You pick up a sweater and the tag says “Proudly made in America.” You think of this as a plus, that this sweater was made ethically through American labour. Occasionally, that may be the case. But not always. 

The other day I finally watched the documentary 13th, which has been on my to watch list for a while. The overall theme is racial injustice and how American slavery was never abolished, it just transitioned from a traditional sense of the word to mass incarceration. I would highly recommend this to anyone who hasn’t seen it (available on Netflix) although fair warning it does get graphic.

This week I was planning on writing more of a guide to ethical shopping, but I thought this was more urgent to talk about in our current political climate. In a previous post I briefly wrote about the existence of American sweatshops that rely on undocumented laborers, but I would argue that prison labor is just as evil, very literally a legal form of slavery. 

Some Background

[All statistics not linked are sourced directly from the documentary. Loose transcript linked here.]

The 13th amendment did not abolish slavery completely. It was abolished “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This clause was immediately used as a loophole by previous slave owners to find any excuse to incriminate black people, in particular black men, to push back into exploitation. They pushed a narrative that black people were dangerous criminals in order to maintain their economic system built on free labor. Even today, prisoners are paid cents on the hour, and in some states they aren’t paid at all.

The United States, despite making up 5% of world’s population, is home to 25% of prisoners globally. That comes out to a prison population of 2.3 million. 

It’s super important to note that laws were set up to be racist, especially our drug laws. Almost 80% of people in federal prisons for drug offenses are black or latino. Black people are almost four times more likely to be arrested because of marijuana offenses, despite using the drug at the same rates as white people.

The Republican politicians who designed the laws literally admitted to targeting people not in their voter base. Take this quote from top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, for example:

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

And it worked. One in thirteen black people of voting age are not able to vote because of a past felony conviction.

Remember this the next time you hear a person subconsciously push the notion that black people are inherently more prone to crime. You have to realize that the stereotype of the African American criminal was not created to match black crime statistics, but rather to rationalize the continuation of their oppression.

Prison labor and fashion have a long and intertwined history. Some brands have made steps to distance themselves from prison labor after backlash in the past few years. Jeans for JCPenney were at one point sewn by prisoners in Tennessee. Victoria Secret lingerie and underwear have also been sourced from US prisons. 

(Just Some) Other Companies that use Prison Labor

Personal Care Products

Home Products

There should not be a loophole to practicing slavery. We must amend the 13th Amendment to erase this clause. You can not call yourself a “family values” politician if you allow the continuation of a corrupt criminal justice system destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of POC families. As rational and human as this sounds, it isn’t an easy fight. It requires going against the prison industrial complex and all the companies that benefit from cheap prison labor.