That's a really dumb article thb... Headline reading that they reject an anti-slavery vote when really it should read "confusingly written ballot causes people to vote for slavery" why are they trying to put blame on the people instead of the government when the reasons are government negligence.

On a related, and very disturbing note, "Slavery by another name" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcCxsLDma2o) describes peonage, the exception to the 13th Amendment ending slavery, that allowed involuntary servitude to continue for convicts. The problem with this is that police arrested black men on trumped up, or outright false, charges; corrupt judges signed off on these arrests; prison "sold" this free labor to farmers.

Watch the video - peonage was never taught in school, and definitely should have been.

“The sponsor of the amendment himself, state Rep. Edmond Jordan, a Democrat, ultimately opposed it due to changes in the text that he said would have expanded the state's ability to use slavery or involuntary servitude as a punishment, according to reporting by member station WRKF.” —-> I am from Louisiana and voted against this constitutional amendment for this reason. I wasn’t confused. The amendment was absolute garbage, would not have ended slavery in our state and might have even expanded its use. The title of the article is misleading.

Kind of understandable.

The law seems pretty badly written meaning that people are confused about what it can actually mean. Both the Sheriff in favor of the slavery measure and the original sponsor against it were against the bill since they believed it would do what they didn't want.

In a couple years, someone will probably write a better law for Louisiana and things will get better.

I'd be more concerned about the state's which still officially allow it and haven't even had a vote, like CA

>Do you support an amendment to prohibit the use of involuntary servitude except as it applies to the otherwise lawful administration of criminal justice? (Amends Article I, Section 3)

In simpler terms, "Do you support ending slavery except in situations where slavery's used as a legal punishment in criminal justice"?

It's just the 13th Amendment on a state level.

But this is so weird. The NPR article says ballot measures in states like Colorado passed that removed the prison labour exception, but aren't such changes technically unconstitutional? Not that many people would go to court over this.

Well...maybe private prison operators.

Yeah, but Reddit doesn't care about facts. "LA votes against anti-slavery" is all they need and want to know.

Media can drone on and on about "democrats voting against anti-slavery", and not say one word for why.

How is it misleading? They rejected the amendment (factual) and reason wasn’t simply because of a face-value interpretation. The entire content of the article can’t go in the headline, and I don’t understand how someone reads that headline and concludes that “they rejected it due to support for slavery”

It's not unconstitutional. The constitution doesn't say that slave labor needs to be part of the punishment for crime, it just doesn't restrict prisons from using slave labor as punishment for crime.

Something that's unconstitutional cannot be legal. But everything that's not unconstitutional is not necessarily legal. For example, there is nothing unconstitutional about an employee firing someone on the basis of gender. But it's still illegal.

The word "anti-slavery" in the title is misleading. I rejected a "maintaining the status quo of slavery" amendment that might have actually magnified its use in our state.

Even further, the amendment wasn't even anti slavery!

So if you were writing the Thalidomide headline it would have been “Drug that causes birth defects causes birth defects?”

And by misinformation you mean NPR is out to misstate the intentions of the bill. NPR is shilling for big slavery hoping people don’t read the contents of the article. It’s not that the ballot measure purported to be anti-slavery, but NPR expecting their audience to not look at the details…

The thing to remember is that legally slavery is defined as restricting the liberty of a person and where someone has power over the person. So in this case yes being a prisoner makes anyone a slave; then if they are made to keep their cells clean that would be slave labor.

These measures are being pushed by people who believe that all prisons should be abolished.

No they are not. Louisiana wants too make sure that if SCOTUS ever lets them, they can get the chains and collars out immediately.