Convict. Enslave. Repeat.

Imagine you're charged and convicted of something relatively trivial, like resisting arrest, and then, as punishment, you're forced to work on a farm, picking vegetables under a hot sun.

No pay. No choice. You are now a slave in every sense of the word.

While this might sound like a plot from a dystopian novel, it is, unfortunately, all too real. It’s not fiction. In fact, it’s perfectly legal — right now — in the United States.

The 13th Amendment, which supposedly abolished slavery, contains a dangerous loophole: it allows slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime. That means the government can force prisoners to work for private companies, and they don’t have to pay them. These prisoners have no rights. They can’t protest unsafe or grueling conditions. They can’t form a union.

And here’s the terrifying truth: it could happen to you.

All it takes is a criminal conviction. Whether you're truly guilty or not, once you're in the system, the Constitution allows the government to take away your freedom and force you to work.

With private industries anxious to take advantage of cheap labor, there’s an incentive to incarcerate more people to keep the labor pool full. Making the situation worse, many politicians with authoritarian ambitions are incentivized to write laws that imprison their political enemies. Already, some politicians are targeting the right to protest. They push for expanded surveillance and the criminalization of dissent. It’s not hard to imagine a future where simply disagreeing with the government lands you in prison and into forced labor.

While states like Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Nebraska have amended their constitutions to close this “slavery loophole,” many others, including Missouri, still leave you unprotected from this kind of exploitation.

Okay, but is this really our future?

Well, consider this: states like Iowa are actively loosening child labor laws to help fill labor shortages. What happens when child labor isn’t enough? The loophole in the 13th Amendment offers a tempting solution: legal, unpaid, forced labor. With the world’s highest incarceration rate and over 1.8 million people behind bars, the U.S. already has a massive pool of captive workers ready for exploitation.

Slavery didn’t end in 1865. It simply changed form. If we don’t confront the loophole in the 13th Amendment now, we may wake up one day to find ourselves convicted of a petty offense and forced to work in a factory under dangerous conditions, with no rights and no escape.