What is the importance of the “criminal exception” language in the Thirteenth Amendment?

0:06That clause in the first section of the 13th Amendment has gathered a lot more attention lately than in the past, because it appears to allow states. It doesn't allow slavery as an institution, but it does seem to allow people in prison to be forced to labor, even against their will, involuntary servitude. That led eventually to a massive system of convict labor in the late 19th, early 20th centuries.

0:37Mostly in the South, but in some other states as well, in which states convicted people of minor offenses, filled the jails with them, particularly African Americans were affected by this, then leased them out to work for private employers or put them to work in prisons for the state itself. Courts ruled that that was okay under the 13th Amendment, even though many people thought it was really a travesty of the abolition of slavery to force people to work. But even today, because of that clause of the 13th Amendment, people in prison can be required to work. They do not have the protections that people in the larger society have. There's no minimum wage, maximum hours of work, things like that. It's become rather controversial,

1:25particularly as the whole issue of the large number of people incarcerated in prison in this country has become more and more of a political point of debate. There's never been a full explanation of why this so called criminal exemption was put into the 13th Amendment. The one thing I say in my book about the period is that it was a very familiar system. Many Northern states had the same clause in their state constitutions that people who have been convicted of crime could be put to work for involuntary labor. It was familiar language.

2:01However, it wasn't really thought through carefully enough as to how it might be abused, because in 1865, when the war ended, there were very few prisons in the United States. It wasn't like you had a mass of prison labor. Very few prisons and very few prisoners. Over time, those numbers increased dramatically, as I said, and it becomes a system of exploitation of prisoners.

2:26That said, and it is an important exception, the 13th Amendment was certainly one of the crucial moments in American history. The country had been divided over slavery for many decades and at least we now knew that there was no longer going to be sectional conflict caused by the existence of slavery.