The Thirteenth Amendment explicitly preserved slavery for convicted criminals

Evidence

The Thirteenth Amendment is credited with ending slavery, but it stopped short of that. It made an exception for those convicted of crimes: “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” (emphasis added). And it could not abolish the true evil of American slavery, which was the belief that Black people are less evolved, less human, less capable, less deserving, less trustworthy than white people. Reconstruction may have challenged the existing paradigm, with changes to the Constitution aimed at enforcing equality before the law, but it was short-lived and could not overcome the commitment to white supremacy evident in so many jurisdictions. The existing racial hierarchy was sustained by myths about Black criminality, which led many white people to insist that only the threat of extreme and brutal punishment could preserve order where Black people were concerned. After emancipation, Black people, once seen as less than fully human “slaves,” were now seen as less than fully human “criminals.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 846

Categorization

• XREF: The shift from ‘slaves’ to ‘criminals’ directly connects to the mass-incarceration and 13th-Amendment arguments prominent in the 1619 Project’s public debates, and to the reader’s need to separate framing from contested empirical claims.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ by showing how the criminal-justice exception became the legal vehicle preserving coercive labor after abolition.