Bringing slavery back is technically incorrect, as it never went away in the first place. When it was allegedly abolished after the Civil War, a loophole in the 13th Amendment made slavery possible when applied to convicts.
“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.” — 13th Amendment
Prison labor has been used for 160 years since the Civil War ended to provide food service, warehouse work, plumbing, painting, or as inmate orderlies. Prisoners have often worked off-site on farms and in factories, sometimes in horrible conditions. They fight fires in California, build roads, and do landscaping throughout the country. I last saw prisoners working on a road about two weeks ago in Florida, about three miles from my home. They don’t work for free; prisoners earn between 12 and 40 cents per hour in most cases.
In California, incarcerated fire crew members earn between $5.80 and $10.24 per day as a base rate. While assigned to an active emergency, crew members earn an additional $1 per hour. Crew members can work a 24-hour shift followed by 24 hours of rest during emergencies, the department says, meaning that for a 24-hour shift during an active wildfire, the lowest amount earned would be $29.80 in total. California’s minimum wage for non-prisoners is $16.50 an hour.
America has a self-imposed labor shortage, caused by the systemized rounding up of migrant laborers, many of them in the country legally, to satisfy Donald Trump’s goal of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day. These laborers play a significant role in meeting America’s agricultural, construction, and hospitality needs. Not only are employers losing those arrested, but others are fearful of showing up to work and being taken in a raid.
Simultaneously, Donald Trump and some of America’s governors are rushing to build concentration camps to house detainees before deporting them to whatever country will take them. It isn’t required that the captives come from that country or even speak the language. There was no due process, often no crime charged, and an indeterminate length of sentence. In addition to the already infamous Alligator Alcatraz in the Big Cypress Swamp. Ron DeSantis is rushing forward with plans for a second site at Camp Blanding near Jacksonville.
I live in Palm Coast, Florida, about 65 miles from Camp Blanding. I decided to take a ride up yesterday to see for myself what was going on. I’d written previously about how Camp Blanding was once used as a concentration camp to house Nazi prisoners of war. I wanted to see the Camp Blanding Museum, which had more information than one can find on the Internet. After seeing exhibits and conversing with the two-person museum staff, I gained a much better understanding of how Camp Blanding was used in the past and might be used in the future. Keep in mind that not only is Alligator Alcatraz designed to hold 5,000 immigrants. Texas is building a facility of a similar size, and Camp Blanding is planned to have 2,000 detainees. Similar sites are in various states of planning around the country, adding to what is already the world’s largest network of immigration centers.
In addition to the Japanese internment camps in the Western United States during World War II, America detained Italian and German Americans and immigrants who were often housed together because the Italians were a much smaller number. These were not the prisoners at Camp Blanding who were all captured in Europe and North Africa, with some sent from Latin and South America. Some were hard-core Nazis and were kept in a separate area. The rest were considered safer and leased out to area farmers.
There was a shortage of workers in Florida as a significant number of male workers were off fighting the war. Women found themselves welcomed to factories to replace the men temporarily, and prisoners from Camp Blanding were sent to surrounding fields to alleviate the labor shortage. The time spent in the fields in the Florida heat drained the prisoners of some of the energy they had for infighting. There were groups of Nazis, anti-Nazis, and some considered traitors to the German war effort. The prisoners had a representative with access to make Geneva Convention complaints. The Nazis organized work slowdowns and strikes. Eventually, Camp Blanding maintained order by shipping any troublemakers out to other detention centers.
Once things had settled down within the camp, providing outside labor became the main function of the detainee center. The small amount of money paid to the prisoners was in the form of coupons, only redeemable for goods on base. In that respect, their situation resembled scrip and Jim Crow more than slavery, but the Camp Blanding prisoners were enslaved people in every other respect. But they were white slaves, treated far better than the modern-day immigrants at Alligator Alcatraz. There are pictures of prisoners smiling in front of their huts. I challenge you to find a similar picture of prisoners posing in front of their bunk beds in cages.
America has three problems, all of which could be solved by using the 13th Amendment to compel detainees to work as enslaved people.
- We have a labor shortage without a supply of willing migrant workers to fill it.
- We have an unpopular deportation program that even Republicans are souring on.
- Prices are rising due to Trump’s tariff program, imposing a tax on Americans, affecting their cost of living.
There’s the small problem that the 13th Amendment requires detainees to be duly convicted of crimes, meaning due process, but this Supreme Court is likely to look the other way. Rising prices can be offset by the influx of cheap labor, already trained in some cases to do the work because they were the ones previously doing it. Turning detainees into enslaved people instead of deporting them frees up the money spent on deporting them and provides the cheap labor not seen since 1865. We will, Make America Great Again.
The only thing stopping America from reimplementing enslavement is the moral ambivalence needed to ignore the human cost. Ask yourself if Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are the least bit concerned about how this affects brown people? They may be concerned about the optics, but that’s what Fox News and X are for: to promote the new normal.
According to museum staff, only three escapes were attempted from Camp Blanding, and those involved were immediately captured. The consensus was that there was no place to go. But Camp Blanding isn’t in the middle of a swamp like Alligator Alcatraz. With a vehicle, an escapee can get to Jacksonville in twenty minutes and St Augustine in less than an hour. Maybe a new underground railroad can be established for escapees from detention centers across the nation. The problem is in Trump’s America, where would they go?
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of William Spivey's work on Medium. And if you dig his words, buy the man a coffee.