Hey, friend.
As you know, especially if you’ve been following my reels this week on facebook, instagram, linkedin, bluesky, and tiktok, the law has never been neutral. It has always reflected the interests of the people who wrote it. I think that’s actually helpful to sit with, because once you understand that the law is made by people, you understand that it can be remade by people. That is what this week’s stories are about: not the law as a fixed thing, but as a contested terrain. A place where the question “who does this serve?” has always been fought over.
The legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes that “the genius of the current caste system, and what distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary.” The 13th Amendment’s exception — slavery as punishment for crime — made that voluntary appearance possible. It turned convict leasing into something that looked, on paper, like due process. But who gets punished, and for what, is often arbitrary (sometimes called “disparate sentencing.”). I have a number of friends who have faced criminal charges, and several of my white friends have stories of getting let off by the same judge who charged their Black or Latino friends for the exact same infractions.
And communities have been organizing to close that loophole for over a century. Eight states have now done it. The federal amendment is still pending. As Bryan Stevenson puts it: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” The exception in the 13th Amendment says otherwise. Organizing to remove it is insisting on that truth.
If the idea of disparate sentencing is new to you, here’s a helpful article from The Sentencing Project. For me, a really big turning point in understanding how the 13th amendment created a new form of slavery was the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander which remains absolutely critical reading (and is readable, too!). Or check out the documentary 13th, now available in its entirety on youtube — my mom and I watched it on netflix during the pandemic and it really helps connect the dots.
The internet trolls had a field day on my professional facebook page on this particular subject. (Shout out to several of you for responding to them! I’ve gotten close to just shutting down that page due to how much hateful noise has shown up in the comments during this whole series — every morning I wake up and switch the settings to “only established followers can comment,” but it’s still after several mean and racist comments have been posted, no matter how soon I remember to switch the setting.) That’s because we have been taught to put a lot of faith in our justice system, and on some level, that requires us to believe that sentencing is overall fair and just. The data has been telling a different story for a very long time, but the messaging drowns out the facts, for even the most open-minded of us. So if you are new to the idea of prison functioning as “The New Jim Crow” or as enslavement in a different costume, I hope you find time to read up on it, and maybe talk with folks you trust about it. Because there’s a lot of noise (and a lot of internet trolls) to cut through on this subject.
PS—thanks for all the concern and well wishes about the ER visit I mentioned in my last newsletter. I’m doing well enough that I was able to accompany my mother on a weekend trip to visit longtime friends and family in Ontario, Canada. Hence the delay in this newsletter! Grateful for the medical care I was able to access outside the hospital thanks to having insurance. Praying we can win the fight for a way to everyone having access to the care they need.
This week: the 13th Amendment, what it actually says, and what happened when people organized to change it.
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The History We Should Have Learned
Here is a sentence from the 13th Amendment — the one that abolished slavery: “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.”
Except as a punishment for crime. Slavery was not abolished. It was made conditional.
Southern states figured this out immediately. Within months, they began passing Black Codes — laws that made it a crime to be unemployed, to stand on a street corner, to change jobs without permission. Black men were arrested by the thousands, convicted in minutes, and leased to plantations, mines, and railroads as forced laborers. This system lasted well into the twentieth century. Today, incarcerated people can be required to work for pennies an hour or nothing at all, and can be punished for refusing. The 13th Amendment still contains that exception. It is still the law. And it wasn’t just the South.
For more: Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name or the PBS documentary by the same name. For how it played out in California, check out the book California, a Slave State.
What’s Happening Right Now
Of approximately 800,000 people who work while incarcerated in the United States, more than three-quarters are compelled to do so under threat of punishment. They earn between zero and fifty-two cents an hour. Because Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans, the burden falls disproportionately on Black communities — exactly as the Black Codes were designed to ensure.
For years, the Marshall Project documented men fighting California wildfires for less than a dollar an hour, then being barred from becoming professional firefighters because of their records. And then something changed. In September 2020, after sustained organizing, Governor Newsom signed AB 2147, allowing formerly incarcerated firefighters to petition to have their records expunged. Brandon Smith, who had served seven and a half years in prison, became the executive director of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program. In May 2026, California introduced SB 245 to expand the law further.
Organizing changed the law.
Sources:
A Saint You Might Know (but maybe could know better!)
You may have learned about her in school. During my schooling, I was the reason my classmates learned about her. No, really! In third grade, my grade had to dress up like one of our American heroes and get up on stage to present a little speech about them to our classmates. I assumed Harriet Tubman had been my mother’s suggestion, but she insisted I came up with it — possibly because when I was little, she read the picture book “Follow the Drinking Gourd” to me.
