Prop 6: Ban slavery in California

In our state constitution, slavery is prohibited except as punishment for a crime. This discriminatory language reflects the troubling notion that people who are incarcerated are less than human and not deserving of basic rights like the rest of us. Considering that a disproportionate number of incarcerated people are Black, Latinx, and Indigenous, the racist implications of this language comes to light. Advocates have called this line in our state constitution an extension of slavery, granting our state the power to force incarcerated people to perform labor with nearly zero pay, harsh working conditions, and without a say of what kind of work they do. This type of labor wouldn’t be acceptable anywhere else, and it shouldn’t be acceptable in our carceral system either.

This November, California voters have the opportunity to remove this discriminatory language from our state constitution and ban forced prison labor by voting YES on Prop 6.

Most people who are forced to do labor in prisons get paid between $0.08-0.74 an hour, a wage that would sound the alarm bells if it were being paid to any other employees and bring lawsuits against any other employers. While the measure doesn’t guarantee an improvement in the pay scale for people who are incarcerated, it opens up a possibility that they would be paid minimum wage for the work they did. What Prop 6 would guarantee is that workers wouldn’t be forced to perform work they didn’t want to.

Voters in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont recently passed ballot measures to ban involuntary servitude in their states. Let’s not get stuck in the past. It’s time for California to end every form of slavery once and for all. YES on Prop 6.