Was slavery ever really abolished in America? I found myself forced to ask that question after a chain gang of mostly non-violent offenders was used to repair the road outside my family's home. It visibly confronted me with the obvious: that draconian laws violate due process, and constitute unjust imprisonment.
As this nation debates the reinstatement of private debters' prisons, and angry citizens cry out that we are degenerating back into an era of Jim Crow, or even worse, the Antebellum years, I find myself arguing that, in fact, we never ceased to be either. We only hid the enslavement of our own people behind more colorful language, none of which carried any true weight.
The problem has historically revolved around the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished any and all "involuntary servitude", with the exception of punishment for a crime of which a person has been "duly" convicted. Duly. As in, through due process, which is defined as the fair determination that a crime has been committed that is worthy of revoking a person's Constitutional rights over.
In other words, any enslavement of a person under the jurisdiction of the United States of America must be a result of conviction under "fundamentally fair laws" in the words of the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court during "Snyder v. Massachusetts" in 1934. So the question then becomes: is a law that punishes a non-violent offense like recreational drug possession with a lifetime of enslavement to society "fundamentally fair"?
If I were alive at the founding of this country, and could propose just one addition to the Bill of Rights, it would be to specifically address the above question by explicitly including the following amendment: no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property by conviction of a crime of which they were the sole victim. If a person is to be convicted of a crime, it must be definitively proven that a person or persons other than the one in question was tangibly deprived of life, liberty, or property.
Those two sentences, or something similar, would have greatly empowered criminals convicted of victimless crimes by draconian laws, in ways the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" has been unable to achieve. Attempted suicide would not be a crime, nor would personal drug use, nor alcoholism, nor distributing salacious selfies. If your actions are only hurting yourself, then that becomes your prerogative; not any government's.
Tens of millions of people, most of whom were black, would not have been imprisoned for decades, nor would they have felony convictions that prevented them from being able to exercise other Constitutional rights. Violent offenders would be behind bars, while self-destructive people would be free to make their own decisions in life. And America would be a much happier land.
That is not the way things unfolded, but luckily, our Founding Fathers did make the most ingenious decision of all: they allowed the American people themselves to alter their own Constitution. None of the laws which govern us are written in stone, which leaves us as authors of our own destiny. We need only the will to finish what the Abolitionist Movement started a century and a half ago, and truly make this country the land of the free, and home of the brave.
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