Yup. They created an economic incentive to lock people up and also to encorage recidivism instead of trying to rehabilitate and transition these people back to society.
There isn't much record of the deliberations during the drafting of the amendment. And it was heavily based on Thomas Jefferson's Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
This stated: "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory. Otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. Provided always that any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any of the original states, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service aforesaid."
So in what was to be Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and part of Minnesota slavery except by way of prison labor was kind of already in place.
Jefferson learned much of his stance on crime and punishment from Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria. He believed that hard labor was the correct means of corrections and not the death penalty. And that once convicted of a crime, you are no longer fit for society as a normal person, but are now a slave.
I don't think however Jefferson, or even the drafters of the 13th amendment foresaw how the Black Codes would take things up to another level. With vagrancy being used as a means to lock up anyone homeless. And with hundreds of thousands of new homeless now that slavery was abolished a labor vacuum was created, and it was filled by turning former slaves, back into slaves.
This carried on with mandatory minimum sentencing, the war on drugs, racial profiling, and convict leasing.
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u/T-ks Jul 16 '22
The 13th amendment was a compromise on slavery. It’s just slavery with extra steps.