More than 150 years after the ratification of the US Constitution’s 13th Amendment, Colorado has officially abolished slavery. Coloradans voted Tuesday for Amendment A, a measure removing language in the state constitution that allowed prison labor without pay.
Colorado is one of more than a dozen states whose state constitution technically still allows involuntary servitude as a form of criminal punishment. The state’s language closely resembles a contested passage that remains in the US Constitution 13th Amendment, which outlawed chattel slavery, but allowed those convicted of crimes to be forced into labor.[...]
The Tuesday result makes Colorado one of the first states to remove this language from its constitution. Governing magazine notes that bills “with similar goals failed this year in Wisconsin and stalled in Tennessee.”
But this wasn’t the first time that such a proposal has appeared on Colorado ballots. In 2016, with the backing of state politicians and various local advocacy groups, a similar measure called Amendment T aimed to remove the “slavery as punishment” language from the state constitution. But the amendment was rejected by the state’s voters, a development experts like University of Colorado Law professor Melissa Hart blamed less on overt racism and more on the confusing way the amendment was written.
No comments:
Post a Comment