Removing the Exception
State constitutions from the late 1800s often followed the example of the times by prohibiting slavery except for those convicted of a crime.
Measures to remove this exception were placed on the ballot by the legislature in Nebraska and Utah for the 2020 ballot. Both passed resoundingly. Colorado had already passed such a measure in 2018, which also passed resoundingly. In 2022, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont resoundingly passed such measures, Alabama passed a revised new constitution that did so. Louisiana had an amendment that was poorly worded and needs to be re-done; there are no indications of this being in the works at this point.
For 2024, Nevada added to the trend by passing a measure to remove the exception with 60.1% of the vote.
California Proposition 6, Remove Involuntary Servitude as Punishment for Crime Amendment, should have been on our list because of our concern for finally abolishing slavery. It received so little publicity that we didn’t know about it. Ballotpedia doesn’t have an easily-found page listing all the referendums as it does on several other topics. Unfortunately, the amendment was defeated, 47-53%.
Current Status
After the election of November 2024, the states that still have the exception for slavery in their state constitutions are:
Arkansas, Article II, Section 27
Indiana, Article I, Section 37
Kentucky, Article I, Section 25
Minnesota, Article I, Section 2
Mississippi, Article III, Section 15
North Dakota, Article I, Section 6
Wisconsin, Article I, Section 2
In addition, these states prohibit “involuntary servitude” with an exception for those convicted of a crime:
California, Article I, Section 6
Georgia, Article I, Paragraph XX
Iowa, Article I, Section 23
Kansas, Bill of Rights, Section 6
Louisiana, Article I, Section 3
Michigan, Article I, Section 9
North Carolina, Article I, Section 17
Ohio, Article I, Section 6
This all follows what’s said in the 13th amendment to the U.S. constitution. There is a joint resolution for a new U.S. constitutional amendment proposed, called the Abolition Amendment, still awaiting consideration in the U.S. Senate. On May 21, 2024, “An Examination of Prison Labor in America,” was held in the U.S. Senate to address this, so hopefully progress is being made.
End the Exception is the title of a 4-minute video in which an actor playing Abraham Lincoln explains the issue. It’s also the name of an organization working for the Abolition Amendment.
There’s been a long-standing tradition of pro-lifers comparing abortion to the way slavery was practiced in the United States, on the grounds that both require dehumanizing. The dehumanization is so extreme that killing human beings – unborn children and enslaved people — is legally allowed. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in both Roe v. Wade and in the Dred Scott decisions that certain classes of human beings were outside legal protection.
While abortion defenders object to the analogy, they do so by defending abortion, not by defending slavery. Naturally – they share the understanding that holding people in slavery is appalling. Nowadays, that’s the common attitude in the United States.
People generally understand that the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery. Several state constitutions, drafted in the years soon thereafter, did the same. These were well after the principle was established nationally. They simply added such a provision to the state constitution.
But neither the nation nor many of these states abolished slavery entirely. They had an exception: people duly convicted of a crime.
The immediate impact in the U.S. was that slavery was able to continue. African Americans would be arrested for “vagrancy,” which means essentially being arrested for being unemployed. If that’s the “crime” that got a person into prison, and someone in prison could be enslaved, then slavery hadn’t really ended.
More recently, the use of cheap prison labor for manufactured goods used by government and nonprofits has meant that prisoners are slaves. In some states, they’re paid nothing; in most states, they get a few cents per hour, and the highest is $2 an hour.
There was a prisoners’ strike against these conditions in 2018, and another one in 2022, where the slavery exception is one of the things in contention.
While their lives are legally protected, they’re still being exploited. The working conditions can include physical harm and even avoidable deaths. Such is the nature of treating people as slaves. People in prison should be treated as people in prison.
Kinds of harm are all connected when dehumanizing is done. If prisoners must do involuntary servitude, they have little pay for themselves, and no pay to send their families. They haven’t always developed the kind of working skills that will help them get employment once out of prison.
Anything that harms families this way will harm a spirit of welcoming new members to the family. That is, these conditions increase the danger of abortions being done in an atmosphere where they’re so readily available.
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