📚 Thirteen Scholarly Articles on the 13th Amendment, Prison Labor & Slavery Abolition
- Abolish Slavery VA
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Although scholars have rigorously examined the harms of the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause for over a century, it is only in recent years that sustained organizing has converted this scholarship into actionable constitutional and statutory reform.
The thirteen scholarly, peer-reviewed works featured below represent some of the most influential, as well as some of the most recent, analyses of the Thirteenth Amendment’s punishment clause, prison labor, and contemporary abolition efforts—documenting both the persistence of legalized slavery and the legal strategies now emerging to end it.
1) The New Abolition: The Legal Consequences of Ending All Slavery and Involuntary Servitude
Author: Ryanne Bamieh
Source: Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, Vol. 59 (2024)
Description: This article analyzes efforts to remove the “except as a punishment for crime…” clause from state constitutions and explores legal challenges and implications for ending compulsory prison labor altogether. It traces how the state movement might dismantle the constitutional basis for forced labor in incarceration.
2) No Exceptions: The New Movement to Abolish Slavery and Involuntary Servitude
Author: Adam A. Davidson
Source: University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 92, Iss. 8 (2025)
Description: Davidson’s article surveys the historic and present efforts to pass state constitutional amendments with no penal exception, tracks litigation and legislation, and explains why text alone has not yet translated into meaningful abolition of prison slavery.
3) Locked Up and Trafficked Out: Prison Labor and the Thirteenth Amendment
Author: Megan Massie
Source: University of St. Thomas Law Journal, 19 U. St. Thomas L.J. 498 (2023)
Description: This article examines how the Thirteenth Amendment’s penal exception has enabled the expansion of prison labor systems that resemble trafficking — focusing on doctrinal developments and constitutional interpretations.
4) The Thirteenth Amendment: Modern Slavery, Capitalism, and Mass Incarceration
Author: Michele Goodwin
Source: Cornell Law Review, 104 Cornell L. Rev. 899 (2019)
Description: Goodwin critically situates the 13th Amendment within broader systems of racial capitalism and mass incarceration, arguing that the punishment clause perpetuated slavery’s legacy by incentivizing economic exploitation of incarcerated labor.
5) State Constitutional Prohibitions of Slavery and Involuntary Servitude
Author: Michael L. Smith
Source: Washington Law Review, 99 Wash. L. Rev. 523 (2024)
Description: Smith charts the recent wave of state constitutional reforms removing slavery exceptions, compares their language and likely effectiveness, and discusses how states like Alabama, Colorado, and Nebraska now offer stronger protection against forced labor.
6) Administrative Enslavement
Author: Adam Davidson
Source: Columbia Law Review (2024)
Description: This influential critique defines the “administrative-enslavement” regime: the system embedding prison labor in everyday prison administration rather than in explicit sentencing — and explores its weak constitutional basis and how courts might dismantle it.
7) The Thirteenth Amendment’s Punishment Clause: A Spectacle of Slavery Unwilling to Die
Author: Michele Goodwin (interpretive scholarly essay)
Source: The Toch Library Collection / Read-Me.org
Description: Goodwin connects the historical logic of racialized punishment and incarceration to the persistence of slavery’s vestiges in U.S. law and argues for abolitionist re-readings of constitutional text and civil rights history.
8) The Costs of the Punishment Clause
Author: Cortney Lollar
Source: Minnesota Law Review
Description: This article analyzes the economic, legal, and moral costs of the punishment clause, documenting how it has allowed penal labor to evolve into an exploited workforce and what reformers must consider to abolish modern slavery.
9) Forced Prison Labor: Punishment for a Crime?
Author: Junaid Wafa
Source: Northwestern University Law Review
Description: This scholarly note examines competing constitutional interpretations of the punishment clause and argues that the legal framing of prison labor as “punishment” undermines basic rights, suggesting paths toward ending such forced labor through legal doctrine.
10) Slavery Under the Thirteenth Amendment: Race and the Law of Crime and Punishment in the Post-Civil War South
Author: Peter Wallenstein
Source: Louisiana Law Review, 77 La. L. Rev. (2016)
Description: The article discusses how the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution expressly permitted a recurrence of slavery, provided only that such enslavement constitutes a punishment for violating a criminal statute. It reports new forms of slavery that spread across the South in ways more or less consistent with the language of the Thirteenth Amendment.
11.) Deploying International Law to Combat Forced Labor in Immigration Detention Centers
Author: Azadeh Shahshahani and Kyleen Burke
Source: Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Vol. 37:57, 2022
Description: Discusses how immigration detention centers across the United States are coercing detained immigrants into forced labor and justifying it by paying them mere cents an hour, all under the guise of a “Voluntary Work Program.” This inhumane program is frequently challenged in domestic courts under federal law. Advocates may also benefit from incorporating arguments based on international law into their strategies.
12) Defining Forced Labor: The Legal Battle to Protect Detained Immigrants From Private Eploitation
Author: Samantha Sherman
Source: The University of Chicago Law Review, September 2021, Vol. 88, No. 5 (September
2021), pp. 1201-1246
Description: Samantha Sherman's article examines how courts should define "labor or services" under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in the context of private immigration detention facilities, where detained individuals allege they are compelled to work without pay under threats of solitary confinement or deprivation of necessities.
13) Unconvicted Incarcerated Labor
Author: Andrea Armstrong
Source: Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, 57 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 1 (2022)
Link:
Description: This article examines the court-created “housekeeping” exception to the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on slavery and involuntary servitude for people detained pending trial. Through a deeper understanding of the origin and evolution of the doctrine, the author identifies and discusses the criteria courts have employed to create and expand the “housekeeping” exception. These cases also illustrate the slippery slope of the exception after creation—namely, the potential for expansion to chores beyond “personally related housekeeping” and to other settings, such as immigration detention.
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