Yes, forced prison labor is slavery
By Thomas L. Knapp
If there’s such a thing as rolling in one's grave, the seismographs around Santa Ana, California's
Fairhaven Memorial Park must be going nuts. A Tesla motor couldn’t possibly top Raymond C.
Hoiles’s revolutions per minute — at least if readership of the Orange County Register, the
newspaper he bought in 1935 and gifted one of America’s most libertarian-leaning editorial
bents, extends into the afterlife.
“There’s nothing wrong with requiring prisoners to work,” the Register’s editorial board wrote on
September 24, endorsing a “no” vote on Proposition 6.
Proposition 6, per California’s official voter guide, “Amends the California Constitution to remove
current provision that allows jails and prisons to impose involuntary servitude to punish crime
(i.e., forcing incarcerated persons to work).”
“[W]hat the proponents of Prop. 6 are calling involuntary servitude,” the board writes, “is really
far more a matter of this: Not allowing prisoners who have been convicted of felonies that were
injurious to real people, say, in effect, that they can’t be bothered to hold down a job while they
are behind bars for their crimes.”
The question is not whether a prisoner should be “bothered to hold down a job.”
The question is not whether, as the Register notes, prison work benefits prisoners by equipping
them with occupational skills, a work ethic, and some pocket change to buy snacks at the
commissary.
The questions are:
First, is involuntary servitude — requiring someone to work on threat of punishment, and denying
their right to quit — slavery?
The answer to that question is “yes.”
Second, should slavery be legal in cases where the plantation is a prison and the state is (at
least temporarily) the slave owner?
The answer to that question is”no.”
Those answers do not seem like they’d be negotiable to Hoiles, who stood nearly alone among
American newspapermen in opposing the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl
Harbor, and who late in life told the New York Times “government should exist only to try to

protect the rights of every individual, not to redistribute the property, manipulate the economy, or
establish a pattern of society.”
Mandatory prison work is redistribution, to the state, of the prisoner-slaves’ property rights in
their labor. It is economically manipulative insofar as wages, if paid, are set by the state rather
than by the market. And it’s an attempt to establish a pattern of society which treats people as
property of the state.
If the government of California incarcerates people, it is the affirmative responsibility of the
government of California to see to their basic material needs, not treat them as chattel.
Unfortunately, it can only do that through its partial enslavement, through taxation, of everyone
else in California.
With mercy and charity in our hearts, we should pardon the Register’s lapse of morality in this
instance. But instead of buying into the editorial board’s odious and repugnant endorsement, we
should encourage them to do better, and to get to work on the problem of ending the taxpayers’
partial enslavement, rather than supporting prisoners’ total enslavement.
Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for
Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).