When I Did Time, I Was Legally, Officially-Enslaved

Oregon and 19 other states still use language from the 13th Amendment to govern working conditions for inmates some of whom still pick actual cotton. The rules are changing, but not without resistance.

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Back in the late' the 90s, I owned asid number (12218354) and an address in an Oregon state prison. For part of my biddy prison bid-the, old heads said my time was short fore I got there-I worked as an orderly in a mental ward of the Oregon State Hospital. The official duties included sweeping and mopping the halls, changing sheets soiled with feces and/or soaked with urine, and making beds tucked with tight hospital corners.

The unofficial duties included learning to at least feign aplomb when residents tossed food trays, tantrumed to the point of restraint, or screeched refusals of their meds.

On the up and up, it wasn't a job I would've appreciated on the outs, but on the inside, I was a pair of praying hands and furthermore envied by no few fellow prisoners for being allowed to leave the confines of the farmhouse-turned-prison that held us captive. Never mind the pay was paltry, so little that I misremember my actual wage, though research affirms it was less than pennies on the dollar.

Research also attests that I was enslaved at the time. And I ain't speaking hyperbolically or philosophically but literally and officially here. As proof, I submit Article 1, Section 34 of the Oregon State Constitution:

There shall be neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude in the State, otherwise than as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.

If that excerpt from my home state's charter sounds familiar, that's because it's almost verbatim the infamous clause of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution that banned slavery in all of the U.S., save one gaping-ass loophole: “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.