prominent today, even though it is not in broad daylight anymore. Behind the walls of many jails, it is still happening.