Published by The Skanner News on December 15, 2020.

Oregon’s U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley and U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-MO) introduced the Abolition Amendment, which would strike the “punishment clause” of the 13th Amendment and abolish forced prison labor.

“That amendment is known, when we are in high school, as the amendment that ended slavery in America,” Merkley said during a press conference Monday. ‘The problem with that story is that slavery continued under the (punishment) clause of the 13th Amendment. That clause specifically says that slavery can’t continue ‘except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.’”

Merkley argued that the 14-word exception has allowed the U.S. to replace legal slavery with coerced labor in the prison system, and allowed the government to essentially outlaw being Black in America by disproportionately arresting citizens of color and renting them out as a workforce.

“We think about the impact of slavery on the financial foundation for families,” Merkley said during a virtual press conference on Monday.

Obviously a family under slavery built no financial foundation.

“Well, when you broke apart a family and arrested the adults and rented them into slavery, there was no financial foundation there. People lost what they had.”

In Oregon, inmates are paid far below the minimum wage to do work that often puts them at risk, like performing laundry services for hospitals at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In September, 150 prisoners fought wildfires alongside professionals. In Texas, inmates have been drafted to work in morgues overwhelmed by victims of COVID-19.

“These laws started to have the state profit directly off slavery because the state governments who rented people back into slavery helped finance their state governments with the money,” Merkley said. “This whole process led to a theme that Black Americans are criminals. It led to dehumanization, it led to unequal treatment under the law.

“It was the first wave of mass incarceration, which continues to this day.”

This is the first effort of its kind to be made at the federal level, although Merkley pointed out three other states have already passed laws striking such exceptional language from their state constitutions: Colorado, Nebraska and Utah.

“I’m encouraging the Oregon Legislature to send a constitutional referral out to the people during this coming session, so the people of Oregon can vote to take this out of our Oregon Constitution,” Merkley said.

During the press conference, Sen. James Manning (D-Eugene) said the late Sen. Jackie Winters (R-Salem) had introduced such a bill in 2019, but that it was a casualty of the Republican congressional walk-out.

“I have redrafted that resolution and plan to bring it back,” Manning told Merkley. “I am so happy to hear that you’re doing this, but I want to make sure I mirror the work that you’re doing. Maybe we can tag-team and call it the Merkley-Winters resolution.”

Merkley admitted that he was first made aware of this form of legalized slavery, and its continuation of systemic racism, by the 2016 Ava DuVernay documentary The 13th, which served as a crash-course of sorts about systems of racial control and ways governments and private prison companies are financially incentivized to create targeted legislation to increase the carceral population, specifically among people of color.

Read the full article HERE.

Photo credit: “Sen. Merkley ready to fight” by afagen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0