The Thirteenth Amendment’s convict loophole created a new legal form of slavery.

Evidence

Convict leasing served a similar purpose. During slavery, black incarceration was rare to nonexistent because plantation owners were solely responsible for disciplining and punishing enslaved people. They generally did not send their enslaved workers to prison because they did not want to lose valuable labor. As a result, prisons held mainly white Americans. But the Thirteenth Amendment included a loophole. If a person was convicted of a crime, the law allowed convicts to be imprisoned in slavery-like conditions. And that loophole was exploited by all those who wanted to create a legal form of slavery. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 273

Categorization

• XREF: Direct historical seed for the modern mass-incarceration arguments; connects to contemporary prison-industrial critiques of the same amendment.