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Slavery Remains Legal
through
Presidential Administrations

The 13th Amendment;

“Forbids chattel slavery across the United States... except as a punishment for crime”
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People like Antonio Espinoza are trying to make a difference.

The Issue

Over 65% of the more than 1.2 million

incarcerated individuals in the US are forced to work.

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  • Few work less than 40 hours a week, some work everyday, and in Angola (the nation's largest prison) maintenance workers are on call every minute of their sentence

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  • Federal regulations set the punishment for refusing to work at 3 months in solitary and 6 for encouraging others to abstain

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Positive relationships are possible.

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Slave labor keeps prisons open and generates billions

  • Incarcerated workers forced to maintain and operate prisons from within, save those prisons more that $9 billion a year

  • Goods and services produced by Prison Industries Programs, representing just 6.5% of incarcerated workers, were valued at over $2 billion in 2021

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Slavery remains the status quo across prisons in America

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  • Art From the Inside proves that there is a way forward, by giving incarcerated people agency to choose to participate and to be compensated fairly for their labor

 

  • Art From the Inside has 200 participants from six prisons in Minnesota and is just one example of a program that functions without slavery

 

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Sources: 

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Captive Labor, ACLU, U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Regulation 28 C.F.R. § 541.3 (2020), Asatar Bair, An Economic Analysis of Prison Labor in the United States, PhD diss, Andrea Armstrong, Slavery Revisited in Penal Plantation Labor

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