Chuck

Yeah.

Which is about the yeah, it's about the high pressure student exams in India.

I'm sure.

But the 13th Amendment is kind of what we're talking about here.

And that's not only abolished slavery, it abolished involuntary servitude of all kinds.

Except one tiny provision, one little loophole that said that if you're a convicted prisoner, you can be punished with slave labor.

That's okay.

And not only was it okay, it's enshrined in the Constitution that slave labor is legal in prisons.

Yeah.

Free labor?

I thought that the reason that they included it in that amendment was because it was just such a no-brainer that you would want the ability to perform hard labor rather than just being punished in other ways, that it was just an accepted thing.

That, yeah, the loophole wasn't meant to be there.

Yeah.

But in the South, almost immediately, they put that to use.

We did an episode on the Black Codes back in January of 2022.

Another very eye-opening topic.

And those only lasted like a year or two.

And it was basically they criminalized being a free Black person in the South.

And so they could pick you up and they could arrest you with something.

If you couldn't prove on the spot that, say, you had a job, you'd be arrested for vagrancy.