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Zachary Potts
English 101
Professor Elvan Katmer
11/3/2016
Modern Day Slaver Exists Today Due to Americas Prison System

If I were to tell you that slavery existed today in America, you probably would be
skeptical. You would have good reason to be skeptical too since slavery was technically
abolished by the introduction of the 13th amendment in 1865 on January 31st. But, due to a ironic
loophole within the 13th amendment that allows all of your rights to be stripped from you if you
are in jail for any crime, Slavery is alive, booming and legal in Americas prison system. Still
skeptical? My hope is by the end of this essay I will have turned your skepticism into small
amount of certainty. According to federal bureau of prisons monthly offenses data chart, people
who go to jail for drug offenses account for 46% of inmates and people who go to jail
for immigration offenses account for 8.6% of inmates. That is more than half of all
inmates incarnated, for crimes that are completely nonviolent.
So, what does that mean? It means mass incarceration is a huge problem in America
because jails are allowed to imprison people for crimes that don't infringe on the rights of other

people, the drug trade is entirely voluntary and immigrants do not harm anyone, so there aren't
any victims to give justice too. So, people go to jail for crimes that do not have a negative effect
on anyone. Then the prison system makes the people who were incarnated for committing a
nonviolent crime, to do labor where they get paid 86 cents a day, or in worse cases labor for free.
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Labor that includes: prison farming, prisoners working as telephone operators, prisoner
sweat shops and BP, when the oil spill happened instead of hiring the fishermen who were out of
work because of the spill, to clean the gulf, they hired prison workers to do the labor. Sounds a
little like slavery to me. You would think Americas prison system would want to combat this
growing problem of mass incarceration considering it is so expensive. According to a report by
the Hamilton project in 2014, it costs America annually 80 billion dollars and rising to keep all of
Americans inmates behind bars. Half of those crimes, were nonviolent as well. Perhaps it is
because they want to use their many inmates to do labor for little to no pay at all, so that prisons
can export the resources to big businesses. Some businesses that get exports and services from
prison labor include: Bank of America, McDonalds, Whole foods, Microsoft, K-mart, Pepsi,
Starbucks, Nintendo, Verizon. The list, it goes on and you get the idea, prison labor is a big
business that helps companies grow at the expense of workers who dont have any rights arent
payed and if they are for less than a dollar a day, for non-violent victimless crimes.
Another horrible thing about Americas prison system, is that its a cycle that a lot of ex
non-violent offenders find themselves trapped in even after their sentence is over. Picture this,
you are an ex-convict who just got released after serving their five-year sentence for selling
drugs. You fill out a job application for your local grocery store to try to get a fresh start and earn

some money to survive after being released. You get called on your phone the very next day, its
a hiring manager and he called to want tell you that he wants to schedule an interview with for
tomorrow for a cashiers position, you gladly accept because you need the money. You show up to
the interview dressed with the best clothes you had. The interview is going smoothly until he
realizes that youre an ex-convict and at that point the interview is over because of the mark on
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your record. No position, no second chance, you dont ever get another shot. This is the
problem with Americas prison system, ex-convicts who solicit or sell drugs do not get another
chance back into society. So, they do the only thing they know that will guarantee to gain
revenue, steal or sell drugs. Then it turns into this vicious cycle of ex-convicts going back into
the prison system to do more labor, for committing another non-violent victimless crime because
they needed the money to buy food or live, so they sold more drugs to survive. It does not look
like modern day slavery or mass incarnation is going anywhere either as the numbers for inmates
keep rising for non-violent crimes each year. As well as the amount of money it costs to keep
inmates in prison each year keeps rising. It looks like modern day slavery and mass incarnation
of non-violent criminals will always exist in the near future and be alive and well in Americas
prison system.

Works cited:
"BOP Statistics: Inmate Offenses". Bop.gov. N.p., 2016. Web. 4 Nov. 2016.
Picchi, Aimee. "The High Price Of Incarceration In America". Cbsnews.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 8
May 2014.