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Stop scrolling, look around your home, consider the serenity of your life, and say this out loud to yourself: “Slavery is prohibited. Involuntary servitude is prohibited except…” Now say it again—hear yourself say it—and imagine you’re teaching that phrase to a group of fourth graders. You need not finish the sentence in order to grasp the cliff you must dive from should you accept the premise. So, do you? Do you accept the premise?
Put another way, are you good with an exception to the prohibition of involuntary servitude? Can you value human rights, find abhorrent the terror of slavery, but give yourself permission to swallow a lesser version of it in the name of the state at the same time? Do you crave the sugar high of retribution that lives at the bottom of the revenge barrel when you think about forcing humans to labor under a compulsory scheme of discipline that lengthens their confinement when they refuse to be the state’s slave?
Should you ever become sentenced to probation for drinking and driving, you might do some community service—but that’s not the prison labor we speak of. In 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom rejected the will of the people who voted to send him a bill authored by Senator Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, that called for the elimination of forced labor as punishment from the state Constitution. Newsome picks and chooses when to abide by the will of the people—he’s beaten back recalls—but when it comes to prisons, California’s top official has chosen a peculiar two-step that too few observers have had the nerve to call out or even frame properly. See, he opted to spare those on death row—and you might applaud him for it—but he only did that in order to forcibly send those same idling bodies into the field to work them until they die.
If it sounds bad when you read it out loud, that’s because it is that bad.
With statewide recidivism hovering over 60%, California’s prison system is a failure—were it a business, a product defect rate of 60% would’ve killed the company a long time ago. But if you were to view these containers of humans as a network of thirty modern day plantations that shuffle laborers like a worn deck of marked cards, you might conclude that they collectively form a well-oiled hamster wheel of get-nowhere-fast that accomplishes its true objective of harnessing surplussed labor perfectly. Keep examining the premise and hunt for a valid argument.
Activists who support Prop 6 have tended to wrap their arguments about servitude in humanitarian concerns that have to do with how low prison wages are in order to assert the inhumanity of not being able to afford basic sanitary supplies with those wages. It sets up a resolution paradigm whereby if the state raises the wage and reduces the expense of those basic supplies, the bad outcome is resolved and the forced labor issue remains. It’s a short-sighted emotional appeal that never gets at the raw moral claim of forced labor.
The best breakdown I’ve seen in the carceral media space of how the mechanics of state power work to enforce slavery in California’s prisons came via Jesse Burleson’s deconstruction of Penal Code section 2700 and California Code of Regulation (CCR) sections 3040(a) and 3315 (a)(3)(J). Woven like a braided rope—a compulsory noose of mandate and consequence—Burleson described in the May 2024 edition of the All Of Us Or None Newspaper how legislative law and administrative policy construction have created a sort of policy ascot that strangles dignity and extends confinement in exchange for demanding dignity. Interlocking power doubles as a vice.
We sacrifice our freedom when we violate the social contract, but we don’t get sentenced to forced labor—that’s what the regimes that run places like China and Russia do to their citizens. If prisons want to utilize resident labor, let them devise fair inducements consisting of wages, time-cuts, and privileges to encourage it. Be it the number a jailer gives you to replace your name, or the surname handed down by your slaver, servitude is slavery, no matter the master. When Prop 6 passes—if it passes—it will deliver a reckoning that’s been past due since the Emancipation Proclamation. The premise will have been erased, but the debt will still linger.
Intellectual pursuits during confinement like reading, writing, and exploring the arts nurture the ethical renewal that undergirds the criminogenic transformation that pushes against the real culprit living within the recidivism problem. With nearly 40% of the carceral state population wading into the functional literacy gap, we need cognitive development verticals more than we need to practice pushing a broom. I salute the Anti-Recidivism Coalition’s efforts to develop stakeholder awareness of Prop 6 and snap my fingers for creators like Maui’s poet laureate Austin Alexander and Poetik LA’s artivist action work to amplify Initiate Justice’s pursuit of equity. Collectivism exponentially moves the universe.
If you vote YES on Prop 6, you will have done your citizen duty to murder the mayhem that infects our social discourse and paralyzes our societal evolution. If you vote NO on Prop 6, you will carry the burden of every hillbilly, redneck, klansman, confederate, and dirty cop bad actor who ever cracked a whip, swung a night stick, and planted a gun in the name of subjugation. I hope you won’t abide by that vile premise—but if you should decide to accept that exception to the codified prohibition , be ready to defend it.
Go tell it to the fourth graders.
Visit www.caslave.com and break the chains.
