by Paul Wright

This month’s cover article discusses the current state of prison slavery in America. This has been an ongoing topic of coverage for Prison Legal News since we first started in 1990. The legal slave status of American prisoners is currently enshrined in the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. constitution which does not ban slavery but limits it to people who have been convicted of a crime. We are slowly seeing efforts to chip away at this, efforts that began in the 1970s as part of that era’s prison reform movement.

The issue of prison slavery is multi-faceted and has a wide variety of impacts throughout society. The first and most obvious is the removal of 2 million-plus people from the active work force by caging them. Second is the fact that at least a million people are directly employed to guard the prisoners. Third is the impact the tiny percentage of employed prisoners has, coupled with the reality that prison slave labor is what keeps the American gulag running with the unpaid/nominally paid labor of the prisoners working in kitchens, laundries, landscaping, maintenance, industries, etc., for the prison and jail system.

It is gratifying to see the impact of PLN’s long-standing coverage of prison slavery. The topic was first raised as a political issue by activists and reformers in the 1970s, but by the end of the 1980s it had largely faded from both the news cycle and political agenda. For over 34 years, though, PLN has had a steady drumbeat of news coverage of the exploitation of prisoner workers and the need to ensure that all prisoner workers be fairly paid and more importantly, keep their wages and also have safe working conditions and basic worker protections up to and including the right to unionize if they so desire. Through the 1990s and the 2000s we were pretty lonely on this topic, but the past decade has seen it slowly pick up steam. The issue is far from mainstream political success, but it seems to be headed there slowly if fitfully.

As this issue of PLN goes to press, former Pres. Donald Trump (R) has just been convicted of lying on business forms for paying $130,000 in hush money to adult film starlet Stormy Daniels. In many countries the path to political power often lies through a prison cell. The world leaders who have been imprisoned before becoming the leaders of their nation include: Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Hugo Chavez, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Ho Chi Minh and many, many others. This may be one of the reasons why making prison conditions worse or more inhumane has rarely been a political issue outside the U.S.

As a convicted felon Trump joins the illustrious ranks of Eugene Debs, who ran for president from his prison cell in 1920 where he obtained over 3% of the vote. Debs had been convicted of sedition for opposing the draft and the U.S. entry into World War I.

It remains to be seen how Trump does at his sentencing, but if past American history is any guide, we have a very long, pathetic, sleazy and hypocritical trail of “tough on crime” politicians who have long campaigned on a police state platform of death and brutality, yet when they themselves are convicted of crimes they grovel before judges begging for mercy to be spared the punishment they have urged on countless others. This pantheon of groveling criminals includes: former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington (R), former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker (D), former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D), former U.S. Reps. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.), Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) and Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who was House Speaker, and many more.

Trump’s conviction highlights the two-tier system of criminal justice in America, one for the rich and well connected and the other for the poor and unconnected. Starting with the access to the counsel of his choice. Various news media accounts claim that since leaving office Trump has spent over $100 million dollars in attorney fees for his myriad legal imbroglios. By contrast, in 2024 the budget of the Palm Beach County public defender’s office, which is where Trump resides, had a budget of $18.3 million to provide legal representation in 50,000 cases a year. Trump remained free on bond and was able to harangue and insult the judge, prosecutor and court staff on an almost daily basis, an exercise in free speech unheard of for indigent criminal defendants.

Trump has not even been sentenced and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has already announced that he will personally ensure Trump can vote in Florida, despite state laws saying the selected felons who can vote can only do so after they have completed the terms of their sentences in full.

We can only expect the contradictions to heighten from here. Political pundits and analysts alike are unsure if the felony conviction will impact Trump’s popularity with voters. Ignored in this analysis is the long steady crisis of legitimacy the American criminal justice system has been undergoing for the past 30 years as a result of mass incarceration. One thing America is good at creating is criminals; with over 70 million convicted felons and more every year, it is likely accurate to say that every voter in America knows or is related to a convicted felon if they are not one themselves.

Trump’s conviction for lying on forms about hush money payments to an adult film actress to buy her silence over an alleged sexual encounter also illustrates the dragnet nature of the American police state. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are convicted every year of crimes against the state that endanger and harm no one and are acts that are a crime because the state has made them crimes. The most obvious examples are on Rikers Island, where many are imprisoned on charges ranging from not paying subway fares to fraud as well as violent offenses.

On that happy note, enjoy this issue of Prison Legal News and please encourage others to subscribe. And yes, if Pres. Trump joins the ranks of our nation’s 2.3 million prisoners, I will personally donate a subscription to PLN and Criminal Legal News to him, even though he is reputed not to be a big reader. We may soon learn his views on prison reform.