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Comment by nickff | Hacker News Reader

The Thirteenth Amendment does not say that prisoners are slaves. The text (of section one) is: “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.”

This means that someone could be sentenced to slavery or indentured servitude. Federal prisons require able inmates to work; this is a form of indentured servitude, but it does not necessarily extend to state prisons (or municipal jails).

Slaves are property of others (until their death or a decision by their owner to free them), and can be traded or sold. Indentured servants are engaged for a specified period of time, usually to one specific employer.

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> Slaves are property of others (until their death or a decision by their owner to free them)

That is chattel slavery. There are other forms of slavery, indentured servitude being one of them. De facto slavery is the term of art for what is going on here.

The term of art that I'm familiar with is "unfree labor" or "modern slavery", both of which are widely used. Either way, every country has agreed it's at least nominally a human rights issue via the Forced Labor Convention ratified by all diplomatically significant nations except the US.

Indentured servitude was a contract one would enter into voluntarily with a perceived benefit on the other side. I think you’d have to squint pretty hard to argue that every criminal doing labor today voluntarily signed up for it to brighten their futures.

Well, supporters of state authority could argue that the contract was a prior one, the ‘social contract’. As it happens, I am a philosophical anarchist, so that doesn’t work for me, but most discussants here probably believe in political authority of some sort.

Equating “the social contract” with the type of legal construction involved with actual indentured servitude is some real “a taco is a hotdog” thinking.

Nobody currently alive actually voted on anything related to the US Constitution, any of the first fifteen amendments, or many important laws, because they weren't alive. I don't see how the Thirteenth Amendment is any different from the many laws which were enacted and last amended before you or I was alive. Either the populace has consented to all of that body of law, or none of it.

I think that they’re saying that the concept of a social contract does not refer to a literal contract or legal document, or document of any kind, but rather simply a way of treating each other implicit in society.

Notably neither the Constitution nor its Amendments is the “social contract.”

Then those people need to stop calling it a "contract". That's an act of manipulative deception purposefully designed to influence the listener towards accepting it, regardless of whether the speaker is aware of those origins.

It doesn't constitute a "contract" any more than a schoolyard bully demanding another child's lunch money "or else" (implicit threat of initiation of force / violence) constitutes a "contract".

The bully wouldn't become morally justified by calling his dictated orders (under threat of violence) a contract, nor would his act of extortion become any more legitimized, by deceptively referring to the act with an unambiguously incorrect term like "contract".

The "social contract" would be the only contract in existence for which those subject to the terms of it were not granted the opportunity of consideration and the free choice to accept or reject that contract.

A contract you cannot choose to decline, and that you'll face imprisonment for violating isn't really a contract at all, it's really just a set of orders being dictated to you by a tyrant willing to initiate violence to get their way.

If you are not allowed to have a sick day without facing physical punishment (a threat obfuscated to the public by it being a threat of being shipped to a more dangerous facility, so I.E. a major threat of danger and permanent maming made clear to the slave but a threat somewhat obscured to the general public) what would you call it? You are not allowed bad days. You are not allowed slow days. You must work to the guard's (whose bonus depends on it) satisfaction.

Or maybe your cell/tier gets extra shakedowns, and it's made known it's because you made a guard mad, you are going to get beat down. Based on your work performance. What would that be called?

I don’t believe they argued that the 13th amendment says prisoners are slaves. They only asked you to imagine that you are and they pointed out that it’s allowed “according to the Thirteenth amendment”. At least, that was my interpretation.

My read is that they were asking the reader to imagine they (the reader) are a prisoner, and thus a slave according to the thirteenth amendment. Even under your reading, that comment is a pure hypothetical, because federal prisoners are not slaves. I happen to believe that the federal government has enslaved people in a different context, very recently, conscripts.

The very amendment you've been quoting explicitly calls it slavery.

What would this system look like if slavery wasn't excused for incarceration?

They call it "involuntary servitude." I read it as:

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 ...

It's a distinction without a difference. Even the Wikipedia article explicitly says that involuntary servitude and involuntary slavery are used interchangeably. [0] I feel you're getting caught up in word choice instead of arguing the actual implementation and interpretation of the law.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_servitude

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