Criminalizing Poverty, Whitewashing Slavery, and the Rise of Modern Servitude

In recent years, three seemingly separate debates in the United States have begun to intersect: the criminalization of homelessness, the sanitizing of slavery in classrooms and museums, and the expansion of prison and detention labor. These trends share a common thread, dehumanization. Together, they risk normalizing modern servitude under the law.

Criminalizing Poverty

Across American cities, local ordinances continue to punish people for basic survival. Advocates with the Fines and Fees Justice Center call for decriminalizing homelessness because unhoused people are often cited or arrested for “acts of living,” such as sleeping, eating, sitting or panhandling in public spaces when they have no alternatives. These “poverty penalties” impose fines and fees that poor defendants cannot pay; an inability to pay can lead to a suspended driver’s license, additional fees and even jail time. Debt-based license suspensions for unpaid court fines also keep people out of the workforce and make it difficult to maintain employment. Critics argue that this cycle transforms poverty itself into a crime and funnels more people into the criminal justice system, where they may be compelled into low‑wage or unpaid labor.

Revising the History of Slavery

At the same time, cultural and political battles over how the United States teaches its past have intensified. Florida’s new African‑American history standards instruct middle‑school students that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”. Educational content from the conservative media outlet PragerU, now approved in Florida classrooms, includes a cartoon Christopher Columbus telling children that being taken as a slave is better than being killed.

Patrick Henry’s 1775 speech captured the revolutionary belief that freedom was more precious than life itself. “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? … as for me, give me liberty, or give me death.” Recasting enslavement as preferable to death inverts this ethos and presents slavery as a pragmatic compromise rather than a system of brutal exploitation.

This revisionism has also extended to cultural institutions. Just this month, president Donald Trump attacked the Smithsonian on social media, claiming the museums were “OUT OF CONTROL” for focusing on how bad slavery was. Days earlier his administration directed an internal review instructing the museum to remove “divisive or partisan narratives” and emphasize “American exceptionalism.” Historians condemned the move as an attempt to whitewash history and minimize the experiences of enslaved people.

Sanitizing the past clears the way to justify exploitation in the present, said one historian. If slavery is taught as tolerable, it becomes easier to accept coerced labor today as harmless “rehabilitation.”

The 13th Amendment and Modern Prison Labor

The U.S. Constitution abolished slavery in 1865, but left a critical loophole: involuntary servitude remains lawful “as punishment for crime.” After the Civil War, Southern states used this exception to impose convict leasing, arresting Black people under discriminatory laws and leasing them to private companies in a system that subjected them to dangerous, unpaid labor.

That system persists in modern prisons. In California, incarcerated people fight wildfires for $2.90 to $5.12 per day with an extra $1 per hour during emergencies. In New York, a former prisoner recounted earning 16 cents an hour making license plates for the state; those who refused the assignment faced solitary confinement or other punishments. Work‑release programs in Alabama send incarcerated workers to fast‑food chains such as McDonald’s and Wendy’s, generating revenue for the state. Yet once released, workers are often denied employment at those same companies due to their records. As Lakiera Walker, a former worker, asked: “If we’re good enough to work inside, why not outside?” She and other plaintiffs allege that Alabama’s program denies parole to force incarcerated people to work for private employers including meatpacking plants and fast‑food franchises.

Immigration Detention as Forced Labor

The issue is not limited to prisons. Immigration detention centers operated by private contractors have been accused of exploiting detainees for labor. At the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington, detainees were paid $1 a day to cook, clean and perform maintenance work that would otherwise have required roughly 85 full‑time employees. As mass deportation policies expand, advocates warn that detention centers could become pipelines to forced labor in hazardous industries, including factory farms and slaughterhouses.

A System of Exploitation

Observers argue that these three trends are not isolated. Laws that criminalize poverty create a steady flow of people into prisons and detention centers, where the 13th Amendment still permits forced labor. Meanwhile, efforts to downplay slavery’s brutality in classrooms and museums normalize the idea that exploitation is tolerable, even beneficial. And by no means is this by accident, whitewashing slavery’s past makes it easier to sell prison labor as rehabilitation and immigrant detention work as opportunity. It’s a strategy to expand modern servitude under a legal framework.

Beyond Authority: The Case for Community

Underlying each of these issues is a deeper conflict between authority and community. As journalist Sebastian Junger wrote in his book Tribe, “The opposite of authority is not anarchy, it is community.” Authority seeks control through punishment and coercion; community seeks cohesion through dignity and belonging.

Efforts to criminalize homelessness, sanitize slavery and expand forced labor reveal a state prioritizing authority over community. They mistake coercion for order and exploitation for opportunity. As writer Toni Morrison once observed, “We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.” Her warning is as relevant today as ever, when cruelty is disguised as order and exploitation is reframed as progress, society risks confusing oppression with freedom.

The alternative lies not in expanding authority, but in strengthening community, the true antidote to dehumanization.