Is slavery or involuntary servitude (forced labor) “legal” in Minnesota? Yes, says the Minnesota Constitution, Article 1, Section 2, which declares slavery and involuntary servitude legal as a “punishment for a crime.” Therefore, it is a rule of law in the exceptional state of Minnesota.
Minus the history lesson, the short explanation is that forced labor has moved from the main streets of the antebellum slavery South into Minnesota’s prisons and legal system and across America, making it prevalent for everyone and anyone to be enslaved if you can convict them of a crime.
That slavery remains “legal” anywhere in the U.S.A., though disturbing, is not as shocking as the fact that the vast majority of Minnesotans don’t know that the brutal enslavement of human beings remains and is being facilitated with their tax dollars to finance an institution that is morally corrupt to the core. Make no mistake about it: laws can be just or unjust.
We are citizens of a nation that “legally” and lawfully sanctioned kidnapping, human trafficking, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, forced pregnancies, lynchings, rapes, torture, medical experimentations, and genocided African and Native Americans for centuries. The “rule of law” means different things to different people, so let us understand this.
Call to mind that the abduction and internment of Japanese people were considered legal; apartheid in South Africa was legal; the U.S. government’s extermination and forced removal policies of Native Americans were legal; Germany’s detention and mass killings of Jews and Gypsies were legal. To quote the late John Africa, founder of the MOVE organization, “Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right.”
Having been held as a captive here at Oak Park Heights as well as the Stillwater and Rush City penitentiaries, I can attest to the fact that the slavery and forced labor machine is running at total capacity, where the correctional officers, acting in character as the institutional descendent of slave plantation overseers, operate a most elaborate scheme of physical repression, spirit breaking, and demoralized, coercive exploitation of people.
This statement, I’m sure, comes as no surprise, as the barbarity of American slave societies is well-known and well-documented and has always been barbaric as it still is today.
I have been cautioned by multiple well-meaning individuals who, out of genuine concern and understanding of how corrupt this system truly is, have warned me that speaking out against this system of exploitation is dangerous, as the Master (administrators) of this slavocracy is serious about maintaining their status quo by any means necessary. You see, imprisoned human beings are expected to silently endure torture, very much like the victims of sexual abuse.
As noted, the Minnesota Constitution has green-lighted forced labor with all its brutality, for which the prison administrators make certain to exemplify the full measure of its bestiality.
Here in Oak Park Heights and throughout the Minnesota Department of Corrections, the policy entitled “Offender Assignment and Compensation Plan” outlines the prison labor scheme. Crafted as it is to the average public eye, it may appear, in theory, to be a reasonably legitimate “Plan” for the incarcerated.
However, aside from the education program verbiage, this policy in practice is the operating manual to a violent, dehumanizing, humiliation machine of forced and coercive slave labor that effectively allows for the establishment of an oppressive “no work, no play” rule, emblematic of Hitler’s Nazi Germany concentration camp mantra: “arbeit maki frei (“work will make you free”).
This is true because for those prisoners who choose to labor in the canteen or at one of the many backbreaking prison maintenance positions ranging from food preparation, laundry, general maintenance, landscaping, sanitation, janitorial, painting, etcetera, for wholly substandard wages ranging from .25¢ to $1 per hr., which is drastically below the state and federal minimum wage, are allowed “freedom” to be out of their concrete and steel enclosures virtually all day/night; wheres.
Those prisoners who choose not to be exploited for their labor or cannot be exploited due to the unavailability of so-called “job assignments” are subjected to 22-23 hours a day isolation cell confinement.
Prisoners have been writing letters to Commissioner of Corrections Paul Schnell and facility administrators calling for the end to the oppressive NO WORK – NO PLAY RULE.
Twenty-four years into the 21st Century, Minnesota is a proslavery state that has forced thousands of poor whites, Blacks, and Native Americans into hybrid slave labor camps – euphemistically known as correctional facilities.
The very fact that slavery is maintained via Minnesota’s criminal justice apparatus and officially sanctioned by the State Constitution is an immoral and indelible stain on this land, as it is part and parcel of the collective chronicle of the inhumanity of this country’s history.
Shavelle Chavez-Nelson is an inmate at Minnesota’s Oak Park Heights correctional facility. He is currently serving life without parole.
The Perspectives from Within feature comes from inmates in partnership with the Twin Cities Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, a union of prisoners, ex-prisoners, families, and communities working to transform the justice system in MN. The expressed views are not necessarily those of the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder Media Group.
Support Black local news
Help amplify Black voices by donating to the MSR. Your contribution enables critical coverage of issues affecting the community and empowers authentic storytelling.