Member-only story
Qatar Ain’t the Only Country That Still Practices Slavery
The country of my birth, where I spend about half the year, does it too.
Can you guess which one? The United States, of course! The slavingest country of the past 1000 years. You heard U.S. slavery ended in 1863 on Emancipation Day? Oh, no no. The Thirteenth Amendment in 1865? I’m afraid not. That amendment included a loophole: “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.”
The problem, of course, is that the police can get away with arresting whoever they want on indistinct charges like vagrancy, creating a public disturbance, and resisting arrest; or if it suits them better, frame innocent people for serious crimes from drug possession to murder. District Attorneys live to put people behind bars, Public Defenders are under-funded and over-worked, and judges tend to be conservative and biased toward the prosecution. All statistics indicate that an enormous percentage of the people in prison are not guilty of the crimes they’ve been convicted of. Even if they are guilty, most people in prison are there for non-violent crimes. Despite all of this, prisoners in the USA have been quietly used as slave labor from…
