"Around the world, at least eleven million people are imprisoned, either pre-trial or following conviction. Most sentenced prisoners will work while in custody...

...

Most countries’ legal systems, however, carve out an exception for prisoner-workers, permitting the state to require them to work—sometimes for no pay, but typically for very low rates of pay.

There are, even so, multiple potential benefits to prison work. For example, ICPR’s recent research indicated that prisoners who could not work (when prison regimes around the world were restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic) reported many negative consequences, including to their mental and physical wellbeing. At the minimum, work may mitigate some harmful impacts of imprisonment. At best, it may increase prisoners’ prospects of successful reintegration into society, potentially also benefitting society by reducing recidivism."

https://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/publicatio...

(emphasis mine)

Here's a photo from a Brazilian prison from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labour#/media/File:Inmat...

De facto there’s hardly rule of law there so if you piss off the wrong people yes.

It's called penal labor, and it was and remains widespread around the world. (And, yes, Brazilian law requires mandatory labor for all prisoners.) It wasn't until the middle to late 20th century that countries began to reform penal labor. But it's complicated. Without penal labor you can't force prisoners to, e.g., do laundry or mop floors. Even mandatory community service is a form of penal labor, and you can still find that in some Western European countries.

The norm now is to require a wage for mandatory labor, but of course often it's just a pittance. (Only 6 US states have uncompensated labor.) But even when you require minimum wage, many criminals owe restitution, so it could be and is taken away again.

Many US states have penal labor systems just like in Europe, that is nominally opt out, mandatory wages, etc, but at the end of the day it's always open to accusations of coercion and claims of "slavery".

The rhetoric around the 13th Amendment is exactly why we're in the situation we are now politically. Everything is equivocated to maximize rhetorical impact. Every unethical thing a politician does is "corruption", so when you get open and egregious corruption as with Trump, people can't discriminate and assume it's all the same.

Was penal labor abused to roll back the clock on abolition? Yes. Is penal labor abused today? Yes. But calling it slavery, drawing parallels to chattel slavery, is just irresponsible.

That the issue of slavery has weak explanatory power for what is happening today.

I'm anti-Trump. If you tell people "Trump is a corrupt asshole", that has a chance at convincing supporters to abandon him. If you tell people "the US needs a cultural revolution due to events from past centuries", that's what got him elected in the first place.

A good general wouldn't voluntarily shift the battleground to a region where their troops are weak. Political persuasion is no different. The Democratic Party keeps losing because they cling to unpopular positions on cultural issues. If Trump is as bad as you say, prove it to me by showing willingness to strategically cede ground on a few issues in order to win more voters.

>It's recent enough that people living today knew a slave.

Slavery ended in 1865. That's 161 years ago. So maybe there are a few modern 80-year-olds who interacted with 80-year-old former slaves when the modern 80-year-olds were infants. Those 80-year-old former slaves would themselves have no memory of slavery since it would've ended before they could form memories. And the modern 80-year-olds would have no memory of the interaction, since they themselves were infants when the interaction happened.

In other words: There aren't very many of these people, and it's unclear if most of them would count.

You know something which happened more recently in the US than slavery? Prohibition. A trendy, self-righteous moral crusade which didn't accomplish what it set out to achieve, and ended up creating a bunch of problems instead.

I think Prohibition is a pretty good template for understanding the form and tendencies of modern left-wing activist movements. But--at least reducing alcoholism was a good cause that we had a shot at doing something about! Short of inventing a time machine, crusading against slavery from centuries ago seems rather pointless. That's not a problem for activists whose primary goal is to be trendy and self-righteous, of course.

I think you need to check the math on that. Knew a former slave maybe?