Some US states are voting on slavery this November’s election
And there goes another week. Welcome back to our weekly recap of the latest news related to the 2024 US presidential election. This week, we’re zooming in on the upcoming state elections in California and Nevada, where an important decision will be subjected to a vote this November 2024: should forced prison labour be banned?
Forced slavery is on the state ballot in November
Voters registered in California and Nevada will be able to decide in November whether to remove language from their state constitutions that are rooted in the legacy of chattel slavery.
This, in turn, would protect incarcerated people from being forced to work under the threat of punishment in the states. Currently, it is not uncommon for prisoners to earn less than $1 an hour to fight fires, clean prison cells, make licence plates or do yard work at cemeteries.
For this reason, prison labour has been likened to modern slavery, a contemporary embodiment of it where work is extracted through tricking, coercing, or forcing individuals to perform it, in ways that devoid them of their freedoms and dignity.
Social activist, writer and inmate Kevin Rashid Johnson wrote a piece about modern slavery in The Guardian, during a nationwide work strike launched across US prisons in 2018.
In it, he maintained that “under the 13th amendment slavery was not abolished, it was merely reformed.”
Johnson continued: “I see prison labour as slave labour that still exists in the United States in 2018. In fact, slavery never ended in this country.”
“Anybody convicted of a crime after 1865 could be leased out by the state to private corporations who would extract their labour for little or no pay. In some ways that created worse conditions than under the days of slavery, as private corporations were under no obligation to care for their forced labourers – they provided no healthcare, nutritious food or clothing to the individuals they were exploiting.”
As of October 2024, Nevada incarcerates about 10,000 people and all of these prisoners are required to work or be in vocational training for 40 hours each week unless they have a medical exemption. Some are compensated with as little as 35 cents hourly.
Including California and Nevada, nearly 20 states still have constitutions that include language permitting slavery and involuntary servitude as criminal punishments.
Nevada’s proposal aims to abolish from the constitution both slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime. It is called ‘Nevada Question 4: Remove Slavery as Punishment for Crime from Constitution Amendment’ and a yes vote will allow for the language to be repealed.
California’s constitution, on the other hand, was changed in the 1970s to remove an exemption for slavery, however, the exception for involuntary servitude remains in effect to this day. A “yes” vote on proposition six will support amending the Constitution to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crimes.
Louisiana, Vermont, and Oregon are also seeing versions of the question go before voters in November.
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In 2018, Colorado became the first state to get rid of an exception for slavery from its constitution. Since then, other states such as Alabama and Tennessee have followed suit in recent years with proposed amendments that would remove exceptions for slavery and involuntary servitude, though the changes were not immediate.
“California, as well as Nevada, has an opportunity to end legalised, constitutional slavery within our states, in its entirety, while at the same time we have the first Black woman running for president,” Jamilia Land, an advocate with the Abolish Slavery National Network, said of Vice President Kamala Harris’ bid as the first Black and Asian American woman to earn a major party’s nomination for the nation’s highest office.
