In the Nov. 8 midterm elections, Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont approved ballot questions to finally abolish slavery – yes, slavery, in the year 2022 – thanks to the efforts of the Abolish Slavery National Network. Louisiana failed to do so because of a flawed referendum question and more than a dozen states still allow forced prison labor. Florida is one of them.

The U. S. Constitution’s 14h Amendment passed on June 8, 1866 — more than 150 years ago — allows it: “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.”

Several states have aggressively used that exception to control African Americans and make hundreds of millions of dollars from their labor.

Exploiting the loophole now brings in $11 billion for states and local governments, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the University of Chicago’s Global Human Rights Clinic reported in June. Some inmates are paid nothing, while others receive between 13 and to 52 cents per hour. Those who refuse to work face punishment, including solitary confinement, Jennifer Turner, the report’s lead author and a n ACLU researcher, told Al Jazeera. Such punishments “are eerily similar to those used during antebellum slavery,” the Associated Press said.

Florida began using forced inmate labor almost from the start, after the United States purchased the territory in 1821 from Spain for $5 million, The New Tropic, a Miami-based news site, noted in a 2016 report. Within 40 years, the state had 61,000 slaves, who, four years later, had to be freed because of emancipation. Florida enacted its version of anti-Reconstruction laws, known as the Black Codes, to legally control the formerly enslaved people and use a prison system designed to lock up those who fell afoul of expanded vagrancy laws and were jailed for a year.

Soon inmates were being rented out to raise funds to pay for the state’s rapid growth. Gov. George Franklin Drew codified this practice in 1877. Douglas Blackmon, in his 2008 book “Slavery by Another Name,” described it as a substitute for slavery. “The convict leasing system was especially harsh in Florida, where convicts worked long days mining phosphate and turpentine, clearing out tropical landscapes, and laying roads in hellish temperatures without adequate food, water, or shelter,” Blackmon wrote. “By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites.”

In Florida, “companies that benefited from the system gave tacit and direct support for the social and legal barriers aimed against the black citizens,” World Digital Library, a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, noted.

Miami historian Paul George also describing it as “almost like another form of slavery,” adding, “People would get picked up on bogus charges or for small slip-ups, get convicted, and sent to work,” according to New Tropic.

There were not enough workers to keep up with development, so convict leasing was used on many state road projects throughout Florida. Tamiami Trail was among those that used prison labor, as was construction of a corrections department auto-tag plant and a shirt factory. Within two decades, inmates were also being forced to work in dairy farming and cigarette manufacturing.

Chain gangs, in which groups of inmates were chained together to work on roads, was introduced in the state in 1919, again, with the Black Codes being used to swell prison populations and expand the pool of unpaid labor. They were used “partly because an increasing number of roads are needed to keep pace with the growing number of tourists to Florida,” the corrections department said. Gov. Cary Hardee ended convict leasing in 1923. Chain gangs were abolished but they were reintroduced in 1995, New Tropic reported, but without the chains because, the corrections department explained, “you can get more work done if people are not chained together.” And, instead of being leased to private entities, inmates are now forced to work on transportation department and forestry division projects, as well as for nonprofit organizations, doing state road construction and cleanup, landscaping, and community betterment projects such as repainting schools; they are now called work squads.

“Some 3,500 unpaid prisoners make up Florida’s shadow economy,” The Florida Times-Union reported in 2019, adding that, in any given year, “State road crews and ‘community work squads incarcerated by the Department of Corrections subsidize local governments from the Panhandle to Miami-Dade: powering waste and public works departments, grooming cemeteries and school grounds, maintaining and constructing buildings, treating sewage and collecting trash.” The transportation department reported that it has used $67 million worth of inmate labor since July 2015, The Times-Union reported. Some 2,500 prisoners are assigned to community work squads and another 1,000 to transportation department road squads. In total, inmates have worked about 17.7 million hours in the last five fiscal years on the community work squads alone, providing labor valued at around $147.5 million, the corrections department reported. But, The Times-Union said, “the real value is likely double or triple that estimate — factoring in actual wages and benefits.”

There is an unmistakable racial component. Of the 2.4 million Americans in prison – the world’s highest per capita — 60 percent are non-European Americans, the Center for Law and Justice reported. They include one in every eight African American men, who inevitably comprise a majority of inmates forced to perform slave labor. Florida has about 100,500 people behind bars – the third largest in the nation – with African Americans comprising 39 percent of those in jail and 47 percent in prison, even though they are only 17 percent of the state’s population. “Forty-five percent of men in Florida prisons — and 43 percent on work squads — are black, according to the most recent DOC data. Black men make up less than 10 percent of the state population,” The Times-Union said.

The Abolish Slavery National Network said it will continue its campaign to persuade at least 38 states to end inmate slavery, the minimum needed to revise the constitution. Florida will likely be among the main holdouts. State Rep. Dianne Hart, a Tampa Bay Democrat, along with seven co-sponsors, introduced the “Prohibition of Slavery and Involuntary Servitude” bill to amend the state constitution. The measure had its first reading on Jan. 11 in the House Criminal Justice & Safety Subcommittee, was indefinitely postponed, withdrawn from consideration on March 12 and died two days later. If the bill had passed, it would have been on the Nov. 8 ballot.

That it was not is no surprise. Gov. Ron DeSantis, in defending his “Stop W.O.K.E” law banning schools and workplaces from teaching about slavery and its continuing impact, declared, “We are not gonna tell some kindergartener that they’re an oppressor based on their race and what may have happened 100 or 200 years ago.”

Really? It “may have happened”?