Yes, forced prison labor is slavery

If there’s such a thing as rolling in one’s grave, the seismographs around Santa Ana, California’s Fairhaven Memorial Park must be going nuts. A Tesla motor couldn’t possibly top Raymond C. Hoiles’ revolutions per minute — at least if readership of the Orange County Register, the newspaper he bought in 1935 and gifted one of America’s most libertarian-leaning editorial bents, extends into the afterlife.

“There’s nothing wrong with requiring prisoners to work,” the Register’s editorial board wrote on Sept. 24, endorsing a “no” vote on Proposition 6.

Proposition 6, per California’s official voter guide, “Amends the California Constitution to remove current provision that allows jails and prisons to impose involuntary servitude to punish crime (i.e., forcing incarcerated persons to work).”

“(W)hat the proponents of Prop. 6 are calling involuntary servitude,” the board writes, “is really far more a matter of this: Not allowing prisoners who have been convicted of felonies that were injurious to real people, (to) say, in effect, that they can’t be bothered to hold down a job while they are behind bars for their crimes.”

The question is not whether a prisoner should be “bothered to hold down a job.”

The question is not whether, as the Register notes, prison work benefits prisoners by equipping them with occupational skills, a work ethic and some pocket change to buy snacks at the commissary.

The questions are:

First, is involuntary servitude — requiring someone to work on threat of punishment and denying their right to quit — slavery?

The answer to that question is “yes.”

Second, should slavery be legal in cases where the plantation is a prison and the state is (at least temporarily) the slave owner?

The answer to that question is “no.”

Those answers do not seem like they’d be negotiable to Hoiles, who stood nearly alone among American newspapermen in opposing the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, and who late in life told the New York Times “government should exist only to try to protect the rights of every individual, not to redistribute the property, manipulate the economy or establish a pattern of society.”

Mandatory prison work is redistribution, to the state, of the prisoner-slaves’ property rights in their labor. It is economically manipulative insofar as wages, if paid, are set by the state rather than by the market. And it’s an attempt to establish a pattern of society that treats people as property of the state.

If the government of California incarcerates people, it is the affirmative responsibility of the government of California to see to their basic material needs, not treat them as chattel.

Unfortunately, it can only do that through its partial enslavement, through taxation, of everyone else in California.

With mercy and charity in our hearts, we should pardon the Register’s lapse of morality in this instance. But instead of buying into the editorial board’s odious and repugnant endorsement, we should encourage it to do better and to get to work on the problem of ending the taxpayers’ partial enslavement rather than supporting prisoners’ total enslavement.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism ( thegarrisoncenter.org ). He lives and works in north-central Florida.

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