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Recognizing and celebrating the women of All Of Us Or None Philadelphia, Why Not Prosper and SWAG for their efforts to address and fix laws that permit enslavement as a punishment for a crime, on the occasion of Black History Month.
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WHEREAS, The United States Constitution's 13th Amendment, Section 1 states, "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, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." This language explicitly permits enslavement as a punishment for crime, and has led to a legal infrastructure that permits inhumane treatment of incarcerated people, including inhospitable living conditions and unconscionable wages under threat of punishment that pay as little as $0.23 per hour in Pennsylvania, or less than 3% of Pennsylvania's minimum wage; and
WHEREAS, Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous people, and other people of color have been disproportionately affected by these laws and, at current, are of the highest incarceration rates across the nation and within the City of Philadelphia. Incarcerated people in Pennsylvania are subject to inhumane forced labor and exploitation of their bodies, including making license plates and clothing products and manufacturing and packaging products that benefit our own state agencies including the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Department of Health Care Services, and more; and
WHEREAS, The prison system and the counties that use prisons as economic anchor institutions have made billions off of the labor of incarcerated people. For example, a 2005 audit of Pennsylvania Correctional Industries found that PCI received over $19 million in profit during the audit period while paying incarcerated people almost nothing. Today, prison labor generates roughly $1 billion in annual economic value for the corporations that exploit that labor; and
WHEREAS, It is clear that the A...
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