Harriet Tubman escaped slavery in 1849, alone, walking ninety miles through unfamiliar terrain at night. When she arrived in Philadelphia, she felt like she was in heaven — and then looked around and realized she had no one to share it with. So she went back...nineteen times. She freed approximately seventy people and never lost a single one.
She did this by breaking federal law, every single time. Slavery was legal. The Fugitive Slave Act was federal law. She called it obeying a higher law. During the Civil War she served as a spy, a scout, and led an armed raid that freed more than seven hundred enslaved people. She applied for a pension for decades. Congress finally passed it — thirty years later, after her husband’s death qualified her as a veteran’s widow.
Today, when the 13th Amendment still contains a literal exception permitting slavery — when organizing to change that law is the work — Harriet Tubman’s defiance of unjust law is not a historical curiosity. It is a living question: what do you do when the law is wrong?
To learn more:
A great overview from the National Women’s History Museum
A fascinating article about her later life, including her deepening eco-spiritualism (which I wish I had known about when I was writing my master’s thesis on environmental racism and grassroots theology)
If you don’t know about Harriet Tubman’s disabilities and why that part of her identity matters, here’s an article that talks about it. When the movie Harriet came out (which my mom and I loved), my friend Leroy Moore (of Krip Hop Nation, which was a long-time partner of the Oakland Peace Center) raised the really important critique of the film, that they turned her well-known seizures into a spiritual gift of seeing. She was in fact deeply spiritual, but the abuse of her enslaver resulted in a lifelong disability that shaped her day-to-day life as well as her heroism. In fact, we might not really understand her if we ignore that she was disabled; that’s part of what the article notes.
Also, if you missed the news, the current administration has scrapped plans to put Harriet Tubman on the 20-dollar bill. That plan went back to the Obama administration. I have mixed feelings: her whole life was about undermining what we now call “racial capitalism,” or the ways that profit from the very origins of this nation hinged on exploiting Black people as well as other marginalized groups, as well as attempted genocide and theft of land. On the other hand, Andrew Jackson, currently on the 20-dollar bill, was the 19th century’s Donald Trump in many ways.
Speaking of the Trump-Jackson parallels, this episode of NPR’s podcast Code Switch did such a good job of capturing that little piece of history, while historians are deeply divided on this subject. (There are serious academic journal article equivalents of street brawls on whether it’s fair to compare the two.) If you’d rather read than listen, here’s the transcript. It also reminded me to check out Debbie Nagle’s book By the Fire We Carry on the same subject. Beach reading!
Good Trouble in Action
Brandon Smith spent seven and a half years in prison. He spent years fighting fires while incarcerated. “Seeing all these families of the homes we helped save,” he told the Sacramento Observer, “it recentered my sense of worth. I felt like I was giving back to the community.” When he got out, he couldn’t become a professional firefighter because of his record. So he organized. He partnered with advocates and lawmakers. AB 2147 passed. And Brandon Smith is now the executive director of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program — helping other formerly incarcerated people do what he did. People who were told they had no future built one.
For more: CalMatters has articles on the law passing in 2020 and on expanding the law in 2025 to facilitate careers of formerly incarcerated fire fighters.
Solidarity Is Already Happening
Remember me mentioning earlier that there’s an exception clause in the 13th amendment that has resulted in modern day slavery under the auspices of incarceration? Well, the Abolition Amendment campaign has been working state by state to remove the slavery exception from state constitutions. Colorado was first, in 2018. Then Utah, Nebraska, Alabama, Oregon, Vermont, Tennessee, and Louisiana — all in 2022. Eight states. In Alabama — yes, Alabama — the campaign was led by a bipartisan coalition including faith communities and a former Republican governor. Every coalition looked different. Every one won. (Sadly, in my state of California, voters in 2024 rejected our own version of this amendment.)
The federal Abolition Amendment is active in Congress. It has not passed. But eight states have already done this. Find the End the Exception campaign at endtheexception.com.
For more:
State Efforts To End Slavery Loophole Are Just The Start - Law360
Most states allow slavery in prison. Inmate advocates say it's hard to dismantle : NPR
Harriet Tubman went back nineteen times. Brandon Smith organized until the law changed. Eight states have already closed the exception. The through-line in all of these stories is people who decided not to accept that what exists must continue to exist — and who did something about it. You and I are part of that lineage. Every time you learn something you didn’t know, every time you share it, every time you show up — you are part of the chain. I’m honored to be in it with you.
Peace,
Sandhya
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